Belford's Magazine, Vol 2, December 1888

Perhaps the infinite beauty of protection is best illustrated by a comparison of the work secured by blacksmiths with that of rolling-mill employés. Of blacksmiths, 82.25 per cent had steady work for the entire year, while only 17.75 per cent were idle 4.41 months. Of rolling-mill employés, as stated above, 66.40 per cent were idle 4.04 months, and of nail-makers 73.49 per cent were idle 3.86 months.

The manufacturing industries of Massachusetts furnish 69.14 per cent of the idleness of the State; i.e., of the 241,589 unemployed, 167,041 depend upon the manufacturers for work and sustenance. On the other hand, agriculture furnishes but 6.28 per cent, transportation 2.91 per cent, personal service but 1.72 per cent, and the day laborers but 8.43 per cent.

Fall River, with a total laboring population of 26,220, found steady employment for but 11,437, or 43.62 per cent, while 14,783, or 56.38 per cent of her population, were seeking work 3.49 months in the year. The result of it all is that one third of the persons engaged in remunerative employment in Massachusetts were unemployed for more than one third of the time.

It is significant that 129,272, or 53.51 per cent, of the total number of unemployed were found in twenty-three cities of the State, while 325 towns furnished 46.49 per cent.

It is often claimed that labor disturbances, strikes, and lock-outs are responsible for most of the idleness in manufacturing industries. The report under review goes into this question, and as a result ascertains that in the manufacturing industries "an average suspension of one-fifth of a month (0.20) was caused by repairs, improvements, etc. An average suspension of one-fiftieth of a month (0.02) was caused by strikes and lock-outs," while the balance was due to "slack trade." Just how much of the loss of time was due to combinations and trusts "restricting production, so as to control prices," does not appear; but when it is shown that in an average idleness of 4.11 months per year, strikes are responsible for but an average of one fiftieth of one month, or but little over one-half day, it is time for "statesmen" to abandon their stock argument of "strikes and strikers," and look about for some of the real causes of present conditions.

It is possible to only partially supplement this investigation in Massachusetts by similar investigations in other States.

In 1886 the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics, in an investigation of trade and labor organizations, covered the question of the number of weeks' work secured during the year. The following analysis of that report refers only to the membership of labor organizations in the State which reported upon that question, or 85,392 workingmen. For these the average was 37.1 weeks work and 14.9 weeks idleness during the year. Only one-fifth found steady work for the year; about one-third could get work but one-half the time; while, to quote from the report, "the industrial people, as a class, secure work for only 71.7 per cent of full time, and spend 28.3 per cent of their time in idleness, for want of work to do." (Illinois Report for 1886, page 319.) The coal-miners of the State secure work for but 23 weeks in the year. The occupations securing the greatest percentage of employment are those most removed from the protecting influences of that Congressional bill of fare called tariff. Thus the barbers, horseshoers, printers and pressmen, street-railway employés and railroad men, report nearly full time; iron-moulders and rolling-mill men, 35 weeks per year; while other metal-workers report 30 weeks of work and 20 weeks of want of work.

In commenting upon the tables given, Colonel John S. Lord, the able secretary of the Bureau, says: "Whatever value may be attached to the ultimate percentage of time lost, as deduced from all classes, the specific facts remain as to a great number of men and occupations. No interpretation of these facts can obscure the important fact that out of 85,329 workingmen, organized to promote their material interests, and presumably able to secure a greater share of them than the unorganized, only about one-fifth of them can obtain continuous work for a full year of working time. As the last table shows, those who get less than 40 weeks work are 65 per cent of the whole; and those who get only from 13 to 30 weeks' wages in the year are 35 per cent of the whole, or 30,451 in number." (Page 320.)

Another and not less important feature of the Illinois report is that it shows the number of members of labor organizations out of work at the time of the investigation – June and July, 1886.

The question of the number of weeks' work secured during the year might be sometimes loosely answered by the secretaries of labor unions; but as to the number at that time unemployed the answers would be almost as accurate as a census enumeration. The 634 labor organizations of Illinois had an enrolled membership in June, 1886, of 114,365. It was found that 17 per cent of these belonged to both the Knights of Labor and to a trade union, and had hence been duplicated. Deducting these, it was found that 103,843 persons were members of these bodies. Of these, 88,223, or 85 per cent, were employed, while 15,620, or 15 per cent, were idle. Applying this percentage to the entire number of persons engaged in the industries in which organizations were found, basing that number on the census of 1880, there must have been in the three grand divisions of industry – manufacturing, mining, and transportation – at least 50,000 men unemployed in Illinois in June, 1886. If that percentage could be applied to all occupations, this number would be swelled to 150,000. The Illinois Bureau found 15 per cent of all those engaged in manufacturing and mining industries idle in 1886.

Massachusetts finds the equivalent of 11 per cent of all her industrial population idle during the year 1885, and finds 69 per cent of this idleness in protected manufacturing industries.

So far as I can see, the result of the Illinois investigation strengthens and verifies that of Massachusetts, both resulting in the conclusion that for 1885 and 1886 the equivalent of at least 11 per cent of our industrial population was out of work. The Iowa Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1887 threw out the "raw material" of a report that would, if digested and tabulated, strengthen this position. Unfortunately, the report as printed is but the reproduction of individual returns, and the work of getting an average is too great for the time at command.

A brief computation, however, on the figures presented shows that, in a total of 1989 reports to that Bureau from workingmen in all industries, trades, and occupations, there was an average loss of time of 80 days per man per year; or, counting 300 working days per year, 26 per cent of the time of the workingmen of Iowa is unemployed.

After this survey of the field from the reports of three States, we turn to the report of the United States Bureau, at Washington, for 1885 (pages 65 and 66).

That report, from information gained by its agents and other sources of information at its hand, estimates that 7-1/2 per cent of the 255,000 manufacturing establishments of the country were absolutely idle during the year ending July 1, 1885, and that 168,750 factory hands were thus rendered idle. By applying the 7-1/2 per cent to all industries, that bureau stated that there "might be" 1,304,407 men out of employment that year, but again readjusts its estimate as being too large, and gives the number as 998,839. That same year 11 per cent of all the people engaged in all gainful pursuits in Massachusetts were idle; the next year 15 per cent of all those engaged in the three principal industries aside from agriculture were idle in Illinois. In Iowa, 26 per cent of the time of workingmen in all industries is spent in hunting work; and how, from this state of facts, the Federal Bureau could get at a 7-1/2 per cent estimate it is difficult to see. Massachusetts finds 29 per cent of her people idle one-third of the time, or 11 per cent all the time. If it is said that this percentage would be reduced in agricultural States, Iowa proves it to be not quite true, and at least the reduction would be slight. Allowing 4 per cent less of idleness for Western States than for Massachusetts is shown to be error by the reports of Illinois and Iowa. The first estimate of the Federal Bureau, 1,304,407, was not too high, but rather too low at that time. Applying the Massachusetts percentage to the entire country at that time, there must have been 1,913,130 persons out of work; and it should be remembered, too, that this is using as a base the number reported in the census of 1880, without allowing for the increase. Colonel Wright gives in his Massachusetts report for 1885, 816,470 persons engaged in all industries; the census of 1880 gives that State 720,774, showing an increase of 95,696, or a gain of over 13 per cent. Applying the Massachusetts gain to the entire class of productive industries, we find 19,753,071 as the number to which this percentage should be applied, instead of the Census number of 17,392,099.

I think no fair estimate of the number of unemployed in 1885 could be much under 1,900,000, and I believe no fair estimate of the present number of idle persons wishing employment and unable to find it, can be placed lower than 1,500,000. At least 6,000,000 of persons ordinarily employed are in enforced idleness from two to five months in the year, and thus forced to consume, while seeking work, the little it was possible to save during their six or eight months of employment.

It is not the purpose of this paper to consider the causes for this tremendous aggregate of enforced idleness. Doubtless much of it is due to the frantic attempts of combinations to control prices by limiting production. Protected by laws of Congress from competition with the industries of other nations, under the guise of "protection to American labor," the combined steel industries of the country pay the Vulcan Steel Works of St. Louis $400,000 to stand idle, thus throwing its workmen out of employ! The Waverly Stone Ring pays quarries thousands of dollars – in one instance, $4500 per year – to do nothing. The salt works along the Kanawha were bought up by the American Salt Manufacturers' Association, and have never employed a man since. Thus is American labor protected! The Standard Oil Company buys up competitors and dismantles their works. The tack manufacturers buy out a refractory fellow who would not join the pool, and not a wheel has turned since. The Western Lead and Shot Association buys the shot-tower at Dubuque, Iowa, to keep men from working there. A leading politician and prominent officeholder of Illinois goes to Washington to prevent the tariff reduction on jute bagging proposed by the Mills bill, and pleads manfully for the poor American workingman, though his own bagging mill has been idle for three years, while he draws a dividend from the pool for "limiting production," greater than he could realize by running his works. It doth not yet appear that his idle workmen have shared in the profits he derives from their idleness.

Sloan and Company stop as many coal-mines as is necessary to prevent the output from exceeding the limit agreed upon at the "annual meeting" of the combination. So with the coke-ovens.

The Joliet Steel Mills suspended "indefinitely" upon the publication of Cleveland's message to Congress, because "we can just as well as not, and we wish to impress upon our workmen the necessity of maintaining the tariff." Very timid is capital, and very shy when it uses its power to starve a thousand men into voting for its interest and against their own!

That very much of this idleness is caused by these attempts on the part of protected industries to limit the production of commodities at home, is probably true. That voluntary immigration into a country already cursed with a large idle population is the cause of much of it is probably also true; but not to so great an extent as the imported contract foreign labor. Voluntary immigrants usually come intending to go far west and take up land. They come with intelligent purposes, and intelligently carry them out. The imported laborers are of a very different type.

A Pennsylvania newspaper states: "There were six hundred and forty Bulgarians just from Europe, by way of Castle Garden, marched to the mouth of a coal-shaft at Johnstown yesterday and halted at the entrance like soldiers. On the opposite side of a close board fence six hundred and forty of the old miners marched out and were discharged. The new men, great, burly, blank-faced fellows, then marched into the dark hole and took up the task laid down by the malcontents. We doubt if one of the 'new arrivals' knew a word of English, or how much they were to receive for their labor. What grand opportunities these animals will have to study the beauties of our institutions!"

There is in New York a company, with a capital of $50,000, chartered by the State to furnish Italian and Hungarian laborers, in defiance of the laws of Congress. That a committee has been appointed to "investigate" this matter of the importation of foreign labor under contract would be a healthful sign, had not these investigations become so diseased by contamination with corporate influences that most of them end at the "gate." The immigration for the first six months of 1888 exceeds that of any year since 1880, and it must follow that a vast percentage of this is either imported under contract, or, what amounts to the same thing, deceived by the lying promises of the agents of those interested in flooding the American labor market. There is certainly no crying need for additional laborers in this country, except to accomplish the purposes of a circular not long ago issued from a New York banking house, stating that "to check the demands of labor for excessive wages, it is necessary to augment the tide of immigration to the United States." The excessive demands of labor average $1.16 per day.

It is not, however, much that New York should charter a company to violate the law of the land, when an Illinois legislature elects to the United States Senate a "high-protective-tariff" man who is building the State House of Texas with foreign contract laborers, brought there in defiance of the law passed by the Senate to which he was elected. Just how many of the four hundred thousand immigrants arriving annually are brought here under contract, or lured by deceptive promises and advertisements of those most interested in making laborers so plentiful that labor shall be cheap, it is of course impossible to tell. But that the fact is one of evil omen admits of no doubt. Rome drew nearer and nearer her end as the army of idle, hungry men increased. Feeding them from her public granaries may have postponed, it could not prevent, her final collapse. "Enforced idleness, or the cheapening of men," says a writer, "is not the sign of decadence, it is decadence." It is laudable and praiseworthy to make money by just and legitimate means, but it is damnable to unmake men in order to make money. To study the causes for this vast and constantly increasing army of unemployed, and then do something to check those causes and prevent their effects, while it might not be so good partisanship, would be much better statesmanship than to "fire the Northern heart" by "bloody shirt" speeches in the Senate, and the raking up of old letters to "expose" the views some men held twenty-five years ago.

Ethelbert Stewart.

P. S. – Since writing the above, several hosiery works and woollen mills have closed because of a "tariff agitation" which, if successful, will give them cheaper raw material! "No matter," says a leading hose manufacturer in a Chicago paper, "whether the result of the proposed tariff-tinkering will benefit or injure us ultimately, any sort of agitation of the question immediately blocks trade. People will not buy when there is the remotest hope that goods will be cheaper after a while. The manufacturing industries at this time cannot stand any tariff agitation." No sane person believes that there is a man, woman, or child in the United States going without stockings until they see whether the Mills bill will pass the Senate! No sane man believes that one pair less of hose is sold in the United States because of tariff agitation. The underlying fact is, that the protected industries propose to "shut down" and throw their employés out of work for the purpose of starving them into voting for a continuation of the present iniquitous tariff schedules. It is the refined "shot-gun electioneering system" of the North.

E. S.

THE BELLS OF CHRISTMAS

O bells that madly toll to-night,What is the meaning of your note?Is disappointment or delightThe burden of each brazen throat?And what the words my weary brainDiscovers in your vague refrain?From the high casement of my roomI watch the world below asleep;While from the belfries clothed in gloomThe clangor rolls from deep to deep,Repeating, as afar 'tis flung,A lesson from an unknown tongue.O music that eludes the soul, —Like that sweet sea which vexed the thirstOf Tantalus, but never stoleAcross his fevered lips accursed, —Unfold your mysteries to-night,Your misty meaning and your might.It surging sweeps upon the air.Besides the clamor of the bellsAre echoing strains from everywhere,Past, present, future. How it swellsInto an endless sea which roarsAnd moans on lonely rock-bound shores!Hoarse, hollow echoes from dead yearsOf that which I have thought and done —The discords of past sin and tearsThrough e'en your fairest measures run.Alas! when will those discords cease?Does sorrow never lead to peace?Chords of the present clash and jarAs though each note would never end;Yet as their rhythms die afar,They slowly unto beauty blend,And the last cadence fades awayAs fades a perfect summer day.O vibrant strains of the to-be,With promise pregnant and with hope,You are a glad epitomeOf the hereafter's power and scope;Yet 'neath your softest note appearsThe thunder-march of coming years.Ring, Christmas bells! The past is dead,E'en though its requiem never die,And God His endless love has spreadUpon the scenes that round us lie.Ring loudly to the midnight airThat Love and Hope have slain Despair.Ring out, O bells! The world is wide,And Goodness sits upon a throne.Ring out upon the Christmas-tideThat God will not forget His own,And that on all, from far above,Descends His never-failing love.William E. S. Fales.

THE AMERICAN EAGLE UNDER DIFFICULTIES

It seems to be a striking case of misunderstanding from the Romans down, or up, to the Americans. Every theory and supposition has curiously added to the misapprehension. Rightly judged, with the plainest facts of his life even casually considered, the Bird o' Freedom seems so disreputable a fowl that one wonders how he ever came to be chosen as a figure-head by Romans, Germans, Americans, or the Michigan Regiment that bore him alive as its standard through the smoke of a score of battles, and brought him home again unscathed to make a curious part of the history of a gallant State in the times that tried men's souls. Innumerable myths trail behind him as appendages to his unearned fame. He was the Bird of Jove. He has ever been the reputed king of an ethereal world of fancy. His eye alone may look upon the sun unwinking and undazed. And yet it is all in his eye, or rather in that of the credulous mortals who believe the ancient story. There never lived a poet, sticking to his business, that has not at some time in his career become a panegyrist of his extraordinary supposed qualities and a proclaimer of his magnificence. It is a curious fact, too, that all the moralists, save one, have at some time or other used him as a simile, a great example, a something to be imitated. That one, greatest of all, is content with the familiar and plebeian hen and chickens in one of the most eloquent and touching of his monologues, and uses the miserable sparrow in that illustration which has in all time since given comfort to forsaken souls.

With the poetry about this overrated fowl everybody is more or less familiar. There is nothing finer; and it is somewhat startling, and also destructive of our most cherished ideas, to say that it seems a case of mistaken identity almost from beginning to end. It cannot be the eagle, our eagle, that is meant. He has never in a single instance done anything to entitle him to a medal. Yet the idealism of the ages has been heaping honors on his crested head through the necessity, as yet unexplained, of having some winged creature to glorify, to use as an emblem, to paint, to describe incorrectly if poetically, to embellish a heroic national moral with. It has been done without regard to fact in all the school-readers and other truthful volumes intended for the use of the very young. Every boy regards the American Eagle as the king of birds even from a moral standpoint, and he is liable to at least a brief spell of disappointment if he has the faculty of observation and the love of nature sufficiently developed to find out by-and-by that he has been deceived.

The coparcener with the eagle in all this beautiful nonsense is a bird that never existed at all, and who, having at last fallen from her high estate, is now principally useful as a name for a hotel that has been too often burned, or as the escutcheon of an insurance company. Considered in a matter-of-fact way, and in the cold and unflattering light of natural history, our national emblem is no more a truth than the Phœnix is, and is almost as preposterous as the roc. One wonders why, in the course of so many ages in which the gradual drift has been toward common-sense and fact, men have not learned to turn for their animal ideals, if it is necessary to have them, to the beasts and birds entitled to some consideration for actual qualities; for both beauty and gallantry, for instance, to the male of the barn yard fowl; for devotion, to the grotesquely homely stork; for self-sacrifice, to any of the beautiful creatures who flutter along before you in the path, with the distressful pantomime of a broken wing and great distress, inviting you to kill them easily with a stick or stone if you have the heart, and offering you every inducement to pursue them that is latent in man's cruel heart, but only after all to lead the marauder further and further away from a nest that is cherished.

As to the first of these hastily-given examples, any country-raised boy will concede the point, and he has not been left entirely out in the poetry, and especially in the folk-lore, of the nations. He it was who marked with his clarion the moment when he upon whose name is founded the most powerful of the Christian Churches denied his master and his faith. He sings the coming of the dawn in every clime, and marks the hour when graveyards cease to yawn, or when Romeos must depart. He leads his harem abroad in the morning as he has ever done, ever ready to fight his rival from across the fence or to meet in unconsidered duel the marauding hawk. With a gallantry quite unknown to any other bird or human, he calls familiarly to others of his family to come and eat the choicest morsel he may find. He is gay. He has the natural gait and air of an acknowledged chieftain. The sun glints upon his neck. His tail is a waving plume the equal of which few birds can boast. He hath a bold and glittering eye. Sometimes retreating under the dictates of prudence, as many higher personages have often done and been commended therefor, he is yet the ideal of homely, home-defending courage. Withal, he will upon necessity demean himself to scratch for a brood of chirping orphans, and gather them to his gallant breast because they have no mother. Yet, forsooth, not this illustrious bird, but the eagle – the "American" Eagle – is the emblem of the foster-mother of all the nations.

There is a place where every visitor to Chicago may see this emblematic lordling near at hand. It is at Lincoln Park. There is a colossal cage there where there are a dozen or so of him, and he is not even restricted in certain limited flights which seem fully satisfying to him in his well-fed condition. If you go to see him there you will have the advantage of observing how absurdly draggle tailed and slovenly he may become with full leisure to make his toilet if he ever does, and that he evidently is not naturally a dandy. This trait is not common with any of his captive neighbors except the coyotes, and nobody who has known the coyote in his native wilderness expects anything better of him. You can also observe his grotesqueness when he is on the ground, where he often comes, and there is probably nothing more ridiculously abortive in all nature than his movements when so situated. But one cannot visit him often or observe him long without becoming convinced that none of the attitudes in which he is almost invariably depicted on flags, medals, seals, coins, and other ornamental and emblematic devices is natural to him. He never assumes them even by mistake or chance. "The poised eagle" becomes poetry like all the rest, when you observe that his "eagle glance" has taken in a piece of fresh meat somewhere, and he wishes to keep someone else from getting it. He then scrambles to the edge of a board, or hitches along to the end of a branch of the dead tree where he sits, and drops off like a hen, making an awkward flight toward the morsel that has attracted him. And when he gets there he edges suspiciously around it in the evident fear that it may be alive and may bite him.