A Labor Question ComingThe broad fact that the United States census of 1870 estimated the average annual income of our wage-workers at a little over $400 per capita, and that the census of 1880 estimates it at a little over $300 per capita, is the quite sufficient evidence that there is a labor question coming upon us in this country. The average wages of 1870 indicated, after due allowance for the inclusion of women and children, a mass of miserably paid labor—that is, of impoverished and degraded labor. The average wages of 1880 indicated that this mass of semi-pauperized labor is rapidly increasing, and that its condition has become 25 per cent worse in ten years. The shadow of the old-worldproletariatis thus seen to be stealing upon our shores. It is for specialists in political economy to study this problem in the light of the large social forces that are working such an alarming change in our American society. In the consensus of their ripened judgment we must look for the authoritative solution of this problem. I am not here to assume that role. I have no pet hobby to propose, warranted to solve the whole problem without failure. I do not believe there is any such specific yet out. * * *Ithe faults of laborPlainly, labor's fault must be found with itself.1. Leaving upon one side the class of skilled labor, a large proportion of our wage-workers are notoriously inefficient. In the most common tasks one has to watch the average workingman in order to prevent his bungling a job. Hands are worth little without some brains; as in the work done, so in the pay won. Our labor is quite as largely uninterested—having no more heart than brains back of the hands. Work is done mechanically by most workingmen, with little pride in doing it well, and little ambition to be continually doing it better.2. There is too commonly as little sense of identity with the employer's interests, or of concern that any equivalent in work should be rendered for the pay received. In forms irritating beyond expression employers are made to feel that their employees do not in the least mind wasting their material, injuring their property, and blocking their business in the most critical moments. Under what possible system, save in a grievous dearth oflaborers, can such labor be well off, and incompetence and indifference draw high wages?3. Our labor is for the most part very thriftless. In the purchase and in the preparation of food—the chief item of expense in the workingman's family and that wherein economic habits count for most—men and women are alike improvident. The art of making money go the farthest in food is comparatively unknown. Workingmen will turn up their noses at the fare on which a Carlyle did some of the finest literary work of our century. I remember some time ago speaking to one of our butchers, who told me that workingmen largely ordered some of his best cuts. Now an ample supply of nutritious food is certainly essential for good work, whether of the brain or of the brawn. The advance of labor is rightly gauged, among other ways, by its increasing consumption of wheat and meat, but the nutritiousness of meat is not necessarily dependent upon its being from the finest cut. I should like to see all men eating "French" chops and porter-house steaks if they could afford it; but when I know the average wages of our workingmen and the cost of living on the simplest possible scale, it is discouraging to learn such a fact as that which I have mentioned, since all the elements of necessary sustenance can be had in so much cheaper forms. * * *4. Labor must fault itself further, on the ground of its lack of power of combination and of its defective methods in combination. It has been by combination that the middle class has arisen, and by it that capital has so wonderfully increased. The story of the Middle Ages, familiar to us all, is the story of the rise of the industrial class by combination in guilds. Labor's numbers, now a hindrance, might thus become a help. In a mob men trample upon each other; in an army they brace each other to the charge of victory.Trades-unions represent the one effective form of combination won by American labor. Trades-unions need no timid apologists. Their vindication is in the historic tale of the successful advances which they have won for workingmen. Called into being to defend labor against legislation in the interests of capital, in the days when to ask for an advance in wages led to workingmen's being thrown into prison, they have in England led on to the brilliant series of reforms which mark our century, as told so well in the articles by Mr. Howell (The Nineteenth Centuryfor October, 1882) and by Mr. Harrison (The Contemporary Reviewfor October, 1883). Doubtless they have committed plenty of follies, and are still capable of stupid tyrannies that only succeed in handicapping labor, in alienating capital, and in checking productivity—that is, in lessening the sumtotal of divisible wealth. Such actions are inevitable in the early stages of combination on the part of uneducated men, feeling a new sense of power, and striking blindly out in angry retaliation for real or fancied injuries.Trades-unions are gradually, however, outgrowing their crude methods. The attempts, such as we have seen lately, of great corporations to break them up, is a piece of despotism which ought to receive an indignant rebuke from the people at large. Labor must combine, just as capital has combined, in forming these very corporations. Labor's only way of defending its interests as a class is through combination. It is the abuse and not the use of trades-unions against which resistance should be made.The chief abuse of our trades-unions has been their concentration of attention upon the organization of strikes.Strikes seem to me in our present stage of the "free-contract" system entirely justifiable when they are really necessary. Workingmen have the right to combine in affixing a price at which they wish to work. The supply of labor and the demand for goods, in the absence of higher considerations, will settle the question as to whether they can get the increase. The trying features of this method of reaching a result are incidental to our immature industrial system. Strikes have had their part to play in the development of that system. We note their failures and forget their successes; but they have had their signal success, and have won substantial advantages for labor. Their chief service, however, has been in teaching combination, and in showing labor the need of a better weapon by which to act than the strike itself.The strike requires long practice and great skill to wield it well. Practice in it is more costly than the experiments at Woolwich. Mr. Dolles, in his new work on political economy, gives some statistics which abundantly illustrate the folly of strikes, although he only gives one side of the case, namely, the losses which fall directly upon the laborers themselves. If to these were added the losses of capitalists, the aggregate would become colossal. In 1829 the Manchester spinners struck, and lost $1,250,000 in wages before the dispute was at an end. The next year their brethren at Ashton and Stayleybridge followed their example in striking and in losing $1,250,000. In 1833 the builders of Manchester forfeited $360,000 by voluntary idleness. In 1836 the spinners of Preston threw away $286,000. Eighteen years afterward their successor, seventeen thousand strong, slowly starved through thirty-six weeks and paid $1,200,000 for the privilege. In 1853 the English iron-workers lost $12,000 by a strike. Such losses marked, too, the strikes of the London builders in 1860,and tailors in 1868, and the northern iron-workers in 1865. The strike of the Belfast linen-weavers, which was ended a few weeks since by the mediation of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, cost the operatives $1,000,000.The cost of strikes is expressible only in the aggregate of the savings of labor consumed in idleness, of the loss to the productivity of the country, of the disturbance of the whole mechanism of exchange, and of the injury wrought upon the delicate social organization by the strain thus placed upon it. The famous Pittsburgh strike is estimated to have cost the country ten millions of dollars. When so costly a weapon is found to miss far more often than it hits, it is altogether too dear. * * *Trades-unions in this country seem to me to be gravely at fault in clinging to such an obsolete weapon. They should have turned their attention to our modern improvement upon this bludgeon.Arbitration is a far cheaper and more effective instrument of adjusting differences between capital and labor—a far more likely means of securing a fair increase of wages. It places both sides to the controversy in an amicable mood, and is an appeal to the reason and conscience—not wholly dead in the most soulless corporation. It costs next to nothing. It is already becoming a substitute for strikes in England, where the trades-unions are adopting this new weapon. * * *Trades-unions ought, among us, to emulate the wisdom of European workingmen, and use their mechanism to organize forms of association which should look not alone to winning higher wages but to making the most of existing wages, and ultimately to leading the wage-system into a higher development. The provident features of the English trades-unions are commonly overlooked, and yet it is precisely in these provident features that their main development has been reached. Mr. George Howell shows that a number of societies, which he had specially studied, had spent in thirty years upward of $19,000,000 through their various relief-funds, and $1,369,455 only on strikes. Mr. Harrison speaks of seven societies spending in one year (1879) upward of $4,000,000 upon their members out of work. He shows that seven of the great societies spent in 1882 less than 2 per cent of their income on strikes; and states that 99 per cent of union funds in England "have been expended in the beneficent work of supporting workmen in bad times, in laying by a store for bad times, and saving the country from a crisis of destitution and strife."Trades-unions ought to be doing for our workingmen what trades-unions have already done in England. * * * It has been by the power of combination among the workingmen, developed through the trades-unions,that this long list of beneficent legislation—factory acts, mines-regulation acts, education acts, tenant-right acts, employers' liability acts, acts against "truck," acts against cruelty to animals, etc.—has been secured. It has been wrested from reluctant parliaments by the manifestations of strength on the part of the laboring classes. * * *Our trades unions ought to be the means of securing one of the great necessities of labor in this country—accurate and generally diffused information concerning the state of the labor-market. Were there any thorough combination in existence on the part of these unions in hard times, there could be diffused through the great centers of labor in the East regular reports of the labor-market in the different local centers of the country, such as would guide workingmen in their search for opportunities of work. * * *Another action that our labor unions might take in the interest of the workingmen is in the development of co-operation. The story of European co-operation is one of the most encouraging tales of our modern industrial world. Germany, for example, had in 1877 some 2,830 credit societies; of which 806 reported 431,216 members; advances for the year, in loans to their members, $375,000,000, with a loss of one mark to every 416 thalers, or 23-4/5 cents on every $297—an indication of soundness in their financial operations that many capitalistic corporations might well envy. The rapid growth of these societies is bringing the omnipotence of credit to the aid of the workingmen in Germany.We have within the past decade had a most encouraging growth of a somewhat similar form of co-operation in the building and loan associations, which are now estimated to number probably about 8,000 in the nation, with a membership of 450,000, and an aggregated capital of $75,000,000.The co-operative stores have reached a wonderful development in England, with most beneficent results. There were 765 stores reporting to the congress in 1881, which showed aggregate sales of $65,703,990, with profits of $435,000; while Scotland reported 226 stores in the same year, representing sales of $17,423,170, and profits of $113,665.Against this showing our workingmen have comparatively little to offer. We have, it is true, had a great deal more of experimenting in co-operative distribution than is ordinarily supposed. Co-operative stores began among us between 1830 and 1840. The Workingmen's Protective Union developed a great many stores at this time, which together did a business in their best days ranging from $1,000,000 to $2,000,000 per annum. In the decade 1860-70 there was an extensive revival of co-operativestores; plans for wholesale agencies being even discussed. A few of these earlier stores still live. Two great national orders have arisen, seeking to build up co-operative stores, among other aims.The Grangers had in 1876 twenty State purchasing agencies, three of which did a business annually of $200,000, and one of which did an annual business of $1,000,000. They claimed to have, about the same time, five steamboat or packet lines, fifty societies for shipping goods, thirty-two grain elevators, twenty-two warehouses for storing goods. In 1876 one hundred and sixty Grange stores were recorded. In he same year it was officially stated that "local stores are in successful operation all over the country."The Sovereigns of Industry also developed co-operative distribution largely. In 1877 President Earle reported that "ninety-four councils, selected from the whole, report a membership of 7,273, and with an average capital of only $884 did a business last year of $1,089,372.55. It is safe to assume that the unreported sales will swell the amount to at least $3,000,000."There have been numerous stores started apart from these orders. The finest success won is by the Philadelphia Industrial Co-operative Society. Starting in 1875 with one store, it has now six stores. Its sales for the quarter ending February 18, 1882, were $51,413.63. A considerable increase of interest in such stores marks the opening of our decade. Stores are starting up in various parts of the country. The Grangers claim to have now hundreds of co-operative stores, upon the Rochdale plan, in successful operation. Texas reports officially (1881) seventy-five co-operative societies connected with this order. * * *We had an epoch of brilliant enthusiasm over co-operative agriculture in 1840-50, but little has been left from it. One form of agricultural co-operation, a lower form, has been astonishingly successful—the cheese-factories and creameries. It is estimated that there are now 5,000 of them in the country. In co-operative manufactures we have had many experiments, but few successes, from 1849 onward. Massachusetts reported twenty-five co-operative manufactories in 1875. All of them, however, were small societies.Now, co-operation has its clearly marked limitations. It is of itself no panacea for all the ills that labor is heir to. But it can ameliorate some of the worst of those ills. It can effect great savings for our workingmen, and can secure them food and other necessaries of the best quality. If nothing further arises, the spread of co-operation may simply induce a new form of competition between these big societies; but no one can study the historyof the movement without becoming persuaded that there is a moral development carried on which will, in some way as yet not seen to us, lead up the organization of those societies into some higher generalization, securing harmony. It is constantly and rightly said that business can never dispense with that which makes the secret of capital's success in large industry and trade, namely, generalship. Co-operation can, it is admitted, capitalize labor for the small industries, in which it is capable of making workingmen their own employers, but it is said it can never, through committees of management, carry on large industries or trade. I can, however, see no reason why hereafter it may not enable large associations to hire superior directing ability at high salaries, just as paid generals give to republics the leadership which kings used to supply in monarchies. There are in the savings-banks of many manufacturing centers in our country amounts which if capitalized would place the workingmen of those towns in industrial independence; moneys which, in some instances, are actually furnishing the borrowed capital for their own employers. In such towns our workingmen have saved enough to capitalize their labor, but for lack of the power of combination, let the advantage of their own thrift inure to the benefit of men already rich. They save money and then loan it to rich men to use in hiring them to work on wages, while the profits go to the borrowers of labor's savings.But the chief value of co-operation, in my estimate, is its educating power. It opens a training school for labor in the science and art of association.Labor once effectively united could win its dues, whatever they may be. The difficulties of such association have lain in the undeveloped mental and moral condition of the rank and file of the hosts of labor. * * *Now, of this effort at co-operation I find scarcely any trace in the trade organizations of our workingmen. Trades-unions have until very lately passed the whole subject by in utter silence. What has been done by workingmen in this country in the line of co-operation has been done outside of the great trade associations, which form the natural instrumentalities for organizing such combination. They offer the mechanism, the mutual knowledge, the preliminary training in habits of combination, which together should form the proper conditions for the development of co-operation. Is it not a singular thing, considering the manifold benefits that would come to labor from such a development, that the attention of these great and powerful organizations has not heretofore been seriously called to this matter. * * *The story of such attempts as have already been made in this directionis one of a sad and discouraging nature to all who feel the gravity of this problem. Again and again great organizations have risen on our soil, seeking to combine our trade associations and promising the millennium to labor, only to find within a few years suspicion, distrust, and jealousy eating the heart out of the order, and disintegration following rapidly as a natural consequence. The time must soon come let us hope, when the lesson of these experiences will have been learned.These are some of the salient faults of labor—faults which are patent to all dispassionate observers. The first step to a better state of things lies through the correction of these faults. Whatever other factors enter into the problem, this is the factor which it concerns labor to look after if it would reach the equation of the good time coming. No reconstruction of society can avail for incompetent, indifferent, thriftless men who cannot work together. Self-help must precede all other help. Dreamers may picture utopias, where all our present laws are suspended, and demagogues may cover up the disagreeable facts of labor's own responsibility for its pitiful condition, but sensible workingmen will remember that, as Renan told his countrymen after the Franco-Prussian war, "the first duty is to face the facts of the situation." There are no royal roads to an honest mastery of fortune, though there seem to be plenty of by-ways to dishonest success. Nature is a hard school-mistress. She allows no makeshifts for the discipline of hard work and of self-denial, for the culture of all the strengthful qualities. Her American school for workers is not as yet overcrowded. The rightful order of society is not as yet submerged on our shores. There are the rewards of merit for all who will work and wait. No man of average intelligence needs to suffer in our country if he has clear grit in him. "The stone that is fit for the wall," as the Spanish proverb runs, "will not be left in the road."IIfaults of capitalBut—for there is a very large "but" in the case—when all this is said, only the thorough goingdoctrinairewill fail to see that merely half the case has been presented. There is a shallow optimism which, from the heights of prosperity, throws all the blame of labor's sufferings on labor's own broad shoulders; steels the heart of society against it because of these patent faults, and closes the hand against its help, while it sings the gospel of the Gradgrinds—"As it was and ever shall be. Amen."Labor itself is not wholly responsible for its own faults. These faultsspring largely out of the defective social conditions amid which the workingman finds himself placed. Before we proceed to administer to him the whole measure of the "whopping" due for his low estate, we had better look back of him, to see why it is that he is as he is.The inefficiency of labor is by no means the fault of the individual laborer alone. Heredity has bankrupted him before he started on his career. His parents were probably as inefficient as he is—and most likelytheirparents also. One who sees much of the lower grades of labor ceases to wonder why children turn out worthless, knowing what the parents were. General Francis A. Walker, in opening the Manufacturers' and Mechanics' Institute at Boston lately, said:"There is great virtue in the inherited industrial aptitudes and instincts of the people. You can no more make a first-class dyer or a first-class machinist in one generation than you can in one generation make a Cossack horseman or a Tartar herdsman. Artisans are born, not made."Our incompetents may plead that they were not born competent. It does not readily appear what we are going to do about this working of heredity against labor, except as by the slow and gradual improvement of mankind these low strata of existences are lifted up to a higher plane. Meanwhile we must blame less harshly and work a little more earnestly to better the human stock.The environment of labor handicaps still further this organic deficiency. In most of our great cities the homes of the workingmen are shockingly unwholesome; unsunned, badly drained, overcrowded. The tenements of New York are enough alone to take the life out of labor. City factories often are not much better. The quality of the food sold in the poorer sections of our cities—meat, bread, milk, etc.—is defectively nutritious, even where it is not positively harmful. The sanitary conditions are thus against labor.This could be largely reflected by the State and city authorities, and ought to be rectified in simple justice to society at large, which is now so heavily burdened by the manifold evils bred under such conditions. Government guards carefully the rights both of land and capital by an immense amount of legislation and administration. Has not labor a fair claim to an equal solicitude on the part of the State? Health is the laborer's source of wealth, but it is by no means so farefully looked after as are the resources of the other two factors of production. It is only within the last three years that in New York we have had a satisfactory tenement-house law or a fair administration of any law bearing on this evil. There ought to be the exercise of some such large wisdom as led the city of Glasgowto spend $7,000,000 in reconstructing three thousand of the worst tenements of that city, with a consequent reduction of the death rate from 54 per thousand to 29 per thousand, and with a corresponding decrease in pauperism and crime.To this end our municipal governments should be taken out of party politics and made the corporation business that they are in German cities.We have in none of the States of our Union any such legislation as that of the thorough system of factory laws in England, and we ought to supply the lack promptly. Whatever may be said as to interference on the part of legislation with the rights of capital, the sufficient answer is that the whole advance of society has been a constant interference on the part of legislation with the merely natural action of the law of supply and demand; and that only thus has England, for example, secured the immense amelioration in the condition of the problem of labor and capital which marks her state to-day.It can be said also in this connection that if Government has one business more peculiarly her own than another, it is to look after the class that most needs looking after; and that not simply from the interest of the class itself, which would rarely supply a basis for governmental interference, but in the interests of society at large—of the State itself. The State's first concern is to see her citizens healthful, vigorous, wealth-producing factors; and to this end bad sanitary conditions, which undermine the "health-capital" of labor, imperatively demand correction.The deeper seated the roots of labor's inefficiency in heredity and environment, the greater the need for an education that will develop whatever potencies may lie latent. Inefficiency will rarely correct itself. Superior ability must train it into better power. Where is there any proper provision for such an education?State governments and our National Government have for a number of years been fostering certain branches of industrial education, chiefly in the line of agriculture. The late report of the Bureau of Education upon industrial education presents a very encouraging summary of what is thus being done under the guidance of the State. It reports concerning forty-three colleges aided by State grants to give agricultural and mechanical training, besides a large number of technical departments in other colleges, industrial schools, evening classes for such instruction, etc. Probably the finest example of industrial education that the country possesses is found in the Hampton schools in Virginia. Of attempts, however, to combine general and intellectual education with practical training and handicrafts we have few examples. The Hampton schools, alreadyalluded to, present one of the best. Professor Adler's school in this city is very interesting in this respect.Our common schools have until lately signally passed by the whole field of practical education. Drawing is at last being generally introduced, and sewing is also being introduced to a small extent, I believe, especially in New England. But the schools which are supposed to be intended for the mass of the people, and which are supplied at the public cost, have made next to no provision for the practiced training of boys and girls to become self-supporting men and women—wealth-producing citizens; while the whole curriculum of the school-system tends to a disproportionate intellectuality, and to an alienation from all manual labor. * * *The necessity of the State's entering the educational field is disputed by no one; but if it is to educate children at the public cost it is bound, I think, to so educate its wards that they shall return to society the taxation imposed for their education. Its justification in becoming school-master lies in the necessity of making out of the raw material of life citizens who shall be productive factors in the national wealth and conservators of its order. If, therefore, it is justified in teaching the elementary branches of education, if it is justified in adding to those elementary branches departments that may be considered in the nature of luxuries, how much more is it justified in training the powers by which self-support shall be won and wealth shall be added to society! * * *That such efforts to encourage industrial education would pay our Government is best seen in the example of England. The International Exhibition of 1851 revealed to England its complete inferiority to several continental countries in art-industries, and the cause of that inferiority in the absence of skilled workmen. The Government at once began to study the problem, and out of this study arose the Kensington Museum, with its art-schools, and similar institutions throughout the country, which have already made quick and gratifying returns in the improvement of the national art-industries, and in the vast enrichment of the trade growing therefrom.Concerning the uninterestedness of labor and its too common lack of any identification with capital, we must also look beyond labor itself to find the full responsibility of this evil.The whole condition of industrial labor has changed in our century. Contrast the state of such labor a century ago with what it is now. Then the handicraftsman worked in his own home, surrounded by his family, upon a task all the processes of which he had mastered, giving him thus a sense of interest and pride in the work being well and thoroughly done.Now he leaves his home early and returns to it late, working during the day in a huge factory with several hundred other men. The subdivision of labor gives him now only a bit of the whole process to do, where the work is still done by hand, whether it be the making of a shoe or a piano. He cannot be master of a craft, but only master of a fragment of the craft. He cannot have the pleasure or pride of the old-time workman, for hemakesnothing. He sees no complete product of his skill growing into finished shape in his hands. What zest can there be in this bit of manhood? Steam machinery is slowly taking out of his hands even this fragment of intelligent work, and he is set at feeding and watching the great machine which has been endowed with the brains that once were in the human toiler. Man is reduced to being the tender upon a steel automaton which thinks and plans and combines with marvelous power, leaving him only the task of supplying it with the raw material, and of oiling and cleansing it.Some few machines require a skill and judgment to guide them proportioned to their own astonishing capacities, and for the elect workmen who manage and guide them there is a new sense of the pleasure of power.But, for the most part, mechanism takes the life out of labor as the handicraft becomes the manufacture—or, more properly, themachino-facture; and the problem of to-day is, how to keep up the interest of labor in its daily task, from which the zest has been stolen.Manufacturers ought to see this problem and hasten to solve it. Those who profit most by the present factory system ought, in all justice, to be held responsible to those who suffer most from it. They ought to be held morally bound to make up to them in some way the interest in life that has gone out with the old handicrafts. They could interest their handsoutof the working hours, and in ways that would give them a new interestintheir working hours. * * *Not a few of our manufacturers are already opening their eyes to the facts of the industrial problem, and, with far-seeing generosity and human brotherliness that will, according to the eternal laws, return even the good things of this world unto them, they are providing their workingmen with libraries, reading-rooms, and halls for lectures and entertainments. They are encouraging and stimulating the formation of literary and debating societies, bands, and clubs, and such other things as give social fellowship and mental interest. All this can be done at comparatively small cost. The men in the employ of a great establishment can be taught a new interest in their task as they learn to understand its processes and the relation of these processes to society at large, which can easily be done by lectures, etc. Such work as this is a work that demands the leadership,the organizing power, which the employer can best furnish. At the last session of the Social Science Association an interesting paper sketched some of these efforts. In what wiser way could our wealthy manufacturers use a portion of the money won for them by the labor which has exhausted its own interest in its task?Such personal interest on the part of employers in their employees leads up to a clue to that other branch of the uninterestedness of labor—its lack of identification with the welfare of capital—its lack of any feeling of loyalty toward the capitalist. How can anything else be fairly expected in our present state of things from theaverageworkingman under theaverageemployer? I emphasize the "average" because there are employees of exceptional intelligence and honor, as there are employers of exceptional conscientiousness, anxious to do fairly by their men. The received political economy has taught the average workingman that the relations of capital and labor are those of hostile interests; that profits and wages are in an inverse ratio; that the symbol of the factory is a see-saw, on which capital goes up as labor goes down. As things are, there is unfortunately too much ground for this notion, as the workman sees.Mr. Carroll D. Wright, in the fourteenth annual report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor (1883), shows that in 1875 the percentage of wages paid to the value of production, in over 2,000 establishments, was 24.68; and that in 1880 it was 20.23. This means that the workingmen's share of the returns of their own labor, so far from increasing, has decreased one sixth in five years.The workingman is disposed to believe in the light of such figures that the large wealth accumulated by his employer represents over and above a fair profit the increased wages out of which he naturally regards himself as being mulcted. He may be thick-headed, but he can see that in such a see-saw of profitsversuswages the superior power of capital has the odds all in its favor. He learns to regard the whole state of the industrial world as one in whichmightmakesright, and feebleness is the synonym of fault.How, in the name of all that is reasonable, can the average man take much interest in his employer or identity himself with that employer under such a state of things as the economy sanctioned by the employer has taught him? This is aggravated by the whole character of our modern industrial system.The factory system is a new feudalism, in which a master rarely deals directly with his hands. Superintendents, managers, and "bosses" stand between him and them. He does not know them; they do not know him. The old common feeling is disappearing. And—this is a significant pointthat it behooves workingmen to notice—the intermediaries are generally workingmen who have risen out of the ranks of manual labor and have lost all fellow-feeling with their old comrades, without gaining the larger sympathy with humanity which often comes from better culture. The hardest men upon workingmen are ex-workingmen. It is stated, on what seems to be good authority, that the general superintendent of the great corporation which lately has shown so hard a feeling towards its operatives when on a strike was himself only ten years ago a telegraph-operator.A further aggravating feature of this problem is the increasing tendency of capital to associated action. What little knowledge of his employees or sympathy with them the individual manufacturer might have is wholly lost in the case of the corporation. To the stockholders of a great joint-stock company, many of whom are never on the spot, the hundreds of laborers employed by the company are simply "hands"—as to whose possession of hearts or minds or souls the by-laws rarely take cognizance. Here there is plainly a case where capital—the party of brains and wealth—the head of the industrial association, should lead off in a systematic effort and renew, as far as may be, the old human tie, for which no substitute has ever been devised.To conciliate the interests of the classes, and identify labor with capital, individual employers must re-establish personal relationships between themselves and their men. What might be done in this way, and how, this being done, the present alienation of feeling on the part of our working-men would largely disappear, must be evident to any one who has watched some of the beautiful exemplifications of this relationship which have already grown into being on our shores. I know of one large manufacturer, in a city not a hundred miles from this, who started to enter the ministry as a young man, but found to his intense disappointment that he had no aptitude for the work of a preacher, and turned his attention, on the insistent advice of those nearest to him, to active business. He took up the business which his father had left him at his death and had left largely involved. His first task was to pay off, dollar for dollar, all the debts which his father had bequeathed him, although in most instances they had been compromised by his creditors. He then threw the energy of his being into development of the business, and, in the course of a few years, put it at the forefront of that line in his native city. Into his business he breathed the spirit of love to God and man which had moved him originally to take up the work of the ministry. He felt himself ordained to be what Carlyle would have called a "captain of industry." From the start he established personal, human, living relationships with his men. He taught them by deed rather than by word to consider him their friend. He was in the habitof calling in upon their families in a social and respecting way. In all their troubles and adversities he trained them to counsel with him, and gave them the advantage of his riper judgment and larger vision. In cases of exigency his means were at their service in the way of loans to tide them over the hard times. His friends have seen, more than once, coming from his private office some of the hard-fisted men of toil in his employ, with tears streaming down their faces. He had called them into the office on hearing of certain bad habits into which they had fallen, and so impressive had been his talk with them, that they left his presence with the most earnest resolves to do better in the future. The result of all this relationship has been that during some fifteen years of the management of this large business he has rarely changed his men, and while strikes have abounded around him he has never known a strike.I hold in my possession a letter from one of our leading iron-manufacturers in this country, who, in response to an appeal for participation in a charity of this city, gave answer that it had been a practice of the firm to invest a certain portion of their profits in developing the comforts of their workingmen, and that they were obliged to limit their desire to give in charity in order that they might be able to build homes, club-rooms, reading-rooms, and all theet ceterasof a really civilized community in their work-village. These are examples, in our own country, of what might be done.One of the most beautiful models that I know of in modern history is furnished by the town to which reference has already been made—the town of Mulhouse, where, after some thirty years, the spirit of brotherliness has so entered into the relationships of capital and labor that a firm would be disreputable which there attempted to carry on business as business is ordinarily done here. All the manufacturers plan out, organize, and carry on what to most of us would seem impossible schemes for the amelioration and uplifting of the condition of their working people. No one wonders that, as he walks through the town which his large hearted philanthropy imbued with this fine spirit, the workingmen salute the originator of these schemes as "Father Peter."In addition to this personal, human relationship, capital might and should, in all justice and humanity, identify the pecuniary interests of labor with its own interests. What is known as industrial partnership is simply a solution of this branch of the problem. The principle is simply that of giving labor a pecuniary interest in the profits of the establishmentpro ratawith his own wages. Abonusis set on frugality and industry and conscientiousness of work by making the hands small partners in the concern. * * *
A Labor Question Coming
The broad fact that the United States census of 1870 estimated the average annual income of our wage-workers at a little over $400 per capita, and that the census of 1880 estimates it at a little over $300 per capita, is the quite sufficient evidence that there is a labor question coming upon us in this country. The average wages of 1870 indicated, after due allowance for the inclusion of women and children, a mass of miserably paid labor—that is, of impoverished and degraded labor. The average wages of 1880 indicated that this mass of semi-pauperized labor is rapidly increasing, and that its condition has become 25 per cent worse in ten years. The shadow of the old-worldproletariatis thus seen to be stealing upon our shores. It is for specialists in political economy to study this problem in the light of the large social forces that are working such an alarming change in our American society. In the consensus of their ripened judgment we must look for the authoritative solution of this problem. I am not here to assume that role. I have no pet hobby to propose, warranted to solve the whole problem without failure. I do not believe there is any such specific yet out. * * *
I
the faults of labor
Plainly, labor's fault must be found with itself.
1. Leaving upon one side the class of skilled labor, a large proportion of our wage-workers are notoriously inefficient. In the most common tasks one has to watch the average workingman in order to prevent his bungling a job. Hands are worth little without some brains; as in the work done, so in the pay won. Our labor is quite as largely uninterested—having no more heart than brains back of the hands. Work is done mechanically by most workingmen, with little pride in doing it well, and little ambition to be continually doing it better.
2. There is too commonly as little sense of identity with the employer's interests, or of concern that any equivalent in work should be rendered for the pay received. In forms irritating beyond expression employers are made to feel that their employees do not in the least mind wasting their material, injuring their property, and blocking their business in the most critical moments. Under what possible system, save in a grievous dearth oflaborers, can such labor be well off, and incompetence and indifference draw high wages?
3. Our labor is for the most part very thriftless. In the purchase and in the preparation of food—the chief item of expense in the workingman's family and that wherein economic habits count for most—men and women are alike improvident. The art of making money go the farthest in food is comparatively unknown. Workingmen will turn up their noses at the fare on which a Carlyle did some of the finest literary work of our century. I remember some time ago speaking to one of our butchers, who told me that workingmen largely ordered some of his best cuts. Now an ample supply of nutritious food is certainly essential for good work, whether of the brain or of the brawn. The advance of labor is rightly gauged, among other ways, by its increasing consumption of wheat and meat, but the nutritiousness of meat is not necessarily dependent upon its being from the finest cut. I should like to see all men eating "French" chops and porter-house steaks if they could afford it; but when I know the average wages of our workingmen and the cost of living on the simplest possible scale, it is discouraging to learn such a fact as that which I have mentioned, since all the elements of necessary sustenance can be had in so much cheaper forms. * * *
4. Labor must fault itself further, on the ground of its lack of power of combination and of its defective methods in combination. It has been by combination that the middle class has arisen, and by it that capital has so wonderfully increased. The story of the Middle Ages, familiar to us all, is the story of the rise of the industrial class by combination in guilds. Labor's numbers, now a hindrance, might thus become a help. In a mob men trample upon each other; in an army they brace each other to the charge of victory.
Trades-unions represent the one effective form of combination won by American labor. Trades-unions need no timid apologists. Their vindication is in the historic tale of the successful advances which they have won for workingmen. Called into being to defend labor against legislation in the interests of capital, in the days when to ask for an advance in wages led to workingmen's being thrown into prison, they have in England led on to the brilliant series of reforms which mark our century, as told so well in the articles by Mr. Howell (The Nineteenth Centuryfor October, 1882) and by Mr. Harrison (The Contemporary Reviewfor October, 1883). Doubtless they have committed plenty of follies, and are still capable of stupid tyrannies that only succeed in handicapping labor, in alienating capital, and in checking productivity—that is, in lessening the sumtotal of divisible wealth. Such actions are inevitable in the early stages of combination on the part of uneducated men, feeling a new sense of power, and striking blindly out in angry retaliation for real or fancied injuries.
Trades-unions are gradually, however, outgrowing their crude methods. The attempts, such as we have seen lately, of great corporations to break them up, is a piece of despotism which ought to receive an indignant rebuke from the people at large. Labor must combine, just as capital has combined, in forming these very corporations. Labor's only way of defending its interests as a class is through combination. It is the abuse and not the use of trades-unions against which resistance should be made.
The chief abuse of our trades-unions has been their concentration of attention upon the organization of strikes.
Strikes seem to me in our present stage of the "free-contract" system entirely justifiable when they are really necessary. Workingmen have the right to combine in affixing a price at which they wish to work. The supply of labor and the demand for goods, in the absence of higher considerations, will settle the question as to whether they can get the increase. The trying features of this method of reaching a result are incidental to our immature industrial system. Strikes have had their part to play in the development of that system. We note their failures and forget their successes; but they have had their signal success, and have won substantial advantages for labor. Their chief service, however, has been in teaching combination, and in showing labor the need of a better weapon by which to act than the strike itself.
The strike requires long practice and great skill to wield it well. Practice in it is more costly than the experiments at Woolwich. Mr. Dolles, in his new work on political economy, gives some statistics which abundantly illustrate the folly of strikes, although he only gives one side of the case, namely, the losses which fall directly upon the laborers themselves. If to these were added the losses of capitalists, the aggregate would become colossal. In 1829 the Manchester spinners struck, and lost $1,250,000 in wages before the dispute was at an end. The next year their brethren at Ashton and Stayleybridge followed their example in striking and in losing $1,250,000. In 1833 the builders of Manchester forfeited $360,000 by voluntary idleness. In 1836 the spinners of Preston threw away $286,000. Eighteen years afterward their successor, seventeen thousand strong, slowly starved through thirty-six weeks and paid $1,200,000 for the privilege. In 1853 the English iron-workers lost $12,000 by a strike. Such losses marked, too, the strikes of the London builders in 1860,and tailors in 1868, and the northern iron-workers in 1865. The strike of the Belfast linen-weavers, which was ended a few weeks since by the mediation of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, cost the operatives $1,000,000.
The cost of strikes is expressible only in the aggregate of the savings of labor consumed in idleness, of the loss to the productivity of the country, of the disturbance of the whole mechanism of exchange, and of the injury wrought upon the delicate social organization by the strain thus placed upon it. The famous Pittsburgh strike is estimated to have cost the country ten millions of dollars. When so costly a weapon is found to miss far more often than it hits, it is altogether too dear. * * *
Trades-unions in this country seem to me to be gravely at fault in clinging to such an obsolete weapon. They should have turned their attention to our modern improvement upon this bludgeon.
Arbitration is a far cheaper and more effective instrument of adjusting differences between capital and labor—a far more likely means of securing a fair increase of wages. It places both sides to the controversy in an amicable mood, and is an appeal to the reason and conscience—not wholly dead in the most soulless corporation. It costs next to nothing. It is already becoming a substitute for strikes in England, where the trades-unions are adopting this new weapon. * * *
Trades-unions ought, among us, to emulate the wisdom of European workingmen, and use their mechanism to organize forms of association which should look not alone to winning higher wages but to making the most of existing wages, and ultimately to leading the wage-system into a higher development. The provident features of the English trades-unions are commonly overlooked, and yet it is precisely in these provident features that their main development has been reached. Mr. George Howell shows that a number of societies, which he had specially studied, had spent in thirty years upward of $19,000,000 through their various relief-funds, and $1,369,455 only on strikes. Mr. Harrison speaks of seven societies spending in one year (1879) upward of $4,000,000 upon their members out of work. He shows that seven of the great societies spent in 1882 less than 2 per cent of their income on strikes; and states that 99 per cent of union funds in England "have been expended in the beneficent work of supporting workmen in bad times, in laying by a store for bad times, and saving the country from a crisis of destitution and strife."
Trades-unions ought to be doing for our workingmen what trades-unions have already done in England. * * * It has been by the power of combination among the workingmen, developed through the trades-unions,that this long list of beneficent legislation—factory acts, mines-regulation acts, education acts, tenant-right acts, employers' liability acts, acts against "truck," acts against cruelty to animals, etc.—has been secured. It has been wrested from reluctant parliaments by the manifestations of strength on the part of the laboring classes. * * *
Our trades unions ought to be the means of securing one of the great necessities of labor in this country—accurate and generally diffused information concerning the state of the labor-market. Were there any thorough combination in existence on the part of these unions in hard times, there could be diffused through the great centers of labor in the East regular reports of the labor-market in the different local centers of the country, such as would guide workingmen in their search for opportunities of work. * * *
Another action that our labor unions might take in the interest of the workingmen is in the development of co-operation. The story of European co-operation is one of the most encouraging tales of our modern industrial world. Germany, for example, had in 1877 some 2,830 credit societies; of which 806 reported 431,216 members; advances for the year, in loans to their members, $375,000,000, with a loss of one mark to every 416 thalers, or 23-4/5 cents on every $297—an indication of soundness in their financial operations that many capitalistic corporations might well envy. The rapid growth of these societies is bringing the omnipotence of credit to the aid of the workingmen in Germany.
We have within the past decade had a most encouraging growth of a somewhat similar form of co-operation in the building and loan associations, which are now estimated to number probably about 8,000 in the nation, with a membership of 450,000, and an aggregated capital of $75,000,000.
The co-operative stores have reached a wonderful development in England, with most beneficent results. There were 765 stores reporting to the congress in 1881, which showed aggregate sales of $65,703,990, with profits of $435,000; while Scotland reported 226 stores in the same year, representing sales of $17,423,170, and profits of $113,665.
Against this showing our workingmen have comparatively little to offer. We have, it is true, had a great deal more of experimenting in co-operative distribution than is ordinarily supposed. Co-operative stores began among us between 1830 and 1840. The Workingmen's Protective Union developed a great many stores at this time, which together did a business in their best days ranging from $1,000,000 to $2,000,000 per annum. In the decade 1860-70 there was an extensive revival of co-operativestores; plans for wholesale agencies being even discussed. A few of these earlier stores still live. Two great national orders have arisen, seeking to build up co-operative stores, among other aims.
The Grangers had in 1876 twenty State purchasing agencies, three of which did a business annually of $200,000, and one of which did an annual business of $1,000,000. They claimed to have, about the same time, five steamboat or packet lines, fifty societies for shipping goods, thirty-two grain elevators, twenty-two warehouses for storing goods. In 1876 one hundred and sixty Grange stores were recorded. In he same year it was officially stated that "local stores are in successful operation all over the country."
The Sovereigns of Industry also developed co-operative distribution largely. In 1877 President Earle reported that "ninety-four councils, selected from the whole, report a membership of 7,273, and with an average capital of only $884 did a business last year of $1,089,372.55. It is safe to assume that the unreported sales will swell the amount to at least $3,000,000."
There have been numerous stores started apart from these orders. The finest success won is by the Philadelphia Industrial Co-operative Society. Starting in 1875 with one store, it has now six stores. Its sales for the quarter ending February 18, 1882, were $51,413.63. A considerable increase of interest in such stores marks the opening of our decade. Stores are starting up in various parts of the country. The Grangers claim to have now hundreds of co-operative stores, upon the Rochdale plan, in successful operation. Texas reports officially (1881) seventy-five co-operative societies connected with this order. * * *
We had an epoch of brilliant enthusiasm over co-operative agriculture in 1840-50, but little has been left from it. One form of agricultural co-operation, a lower form, has been astonishingly successful—the cheese-factories and creameries. It is estimated that there are now 5,000 of them in the country. In co-operative manufactures we have had many experiments, but few successes, from 1849 onward. Massachusetts reported twenty-five co-operative manufactories in 1875. All of them, however, were small societies.
Now, co-operation has its clearly marked limitations. It is of itself no panacea for all the ills that labor is heir to. But it can ameliorate some of the worst of those ills. It can effect great savings for our workingmen, and can secure them food and other necessaries of the best quality. If nothing further arises, the spread of co-operation may simply induce a new form of competition between these big societies; but no one can study the historyof the movement without becoming persuaded that there is a moral development carried on which will, in some way as yet not seen to us, lead up the organization of those societies into some higher generalization, securing harmony. It is constantly and rightly said that business can never dispense with that which makes the secret of capital's success in large industry and trade, namely, generalship. Co-operation can, it is admitted, capitalize labor for the small industries, in which it is capable of making workingmen their own employers, but it is said it can never, through committees of management, carry on large industries or trade. I can, however, see no reason why hereafter it may not enable large associations to hire superior directing ability at high salaries, just as paid generals give to republics the leadership which kings used to supply in monarchies. There are in the savings-banks of many manufacturing centers in our country amounts which if capitalized would place the workingmen of those towns in industrial independence; moneys which, in some instances, are actually furnishing the borrowed capital for their own employers. In such towns our workingmen have saved enough to capitalize their labor, but for lack of the power of combination, let the advantage of their own thrift inure to the benefit of men already rich. They save money and then loan it to rich men to use in hiring them to work on wages, while the profits go to the borrowers of labor's savings.
But the chief value of co-operation, in my estimate, is its educating power. It opens a training school for labor in the science and art of association.
Labor once effectively united could win its dues, whatever they may be. The difficulties of such association have lain in the undeveloped mental and moral condition of the rank and file of the hosts of labor. * * *
Now, of this effort at co-operation I find scarcely any trace in the trade organizations of our workingmen. Trades-unions have until very lately passed the whole subject by in utter silence. What has been done by workingmen in this country in the line of co-operation has been done outside of the great trade associations, which form the natural instrumentalities for organizing such combination. They offer the mechanism, the mutual knowledge, the preliminary training in habits of combination, which together should form the proper conditions for the development of co-operation. Is it not a singular thing, considering the manifold benefits that would come to labor from such a development, that the attention of these great and powerful organizations has not heretofore been seriously called to this matter. * * *
The story of such attempts as have already been made in this directionis one of a sad and discouraging nature to all who feel the gravity of this problem. Again and again great organizations have risen on our soil, seeking to combine our trade associations and promising the millennium to labor, only to find within a few years suspicion, distrust, and jealousy eating the heart out of the order, and disintegration following rapidly as a natural consequence. The time must soon come let us hope, when the lesson of these experiences will have been learned.
These are some of the salient faults of labor—faults which are patent to all dispassionate observers. The first step to a better state of things lies through the correction of these faults. Whatever other factors enter into the problem, this is the factor which it concerns labor to look after if it would reach the equation of the good time coming. No reconstruction of society can avail for incompetent, indifferent, thriftless men who cannot work together. Self-help must precede all other help. Dreamers may picture utopias, where all our present laws are suspended, and demagogues may cover up the disagreeable facts of labor's own responsibility for its pitiful condition, but sensible workingmen will remember that, as Renan told his countrymen after the Franco-Prussian war, "the first duty is to face the facts of the situation." There are no royal roads to an honest mastery of fortune, though there seem to be plenty of by-ways to dishonest success. Nature is a hard school-mistress. She allows no makeshifts for the discipline of hard work and of self-denial, for the culture of all the strengthful qualities. Her American school for workers is not as yet overcrowded. The rightful order of society is not as yet submerged on our shores. There are the rewards of merit for all who will work and wait. No man of average intelligence needs to suffer in our country if he has clear grit in him. "The stone that is fit for the wall," as the Spanish proverb runs, "will not be left in the road."
II
faults of capital
But—for there is a very large "but" in the case—when all this is said, only the thorough goingdoctrinairewill fail to see that merely half the case has been presented. There is a shallow optimism which, from the heights of prosperity, throws all the blame of labor's sufferings on labor's own broad shoulders; steels the heart of society against it because of these patent faults, and closes the hand against its help, while it sings the gospel of the Gradgrinds—"As it was and ever shall be. Amen."
Labor itself is not wholly responsible for its own faults. These faultsspring largely out of the defective social conditions amid which the workingman finds himself placed. Before we proceed to administer to him the whole measure of the "whopping" due for his low estate, we had better look back of him, to see why it is that he is as he is.
The inefficiency of labor is by no means the fault of the individual laborer alone. Heredity has bankrupted him before he started on his career. His parents were probably as inefficient as he is—and most likelytheirparents also. One who sees much of the lower grades of labor ceases to wonder why children turn out worthless, knowing what the parents were. General Francis A. Walker, in opening the Manufacturers' and Mechanics' Institute at Boston lately, said:
"There is great virtue in the inherited industrial aptitudes and instincts of the people. You can no more make a first-class dyer or a first-class machinist in one generation than you can in one generation make a Cossack horseman or a Tartar herdsman. Artisans are born, not made."
Our incompetents may plead that they were not born competent. It does not readily appear what we are going to do about this working of heredity against labor, except as by the slow and gradual improvement of mankind these low strata of existences are lifted up to a higher plane. Meanwhile we must blame less harshly and work a little more earnestly to better the human stock.
The environment of labor handicaps still further this organic deficiency. In most of our great cities the homes of the workingmen are shockingly unwholesome; unsunned, badly drained, overcrowded. The tenements of New York are enough alone to take the life out of labor. City factories often are not much better. The quality of the food sold in the poorer sections of our cities—meat, bread, milk, etc.—is defectively nutritious, even where it is not positively harmful. The sanitary conditions are thus against labor.
This could be largely reflected by the State and city authorities, and ought to be rectified in simple justice to society at large, which is now so heavily burdened by the manifold evils bred under such conditions. Government guards carefully the rights both of land and capital by an immense amount of legislation and administration. Has not labor a fair claim to an equal solicitude on the part of the State? Health is the laborer's source of wealth, but it is by no means so farefully looked after as are the resources of the other two factors of production. It is only within the last three years that in New York we have had a satisfactory tenement-house law or a fair administration of any law bearing on this evil. There ought to be the exercise of some such large wisdom as led the city of Glasgowto spend $7,000,000 in reconstructing three thousand of the worst tenements of that city, with a consequent reduction of the death rate from 54 per thousand to 29 per thousand, and with a corresponding decrease in pauperism and crime.
To this end our municipal governments should be taken out of party politics and made the corporation business that they are in German cities.
We have in none of the States of our Union any such legislation as that of the thorough system of factory laws in England, and we ought to supply the lack promptly. Whatever may be said as to interference on the part of legislation with the rights of capital, the sufficient answer is that the whole advance of society has been a constant interference on the part of legislation with the merely natural action of the law of supply and demand; and that only thus has England, for example, secured the immense amelioration in the condition of the problem of labor and capital which marks her state to-day.
It can be said also in this connection that if Government has one business more peculiarly her own than another, it is to look after the class that most needs looking after; and that not simply from the interest of the class itself, which would rarely supply a basis for governmental interference, but in the interests of society at large—of the State itself. The State's first concern is to see her citizens healthful, vigorous, wealth-producing factors; and to this end bad sanitary conditions, which undermine the "health-capital" of labor, imperatively demand correction.
The deeper seated the roots of labor's inefficiency in heredity and environment, the greater the need for an education that will develop whatever potencies may lie latent. Inefficiency will rarely correct itself. Superior ability must train it into better power. Where is there any proper provision for such an education?
State governments and our National Government have for a number of years been fostering certain branches of industrial education, chiefly in the line of agriculture. The late report of the Bureau of Education upon industrial education presents a very encouraging summary of what is thus being done under the guidance of the State. It reports concerning forty-three colleges aided by State grants to give agricultural and mechanical training, besides a large number of technical departments in other colleges, industrial schools, evening classes for such instruction, etc. Probably the finest example of industrial education that the country possesses is found in the Hampton schools in Virginia. Of attempts, however, to combine general and intellectual education with practical training and handicrafts we have few examples. The Hampton schools, alreadyalluded to, present one of the best. Professor Adler's school in this city is very interesting in this respect.
Our common schools have until lately signally passed by the whole field of practical education. Drawing is at last being generally introduced, and sewing is also being introduced to a small extent, I believe, especially in New England. But the schools which are supposed to be intended for the mass of the people, and which are supplied at the public cost, have made next to no provision for the practiced training of boys and girls to become self-supporting men and women—wealth-producing citizens; while the whole curriculum of the school-system tends to a disproportionate intellectuality, and to an alienation from all manual labor. * * *
The necessity of the State's entering the educational field is disputed by no one; but if it is to educate children at the public cost it is bound, I think, to so educate its wards that they shall return to society the taxation imposed for their education. Its justification in becoming school-master lies in the necessity of making out of the raw material of life citizens who shall be productive factors in the national wealth and conservators of its order. If, therefore, it is justified in teaching the elementary branches of education, if it is justified in adding to those elementary branches departments that may be considered in the nature of luxuries, how much more is it justified in training the powers by which self-support shall be won and wealth shall be added to society! * * *
That such efforts to encourage industrial education would pay our Government is best seen in the example of England. The International Exhibition of 1851 revealed to England its complete inferiority to several continental countries in art-industries, and the cause of that inferiority in the absence of skilled workmen. The Government at once began to study the problem, and out of this study arose the Kensington Museum, with its art-schools, and similar institutions throughout the country, which have already made quick and gratifying returns in the improvement of the national art-industries, and in the vast enrichment of the trade growing therefrom.
Concerning the uninterestedness of labor and its too common lack of any identification with capital, we must also look beyond labor itself to find the full responsibility of this evil.
The whole condition of industrial labor has changed in our century. Contrast the state of such labor a century ago with what it is now. Then the handicraftsman worked in his own home, surrounded by his family, upon a task all the processes of which he had mastered, giving him thus a sense of interest and pride in the work being well and thoroughly done.Now he leaves his home early and returns to it late, working during the day in a huge factory with several hundred other men. The subdivision of labor gives him now only a bit of the whole process to do, where the work is still done by hand, whether it be the making of a shoe or a piano. He cannot be master of a craft, but only master of a fragment of the craft. He cannot have the pleasure or pride of the old-time workman, for hemakesnothing. He sees no complete product of his skill growing into finished shape in his hands. What zest can there be in this bit of manhood? Steam machinery is slowly taking out of his hands even this fragment of intelligent work, and he is set at feeding and watching the great machine which has been endowed with the brains that once were in the human toiler. Man is reduced to being the tender upon a steel automaton which thinks and plans and combines with marvelous power, leaving him only the task of supplying it with the raw material, and of oiling and cleansing it.
Some few machines require a skill and judgment to guide them proportioned to their own astonishing capacities, and for the elect workmen who manage and guide them there is a new sense of the pleasure of power.
But, for the most part, mechanism takes the life out of labor as the handicraft becomes the manufacture—or, more properly, themachino-facture; and the problem of to-day is, how to keep up the interest of labor in its daily task, from which the zest has been stolen.
Manufacturers ought to see this problem and hasten to solve it. Those who profit most by the present factory system ought, in all justice, to be held responsible to those who suffer most from it. They ought to be held morally bound to make up to them in some way the interest in life that has gone out with the old handicrafts. They could interest their handsoutof the working hours, and in ways that would give them a new interestintheir working hours. * * *
Not a few of our manufacturers are already opening their eyes to the facts of the industrial problem, and, with far-seeing generosity and human brotherliness that will, according to the eternal laws, return even the good things of this world unto them, they are providing their workingmen with libraries, reading-rooms, and halls for lectures and entertainments. They are encouraging and stimulating the formation of literary and debating societies, bands, and clubs, and such other things as give social fellowship and mental interest. All this can be done at comparatively small cost. The men in the employ of a great establishment can be taught a new interest in their task as they learn to understand its processes and the relation of these processes to society at large, which can easily be done by lectures, etc. Such work as this is a work that demands the leadership,the organizing power, which the employer can best furnish. At the last session of the Social Science Association an interesting paper sketched some of these efforts. In what wiser way could our wealthy manufacturers use a portion of the money won for them by the labor which has exhausted its own interest in its task?
Such personal interest on the part of employers in their employees leads up to a clue to that other branch of the uninterestedness of labor—its lack of identification with the welfare of capital—its lack of any feeling of loyalty toward the capitalist. How can anything else be fairly expected in our present state of things from theaverageworkingman under theaverageemployer? I emphasize the "average" because there are employees of exceptional intelligence and honor, as there are employers of exceptional conscientiousness, anxious to do fairly by their men. The received political economy has taught the average workingman that the relations of capital and labor are those of hostile interests; that profits and wages are in an inverse ratio; that the symbol of the factory is a see-saw, on which capital goes up as labor goes down. As things are, there is unfortunately too much ground for this notion, as the workman sees.
Mr. Carroll D. Wright, in the fourteenth annual report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor (1883), shows that in 1875 the percentage of wages paid to the value of production, in over 2,000 establishments, was 24.68; and that in 1880 it was 20.23. This means that the workingmen's share of the returns of their own labor, so far from increasing, has decreased one sixth in five years.
The workingman is disposed to believe in the light of such figures that the large wealth accumulated by his employer represents over and above a fair profit the increased wages out of which he naturally regards himself as being mulcted. He may be thick-headed, but he can see that in such a see-saw of profitsversuswages the superior power of capital has the odds all in its favor. He learns to regard the whole state of the industrial world as one in whichmightmakesright, and feebleness is the synonym of fault.
How, in the name of all that is reasonable, can the average man take much interest in his employer or identity himself with that employer under such a state of things as the economy sanctioned by the employer has taught him? This is aggravated by the whole character of our modern industrial system.
The factory system is a new feudalism, in which a master rarely deals directly with his hands. Superintendents, managers, and "bosses" stand between him and them. He does not know them; they do not know him. The old common feeling is disappearing. And—this is a significant pointthat it behooves workingmen to notice—the intermediaries are generally workingmen who have risen out of the ranks of manual labor and have lost all fellow-feeling with their old comrades, without gaining the larger sympathy with humanity which often comes from better culture. The hardest men upon workingmen are ex-workingmen. It is stated, on what seems to be good authority, that the general superintendent of the great corporation which lately has shown so hard a feeling towards its operatives when on a strike was himself only ten years ago a telegraph-operator.
A further aggravating feature of this problem is the increasing tendency of capital to associated action. What little knowledge of his employees or sympathy with them the individual manufacturer might have is wholly lost in the case of the corporation. To the stockholders of a great joint-stock company, many of whom are never on the spot, the hundreds of laborers employed by the company are simply "hands"—as to whose possession of hearts or minds or souls the by-laws rarely take cognizance. Here there is plainly a case where capital—the party of brains and wealth—the head of the industrial association, should lead off in a systematic effort and renew, as far as may be, the old human tie, for which no substitute has ever been devised.
To conciliate the interests of the classes, and identify labor with capital, individual employers must re-establish personal relationships between themselves and their men. What might be done in this way, and how, this being done, the present alienation of feeling on the part of our working-men would largely disappear, must be evident to any one who has watched some of the beautiful exemplifications of this relationship which have already grown into being on our shores. I know of one large manufacturer, in a city not a hundred miles from this, who started to enter the ministry as a young man, but found to his intense disappointment that he had no aptitude for the work of a preacher, and turned his attention, on the insistent advice of those nearest to him, to active business. He took up the business which his father had left him at his death and had left largely involved. His first task was to pay off, dollar for dollar, all the debts which his father had bequeathed him, although in most instances they had been compromised by his creditors. He then threw the energy of his being into development of the business, and, in the course of a few years, put it at the forefront of that line in his native city. Into his business he breathed the spirit of love to God and man which had moved him originally to take up the work of the ministry. He felt himself ordained to be what Carlyle would have called a "captain of industry." From the start he established personal, human, living relationships with his men. He taught them by deed rather than by word to consider him their friend. He was in the habitof calling in upon their families in a social and respecting way. In all their troubles and adversities he trained them to counsel with him, and gave them the advantage of his riper judgment and larger vision. In cases of exigency his means were at their service in the way of loans to tide them over the hard times. His friends have seen, more than once, coming from his private office some of the hard-fisted men of toil in his employ, with tears streaming down their faces. He had called them into the office on hearing of certain bad habits into which they had fallen, and so impressive had been his talk with them, that they left his presence with the most earnest resolves to do better in the future. The result of all this relationship has been that during some fifteen years of the management of this large business he has rarely changed his men, and while strikes have abounded around him he has never known a strike.
I hold in my possession a letter from one of our leading iron-manufacturers in this country, who, in response to an appeal for participation in a charity of this city, gave answer that it had been a practice of the firm to invest a certain portion of their profits in developing the comforts of their workingmen, and that they were obliged to limit their desire to give in charity in order that they might be able to build homes, club-rooms, reading-rooms, and all theet ceterasof a really civilized community in their work-village. These are examples, in our own country, of what might be done.
One of the most beautiful models that I know of in modern history is furnished by the town to which reference has already been made—the town of Mulhouse, where, after some thirty years, the spirit of brotherliness has so entered into the relationships of capital and labor that a firm would be disreputable which there attempted to carry on business as business is ordinarily done here. All the manufacturers plan out, organize, and carry on what to most of us would seem impossible schemes for the amelioration and uplifting of the condition of their working people. No one wonders that, as he walks through the town which his large hearted philanthropy imbued with this fine spirit, the workingmen salute the originator of these schemes as "Father Peter."
In addition to this personal, human relationship, capital might and should, in all justice and humanity, identify the pecuniary interests of labor with its own interests. What is known as industrial partnership is simply a solution of this branch of the problem. The principle is simply that of giving labor a pecuniary interest in the profits of the establishmentpro ratawith his own wages. Abonusis set on frugality and industry and conscientiousness of work by making the hands small partners in the concern. * * *