Q. These plantations? —A. Not only these plantations particularly. What I mean by alluvial lands are the alluvial lands on the coast and the alluvial lands of the Mississippi Valley, the rich lands where the negro relies on his own energy and exertion rather than on his brains. There is an immigration coming into the older States now.

Q. The older Southern States? —A. The older Southern States. As they come in the negroes gradually give way and go to the richer lands. For instance, one railroad last year brought into the Mississippi Valley over 10,000 negro immigrants.

Q. From what States? —A. From the Atlantic and Gulf States.

Q. What became of them? —A. They were scattered along the alluvial lands of the Mississippi Valley. As the negroes of the Mississippi Valley either immigrate from that valley and go in different directions and buy land, the planters of the Mississippi Valley send out to the older States and replace them with labor from those States. A negro in the older States, probably, to make his support would have to cultivate 15 or 20 acres of land, whereas a negro in the Mississippi Valley can make his support on 8 or 10 acres of land.

Q. Will this result in the ownership of the alluvial lands being transferred to the negro? —A. No, sir; because as he makes money he goes off.

Q. He is a Chinese immigrant?—A. I mean by "goes off" he does not go out of the State, but he goes to the hills.

Q. And to smaller ownerships?—A. To smaller ownerships.

Q. And the aim of the Southern planter is to accommodate this tendency of things to smaller rentings? —A. Yes, sir.

Q. Do you think a plantation is more productive where, under a general supervision by the planter or the owner, it is let out in small sections to the negroes to cultivate, or is it better to cultivate the plantation as a whole? —A. It is better to let it out, as I stated in my written answers. The cotton crop of this country is being raised to such an extent by the small white farmers that the large planter can no longer afford to hire and compete with that class of labor who only expend their own energy; consequently the tendency is to make farmers of the negroes.

Q. What chance is there of the planter securing white labor to carry on these plantations? —A. There is such a small proportion of white labor in the South that it would be difficult for him to find them, and the tide of foreign immigration is just beginning to be turned in that direction. There has been a prejudice against white emigrants going to the South, on account of going among the negroes.

Q. Do you think that is diminishing? —A. Diminishing yearly.

Q. You mean that immigration from Europe is being employed on the plantations? —A. Not exactly upon the large cotton plantations, but the smaller plantations are now being converted into farms. For instance, there has been a large immigration of European emigrants into that section of the country between Little Rock and Fort Smith.

Q. Do they, upon these farm or small plantations being converted into farms, work in companionship with the negro laborer? —A. No; they generally buy the land and work it themselves; they may hire a negro and work with him; they are laborers themselves.

Q. Is there any tendency among the white and colored laborers of any class to work in companionship, or to fraternize at all in labor? —A. I cannot say that there is. A white man would not take a negro in as a partner to work with him in the field.

Q. And will a white man find any difficulty in hiring another white man and negro to work together side by side in the field? —A. No, sir; I have them myself working side by side.

Q. There is no prejudice of that kind? —A. None at all.

Q. No white man inquires whether he can work by himself or is to work in company with a negro? Do they exhibit any reluctance to work in company with the negro? —A. The class of white people that work in our country for wages comes from Ohio, and Missouri, and Indiana, and that section of country, and I find there is some prejudice among that class of people sometimes, but still there are instances—as I say, I have men from Indiana now myself hired working right in a gang with negroes.

Q. There is no strong tendency in that way, I suppose? —A. No strong tendency in that way. There are no white laborers from the South proper; at least the number we can hire for wages is so small that it is not sufficient to call it a class.

Q. In the Southern States proper about two thirds of the population is white, is it not? —A. I do not recollect. According to the census returns I think there are about seven millions of negroes. The census would give the exact statement.

Q. Not far from two thirds of the population, I think, is white. In the Gulf States proper at least one half the population must be white. In what way is the white laboring population of the South employed? —A. They are employed as small farmers nearly almost entirely.

Q. Not to as great extent as mechanics and artisans? —A. I suppose there is a liberal proportion of them to the population; we have to have our artisans and mechanics; but as a rule the white population of the South are small farmers, either owners of the land themselves or tenants.

Q. How as to their material prosperity and thrift and saving? —A. It varies very much. For instance, take the State of Georgia—and I believe it is admitted that Georgia is one of the most thrifty and prosperous of all the Southern States—I think the small farmers are generally self-sustaining; they raise their own supplies.

Q. Do these small white farmers employ negro help to any extent? —A. To a certain extent. If a man has more land than his family can work he will hire a negro laborer. There is no prejudice against his doing so either on the part of the farmer hiring him or the negro hired.

Q. He may hire some white and other colored laborers, I suppose? —A. Yes, sir.

Q. Do they work together? —A. Yes, sir.

Q. How in regard to the value of the hill lands you have spoken of in the State of Arkansas; as compared with the alluvial, what is the difference in value? —A. It is very great. There are farms in Arkansas that can be bought, partially cleared up, and with some improvements upon them, for from $5 to $20 an acre, less than the rent of fair lands on the river. There is no finer section of country in the world—I say that unhesitatingly—for a foreign immigrant, or the immigrant from the East, or from anywhere, than is afforded to-day in Arkansas and Texas.

Q. And political disturbances are at an end? —A. We apprehend nothing at all; there is no reason why we should.

Q. You were speaking of the necessity of the education of the laborer of the South, the negro especially. Will you not describe to us the actual condition of the masses of the colored people in the matter of education, to what extent it has progressed, and what facilities and opportunities exist, and what additional are required? —A. It varies in different sections. For instance, Georgia, and Tennessee are probably ahead of any of the Southern States in point of educating the colored people; they have more facilities; they have negro primary schools and colleges where a man is educated. The education that I was speaking of, more particularly for the negro, is a plain English education, sufficient to enable him to read and write.

Q. What we call up North a common school education? —A. A common school education. I will illustrate that. Suppose a negro comes to me to make a contract that I have written for him, and he cannot read or write. I offer that contract to him, and I read it to him. He touches a pen and signs his mark to it; there is no obligation attached at all. He says at once, "That man is an educated man; he has the advantage of me; he shows me that contract; I do not know what is in it; I cannot even read it." Therefore a contract made with a negro in that way is almost a nullity; but if he could read that contract himself and sign his own name to it, it would be a very different thing. I never allow a negro to sign a written contract with me before he has taken it home with him and had some friend to read it over and consult with him about it, because I want some obligation attached to my contracts.

Q. It is necessary for you as well as the negro? —A. Necessary for my protection as well as his.

Q. How many of the negroes on the plantations can comprehend a written contract by reading it, because a man may be somewhat educated and not be able to decipher a contract? —A. I cannot give you an exact proportion, for it varies to a great extent. I can only say that that number is increasing rapidly.

Q. From what circumstances comes this increase? —A. From their desire to gain knowledge.

Q. Do you find that desire strong among the colored people? —A. Very strong indeed; and there are two ideas which a negro possesses that give me great hopes for his future. If I did not believe the negro was capable of sufficient development to make him a responsible small farmer, I should not want to remain in the business that I am any longer, because I believe that the development of my business is necessarily based upon the development of the negro and the cultivation of my lands. The negro possesses two remarkable qualifications: one is that he is imitative, and the other is that he has got pride; he wants to dress well; he wants to do as well as anybody else does when you get him aroused, and with these two qualifications I have very great hopes for him in the future.

Q. What do you think of his intellectual and moral qualities and his capacity for development? —A. There are individual instances I know of where negroes have received and taken a good education. As a class, it would probably be several generations, at any rate, before they would be able to compete with the Caucasian. I believe that the negro is capable of receiving an ordinary English education, and there are instances where they enter professions and become good lawyers. For instance, I know in the town of Greenville, Miss., right across the river from me, a negro attorney, who is a very intelligent man, and I heard one of the leading attorneys in Greenville say he would almost have anybody on the opposite side of a case rather than he would that negro. The sheriff of my county is from Ohio, and a negro, he is a man whom we all support in his office. We are anxious that the negroes should have a fair representation. For instance, you ask for the feeling existing between the proprietor and the negroes. The probate judge of my county is a negro and one of my tenants, and I am here now in New York attending to important business for my county as an appointee of that man. He has upon him the responsibilities of all estates in the county; he is probate judge.

Q. Is he a capable man? —A. A very capable man, and an excellent, good man, and a very just one.

Q. Do you see any reason why, with fair opportunities assured to himself and to his children, he may not become a useful and competent, American citizen? —A. We already consider him so.

Q. The question is settled? —A. I thought you were speaking personally of the man I referred to.

Q. No; I was speaking of the negro generally—the negro race. —A. Let me understand your question exactly.

Q. Do you see any reason why the negroes, as a component part of the American population, may not, with a fair chance, come to be useful, industrious, and competent to the discharge of the duties of citizenship? —A. I think they may as a class, but it will take probably generations for them to arrive at that standard.

Q. It has taken us generations to arrive at the standard, has it not? —A. Yes, sir.

Q. There is some talk about our ancestors having been pirates, I believe. Now, will you state to us what the existing facilities for education are among the negroes? —A. I can only speak as regards Arkansas. Of course I do not know much of the other States. In Arkansas we have in each county a school board. These boards examine and employ teachers. We are taxed for a school fund, from which these teachers are paid.

Q. What proportion of the colored children attend school, do you think? —A. On my own property there are five schools, and I think the larger portion, I might say nearly all that are capable of going to school, do go to school.

Q. How many children are there on your own property? —A. I could scarcely form an idea.

Q. There are five schools? —A. There are five schools, and I should suppose from 300 to 500 children.

Q. Those are educated in public schools? —A. Yes, sir.

Q. I understand you to say that nearly all of them attend? —A. Yes, sir.

Q. For how long a time each year is school kept open? —A. The schools extend all the year except vacation, I think, which is about three months; but a number of the negroes will withdraw their children from school during cotton-picking season, to help them pick the crop.

Q. Between what ages do they actually attend school? —A. From 6 to 19. I know a great many of them who are going to school who are 17, 18, and 19, who can just begin to read and write a little.

Q. Do you find any inclination among the older negroes who are past school age to endeavor to read and write? —A. Not very much, but they are anxious their children should, and appeal to them. In almost every instance where a man has a child who can read and write, he will bring him along with him when he makes a contract. They are very proud of their children being able to read and write.

Q. Are they satisfied, as a rule, with their simply becoming able to read and write, or do they like to have them make a little further progress in mathematics, geography, &c.? —A. As a class they look to them simply to read and write. They think when they have got that far they know everything; but then there are certain ones who have ambition, just as it is with our own race. There are some men who have tastes for literature, and receive a better education than others do, but it is not the same proportion of the negro race of course that it is with our own. There are instances where negroes are also anxious to obtain a collegiate education, and become school teachers.

Q. I do not know that you are able to state to what extent they actually attend school in the hill districts? —A. I am not.

Q. You speak both of your own plantation and of other plantations as well as your own in that regard? —A. I am speaking of the alluvial lands along the Mississippi River.

Q. In Arkansas? —A. Not only in Arkansas, but in Louisiana and Mississippi; I will say the alluvial lands on the Mississippi River between Memphis and Vicksburg.

Q. Are the negroes on those lands generally having the same opportunities for education that they do on your plantation? —A. Oh, yes, sir; there is a common school system.

Q. And it is as prevalent in Louisiana and Mississippi as in Arkansas? —A. I think it is.

Q. What is the nativity of those teachers, as a rule? —A. They are generally colored people from either the East or the Northwest. There are some white teachers, but very few.

Q. Are any of the white teachers Southern in birth? —A. There is not a white teacher on my own property; they are all colored teachers on my own property. The proportion of white teachers is very small.

Q. How much do these colored teachers themselves know? —A. Some of them are remarkably well educated.

Q. And generally earnestly devoted to their work? —A. Perfectly so.

Q. Or is it simply to get their money? —A. No; I think some of them really have a desire to see their scholars advance.

Q. Some pride in their race, to have them get on, I suppose? —A. I think there is a certain pride in that respect; and, again, they want to gain a reputation as teachers.

Q. What compensation does a teacher get? —A. I think about from $50 to $100 a month.

Q. Do they pay their own expenses, board and shelter? —A. Yes, sir; but board is cheap, merely nominal.

Q. About what amount? —A. I should say these teachers can get board for $10 a month.

Q. Is the cost of clothing in your part of the country about the same as here? —A. This is our market.

Q. You buy the ready-made clothing largely for the population in general, I suppose? —A. We buy both ready-made clothing and cloth to make up.

Q. I suppose the colored population hardly buy custom goods? —A. A great many of them buy the cloth, and some of their women are as good tailoresses as you would find anywhere. They buy the cloth and make it up themselves.

Q. That must bring a suit of clothes pretty cheap in a colored family; they really expend nothing but buy the cloth themselves? —A. They sell very good jeans cloth there at 35 or 40 cents a yard; they generally wear jeans.

Q. All seasons of the year? —A. Generally in all seasons of the year. In the summer time a laboring man hardly ever wears a coat at all.

Q. What do you think an average colored Southern laborer expends per annum for his clothing, say the head of the family, the man—what does it cost him for clothing a year? —A. I cannot give you a definite answer. I will only say that we who are the producers of cotton are very glad to see them get in a prosperous condition in order that there may be more consumption, and when a man is prosperous he will buy two suits of clothes, where if he is not prosperous he will make one do.

Q. We have had a good deal of testimony as to what it actually costs a Northern laborer a year for clothing. I have no desire to show that any laborers dress cheaply or poorly; I merely want to get an idea of the relative cost of the laboring man living North or South, in the item of clothing? —A. I can sell and do sell a man a pair of jeans pants and a coat from $7 to $12 per suit.

Q. How many suits will he want in a year? —A. That will depend on his condition and his ability to pay me. If he is a prosperous man and beginning to accumulate he will make one do. Whenever a negro begins to accumulate he goes to extremes; he does not want to buy anything; he wants to accumulate rapidly. Where a man is not doing so well, and there is little doubt of his ability to pay, he would probably want several suits; but I would confine him to one or two.

Q. The same is true, I suppose, of his wife and children? —A. Yes, sir.

Q. But you look on the matter of clothing as a much less expensive item in the laborer's account in your country than here in the North where the climate is colder, I suppose? —A. Yes, sir. What absorbs the profit of the laborers with us is their want of providence; that is, if they get surplus money they throw it away for useless articles.

Q. It has been suggested that a postal savings bank might be a good thing as a place of deposit of the savings of the colored population of the South; they might feel some confidence in an institution of that kind, and that it would be a beneficial thing to them. What is your own judgment? —A. I advocate it and approve it, and indeed propose to start a savings bank in our own neighborhood. In this connection I will mention another important feature. In the Mississippi Valley—and when I speak of the Mississippi Valley I mean both sides of the river, Arkansas and Louisiana on one side and Mississippi on the other—there are numbers of negroes who have considerable accumulations and use their surplus to advance to other negroes. For instance, there are negroes right on our property who have accumulated enough to help out certain others, as they express it, and they use their money as an investment in that way. For instance one negro who has got something will advance it to another negro and take a mortgage on his crop. Consequently there are numbers of them who are getting advances from their co-laborers, and I always give them that opportunity when they want it. My idea of the adjustment in the Mississippi Valley, seeing what I can make from the mercantile portion of my business, is that it is simply my revenue that I get from the rent of my land as an investment on my capital; and whenever a negro can get his own merchant in New Orleans—a number of them have very good factors in New Orleans and ship their cotton direct—I encourage it. When one negro wants to help out another, I give him the privilege of doing it and encourage it. There are several negroes, a great many, not a few in Chicot County to-day who have their own factors in New Orleans, ship their own goods, and receive their own accounts of sales.

Q. They are not owners of alluvial lands? —A. They are not owners at all; they are tenants.

Q. I suppose some time they will be liable to make some accumulations, and they will now and then own a plantation? —A. I do know of one instance on the river below Vicksburg where the old property of Mr. Davis was bought by a former slave of his.

Q. Is that the only instance? —A. The only instance I know of.

Q. One question we have been accustomed to put is as to the actual personal feeling that exists between the laborers and capitalists of different parts of the country. What is the feeling between the laborers, colored and white, and the owners of the land and of capital at the South? —A. I confine my replies to my own section, because I am not familiar with the others. I have answered that question in the written answers. The feeling is harmonious and good, as I have expressed it there. The negro naturally looks to the planter for advice and for assistance, and the planter looks to his laborers for the development of his property. Consequently their interests are identical and their feelings good.

Q. You have alluded once or twice to the pressure of outside, and I suppose Northern, opinion; I assume that you mean political opinion in the past and the desirability that it should cease. What is the fact as to a progressive disintegration of the solid Republican or solid negro vote of the South? What are the chances of its dividing, and of the white vote dividing? We hear now of a "solid South," colored on the one side and white on the other. What prospect is there of a division in that regard; to what extent does it exist, or is it going on? —A. The negroes of the South are already divided in their votes. There are a great many who vote with the proprietors of the properties. There are instances where they vote with what they call their Republican friends. A few years ago in the South any man who was an escaped convict from one of your penitentiaries here who would come down to that country and tell the negroes that he was one of General Grant's soldiers, and fought to free him, would vote the last one out; but any of those negroes would come to me at that very time with his money and get me to save it for him, and take care of it for him. He would put all his confidence in me so far as his money was concerned, but when it would come to politics he would vote with this man, who probably did not own the coat he had on his back. Those kind of inferences were what did do us in the South very material damage. Let me illustrate that by a riot in my own county. In Chicot County, in 1872, there was a proposition to impose upon the county a railroad tax of $250,000 for the purpose of building a railroad.

Q. What proportion of the taxable property of the county would that have been? —A. Our whole assessed valuation was about $1,500,000 at that time. This was brought out by a promise that if the appropriation was made, the levees on our river should be built and this road would run on the levees. At that time the whole of the local government in Chicot County was in the hands of men who did not own any property in the county, and had just come down there and been elected by the negroes, who have a very large majority in that county. This tax was a very great imposition upon us. At that time there was a negro attorney at Lake Village, who was one of the prime movers in this thing. The planters knew that this was only intended as a speculation upon the county, for the vote was afterwards taken, the appropriation was made, and not one foot of levee was put up, and not one foot of that railroad was built in Chicot County. Still we are mandamused now for the interest on that debt that was put on us by that kind of influence. One of our planters was remonstrating with this negro attorney about this debt and told him it was an imposition on the property owners, and that the thing ought not to be done, when the man became violent and insolent, and it resulted in a difficulty between this planter and the negro. The planter had a little pen-knife in his pocket, the blade not longer than my little finger; he struck the negro with it and it happened accidentally to hit him on a vital point and killed him. The sheriff of the county was a negro. The planter, with two innocent parties in whose house this occurrence took place at the county-seat, in Lake Village, was arrested and lodged in jail. A few days afterwards—probably not more than two or three—nearly every negro in the county was summoned to Lake Village, and they rose like so many locusts, coming in from every direction, took those three men out of jail shot them to pieces, murdered them. It was such an outrage that the people from Memphis and Vicksburg and from the hill countries, commenced to come in there with companies, started down with companies. On investigation we found out that the sheriff of the county had exercised his authority to send out to the ignorant negroes of the county and summon them to the village, and these fellows went because they were afraid not to obey the mandate of the sheriff. At that time feeling was running very high, and these people were anxious to come in and quell this riot, but a few of us who were more prudent, a few of the leading planters of the county, got together, sent these different companies word not to come there, that we did not want them in the county; some of the companies were already on their way to Chicot County, thinking the people there were going to be massacred. A great many of our people had to run away from their homes for several days; but we took the ground that we would let the thing take its natural course. As soon as things quieted down, which they did so partially in three or four days, some of our gentlemen who had gone off with their families returned, and it resulted in our arresting a few of the ringleaders in the county. The courts and the administration were all at that time in the hands of persons not identified with the interests of the county, and it was impossible for us to get justice meted out. We saved a massacre of the negroes of the county, but we never could bring those men to any kind of punishment before the courts, and finally we came to a compromise with them, that if they would leave the county we would withdraw the suit against them, and that was the way the thing was ended. Now, I do not believe you could get up a riot in Chicot County because I think there are many intelligent negroes there who would not permit it. Those are the kind of race issues that I referred to. Relieve us of that sort of thing, and leave our government to ourselves and our people, and give to the negro the same protection the white man has, but do not give him any more. Do not let him feel that he has the United States Government standing behind him, and that he is the child of the United States Government to be taken care of, but that he must rely on his own resources and energy for his living, and time will solve the question, and the demand for his labor will protect him.

Q. Do you find that the feeling among the negroes which resulted in the exodus of a few years ago has been allayed and perhaps has disappeared? —A. I will tell you something that is rather amusing about that. The first that I heard of a negro exodus in my section of the country—it was to Kansas—was my manager coming into my room one morning and saying that the negroes were going out to the river to go to Kansas. I said, "It is several miles to the river; how are they going?" Said he, "They are toting their things out on their heads." Said I, "Go right at once there and offer them the wagons on the plantation to haul the things. What is the matter?" Said he, "I don't know; I went out this morning and summoned the hands to the field, but they say they are all going to Kansas." I got on my horse and rode out and met a negro who had been my engineer. I said to him, "What is the matter, where are you all going?" He stopped right on the road and said, "Mr. Calhoun, you never have deceived me, and I am going to tell you what is the matter. There were two men came through here last week, one night, and said 'You see this picture?' There is a picture of a farm in Kansas for me that General Grant has bought out there for me. That is so because my name is on the back of it, and here is my ticket; that carries me to Kansas." Said I, "Let me see it." He showed me a piece of pasteboard that had printed on it "Good for one trip to Kansas." Said I, "What did you pay him for this?" He said, "We paid him $2 a piece." "How many of you are in this thing?" "Over eighty of us are in this thing." Said I, "That man then swindled you out of $160; he is an imposter; there is no farm bought for you in Kansas." I saw that the time for me to remonstrate with them was not then; they were on their way to the Mississippi River, and I let them all go. After they got out there I went and expostulated with them; told them of the difference in climate, soil, and everything else that they were accustomed to, and that if they went there many of them would lose their families and children. They would not listen to me. They went on to the river bank, and those negroes who went out there owed me over $109,000.

Q. How many of them were there? Eighty I think you said? —A. There were 80, I think. Once, I suppose, there were 150 negroes, perhaps more, on the bank of the river. They were not at a regular landing. They went out to the intermediate points where a boat would not be compelled to land. We notified all the boats coming up the river not to land at this point. I did not want these negroes to go off, being satisfied that they were going to their ruin if they did; that they were leaving comfortable homes; many of them had sold their mules or given them away at a mere sacrifice. One negro sold a mule worth $150 for $15 to get off. They opened their potato-houses, they opened their corn-cribs and scattered the corn, giving it away to everybody that would offer them five cents a bushel. I had given two of these people a piece of land, the productions of all of which they were to have for bringing it into cultivation and improving it. Knowing the negro nature as I do, and knowing that he would not want anybody to derive the benefit of something that he thought he was entitled to, I got two white men in the county to come and offer me to take this piece of land and cultivate it on shares with me, giving me one half its product, whereas with them I was entitled to nothing. As soon as those two fellows found out that I had made a good bargain for their land they went back home from the river bank, and as soon as they went back all the rest followed. Then I called the whole plantation up and told them to appoint two representatives and that I would send them to Kansas at my own expense to examine into this matter and report to them. These two men went to Kansas, came back, and reported the true condition of affairs; and now if what they call in that country "a poor white man"—the negro's expression—goes through the country and says "Kansas," they almost want to mob him. That was the result of the Kansas movement.

Q. What has become of those who went to Kansas? —A. Many of them have returned and many have died; numbers of them have died. Quite a large number went to Washington County Mississippi, just opposite me.

Q. From time to time, at Washington, efforts are being made to secure public lands in the Territories, the Indian Territory and elsewhere, for the purpose of colonizing such tracts with negroes. Do you think there is any sort of occasion for that? —A. None in the world. If the alluvial lands on the Mississippi River were protected from overflow and brought into a condition where they could be cultivated they would afford all the homes, and of the best character, that the negroes could possibly want in the South, and the natural tendency is to come to just such lands.

Q. And the negroes prefer to be there to anywhere else? —A. Those that come, I notice, never go back.

Q. You suggested the improvement of the levees. What is the necessity, and in what degree is it difficult for those residing along the river banks to protect themselves? —A. I am the president of the levee board of Chicot County. The plan which has been suggested by the Mississippi River Commission and Mr. Eads, as their chief engineer, is unquestionably the correct one for the improvement of the Mississippi River. We know this not only from theory, but from long experience with the river, those of us who have lived there. The Mississippi River being, as it is generally termed, the "Father of Waters," and passing through several States, it is almost a national system, and it would be impossible for any system to be adopted by the States which would be local. Consequently it is imperatively the duty of the Government of the United States to take care of the improvement of the Mississippi River. There are certain sections of the Mississippi River that are naturally above overflow, made so by cut-offs. The fall of the Mississippi River is about four inches to the mile. Consequently, when there is one of those large bends, where the river runs around where the cut-off is, no increase of water is needed. The fall being four inches to the mile, the lands just above the cut-off are made higher and above overflow, whereas just below, the lands are overflowed or become liable to overflow. The improvement of the Mississippi River itself for commercial purposes, as well as the protection of the lands, is dependent upon the building of the levees, for the levees of course confine the water within its banks, and give not only a greater volumn of water, but greater velocity for scouring purposes, which scours out the sand bars that are formed continually on the river. Captain Eads's plan of forming jetties where the banks cave, saves this deposit, as it were, in the water, which makes the sand bars. A mattress is put against the caving banks which prevents the alluvial land caving into the river which forms the sand bars below. Then the increased volumn and increased velocity of the water wash out the channel, and improve it for commercial purposes, answering the object of protecting the land, and at the same time opening that immense channel for commerce.

Again, there are very important lines of railroad that are being built up and down either bank of the Mississippi River, and it is necessary they should be protected for commercial purposes, as well as that the Mississippi River should be improved for commercial purposes, and they can only be protected by the building of levees. We who have been on the river, and who feel that we are familiar with it, have closely watched the course of the Commission, and I can only say, as an expression of the opinion of the people, that we indorse what the Commission are doing.

Q. And desire still more of it? —A. Yes, sir; it is absolutely necessary. What has already been expended by the Government would be absolutely useless unless additional appropriations are made to complete the work. I would like to call your attention to this point. The Atchafalaya, in Louisiana, is a stream which runs from just about the mouth of Red River into the Gulf of Mexico. The fall from the mouth of the Atchafalaya and Red River to the Gulf of Mexico is very much greater than the fall from the mouth of Red River to the Gulf by way of New Orleans down the Mississippi River. A few years ago the Atchafalaya was a stream which could be waded across, but owing to the current gradually going through it, it commenced to wash out until now it has got to be a stream 100 feet deep.

Q. Is there or not any perceptible increase or diminution of the column of the Mississippi itself as compared with 25, or 50, or 100 years ago? —A. We think that our waters are higher now than they have ever been before.

Q. Greater extremes, or is there a uniform flow? —A. A larger uniform flow, and it is attributed to the destruction of the forests, though that is mere theory. One of the arguments, at any rate, is that it is owing to the destruction of the forests in the Northwest, which causes more rain storms and gives a larger rainfall.

Q. I have heard the idea advanced that the destruction of the woods and timber about the headwaters would, in case of rain, lead to a more rapid deposit in the stream, it would not be held back by the swampy nature of the soil, and so you might have more sudden rises and falls in the river than formerly without the volume of water or the uniform flow being increased or lessened? —A. I think—at least I have heard it so expressed by men experienced on the river—that the flow of the Mississippi River is greater now than it was formerly.

Q. That one year with another, more water runs down the channel? —A. We can see a slight increase of the water of the Mississippi River. I do not know how it may increase in the future, or if it will at all, but that is the opinion of people there now. The point I want to call your attention to specifically is the necessity for the prevention of the water of the Red River going down through the Atchafalaya, for if the Atchafalaya washes out it leaves New Orleans, a large commercial city, upon, as it were, an inland sea. The waters which overflow from the banks of the Mississippi River on the front of Arkansas go over into the Red River and never come back into the Mississippi River any more until they come out at the mouth of the Red River. Just at the mouth of Red River, and before Red River reaches the Mississippi, is the Atchafalaya. So that all of this overflow water that could be kept in the Mississippi River by building the levees on the front of Arkansas, now goes into Red River and helps to wash out the Atchafalaya, which will ruin the city of New Orleans if that is not prevented. It is a very strong commercial point, for the commerce of New Orleans is a matter to be considered in our affairs.

Q. I suppose there is no doubt that the Atchafalaya furnishes an outlet, which relieves your plantations very much? —A. No, sir; it does not affect where I live at all.

Q. Below the Red River, in Louisiana, is it not a relief in case of an overflow? —A. A partial relief; but in Louisiana, when you get down that far, they pretty much have their system of levees built, which protect the sugar district; there are only probably a few gaps; and the Mississippi River, when it gets that far down, does not rise in the same proportion that it does where I live, 500 miles above. The mouth of the Atchafalaya is 500 miles below where I am.

Q. Has this increased drainage from the Atchafalaya resulted in any injury to the navigation of the river as far north? —A. Not as yet; but if it is not stopped—the commission realize the fact I am now telling you—if it is not checked, the whole Mississippi River will naturally turn through the Atchafalaya, because the fall is so much greater.

Q. How do they propose to check it? —A. That is a matter the commission and scientific engineers would have to decide.

Q. Can they block it at the outlet of the Red River? —A. They propose to check it principally by stopping the water from the Mississippi River that goes into the Red River. There would in that way be an enormous quantity of water kept out of Red River. That would be one method. What the engineers would consider sufficient or necessary to be done, of course I would not venture to express an opinion upon.

Q. What danger is there to the large mass of capital invested in these alluvial lands, unless something is done to prevent the overflows of which you speak? —A. The lands that are now liable to overflow are almost entirely abandoned.

Q. To how large an extent are they now abandoned? —A. Taking in the whole of Mississippi Valley proper, from Memphis down.

Q. Has there been any computation or reasonable estimate that you know of the value of those lands affected by the overflow? —A. I have never heard of it; but I will say that those lands which are liable to overflow now, if brought into cultivation, are just as valuable as any we are cultivating; probably more so, because they have the alluvial deposits upon them. There is a deposit there from 3 to 4 inches.

Q. You have no idea of the extent of those lands? —A. I cannot give you the proportion. I will simply say it is a very large proportion.

Q. A third, or a half, or a quarter? —A. More than a half. I saw it estimated some time ago, at least I will give it as a statement published in the Planters' Journal, published in Vicksburgh, that there are thirteen counties on the Mississippi River which, if all cleared up and put into cultivation, are capable of producing the entire cotton crop of the United States, and I have heard the question discussed.

Q. What prevents their being cleared up and put into cultivation? —A. Simply the overflow.

Q. Have they ever been cleared as yet? —A. A great portion of them; and now destroyed because the levee system is not complete. On these lands all the negro labor which is not found profitable on the poorer lands in the older States, could be made extremely profitable, not only to the proprietors of the lands, but to the laborers themselves.

Q. Do you think it would be within limit to say that one half of the alluvial plantation lands, such as you have described in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, is now practically destroyed by reason of this overflow occasioned by the destruction of the levee system? —A. Yes, sir.

Q. At least one half? —A. At least one half of that which has been in cultivation, and which can be brought into cultivation.

Q. Of that which is thus useless now, what portion has been formerly under cultivation? —A. It would be impossible for any one to form an estimate, because it is so varied.

Q. The amount of land that has been improved and which is now destroyed by reason of the overflow, you cannot state? —A. I cannot state it accurately; I will state it approximately; I should say at least one third.

Q. One third of the entire amount that has been improved is now destroyed by reason of the overflow, resulting from imperfections in the levee system? —A. Yes, sir; that is what I mean to say.

Q. And of that which has not been improved but might be improved, how much? —A. At least half.

* * * * *

As I have devoted some space to the general condition of labor in the whole country, and as some of my statements and conclusions may be looked upon as extravagant, I deem it very pertinent to add to the appendix a portion of the testimony of Dr. R. Heber Newton, given before Senator Blair's Committee on the "Relations between Capital and Labor," in New York City, September 18, 1883 (Vol. II., p. 535). Dr. Newton is recognized as a clear thinker and a ready writer not only on theological but on economic questions as well. His testimony on the points to which I have asked attention was as follows:

A LABOR QUESTION COMING

The broad fact that the United States census of 1870 estimated the average annual income of our wage-workers at a little over $400 per capita, and that the census of 1880 estimates it at a little over $300 per capita, is the quite sufficient evidence that there is a labor question coming upon us in this country. The average wages of 1870 indicated, after due allowance for the inclusion of women and children, a 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-world proletariat is 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 of laborers, can such labor be well off, and incompetence and indifference draw high wages?

3. Our labor is for the most part very thriftless. In the purchase and in the preparation of food—the chief item of expense in the workingman's family and that wherein economic habits count for most—men and women are alike improvident. The art of making money go the farthest in food is comparatively unknown. Workingmen will turn up their noses at the fare on which a Carlyle did some of the finest literary work of our century. I remember some time ago speaking to one of our butchers, who told me that workingmen largely ordered some of his best cuts. Now an ample supply of nutritious food is certainly essential for good work, whether of the brain or of the brawn. The advance of labor is rightly gauged, among other ways, by its increasing consumption of wheat and meat, but the nutritiousness of meat is not necessarily dependent upon its being from the finest cut. I should like to see all men eating "French" chops and porter-house steaks if they could afford it; but when I know the average wages of our workingmen and the cost of living on the simplest possible scale, it is discouraging to learn such a fact as that which I have mentioned, since all the elements of necessary sustenance can be had in so much cheaper forms. * * *

4. Labor must fault itself further, on the ground of its lack of power of combination and of its defective methods in combination. It has been by combination that the middle 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 Century for October, 1882) and by Mr. Harrison (The Contemporary Review for October, 1883). Doubtless they have committed plenty of follies, and are still capable of stupid tyrannies that only succeed in handicapping labor, in alienating capital, and in checking productivity—that is, in lessening the sum total of divisible wealth. Such actions are inevitable in the early stages of combination on the part of uneducated men, feeling a new sense of power, and striking blindly out in angry retaliation for real or fancied injuries.

Trades-unions are gradually, however, outgrowing their crude methods. The attempts, such as we have seen lately, of great corporations to break them up, is a piece of despotism which ought to receive an indignant rebuke from the people at large. Labor must combine, just as capital has combined, in forming these very corporations. Labor's only way of defending its interests as a 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-operative stores; plans for wholesale agencies being even discussed. A few of these earlier stores still live. Two great national orders have arisen, seeking to build up co-operative stores, among other aims.

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 history of 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 direction is 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 going doctrinaire will 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 faults spring 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 likely their parents 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 Glasgow to 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, already alluded 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 he makes nothing. 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, the machino-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 hands out of the working hours, and in ways that would give them a new interest in their 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 the average workingman under the average employer? 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 profits versus wages 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 which might makes right, 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 point that 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 habit of 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 the et ceteras of 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 establishment pro rata with his own wages. A bonus is set on frugality and industry and conscientiousness of work by making the hands small partners in the concern. * * *

THE END