THE DECLINE OF OUR WORKMAN.
The manufacturing classes of this country doubtless present a much more favorable condition of the workmen than prevails in other countries. The men who are generally described as laborers—whether they work isolated or in bodies—occupy a higher level of life than the same class in the old world. We may pass by, as being, in dispute, the question of the protective system’s relation to this fact. The higher condition of workmen is partly a result of democratic institutions and the absence of social grades in society; partly also of the youth of this country and its abundance of natural bounties. We have had the unexampled good fortune to be a young country rapidly developing wealth. A democratic level, a republican simplicity, vast stores of undeveloped natural wealth, and a system of free schools and free churches, have probably conspired to produce a high grade of workmen. We naturally desire to keep this feature of American society and industry. We note with alarm any sign that workmen are dropping to a lower level. It is not exclusively a humanitarian feeling which prompts us to maintain our workmen on a high level. We have all come to be interested in the prosperity of this section of the community. The economic usefulness of a man may be as conveniently measured by what he consumes as by what he does. In fact, his consuming power is the more accurate measure of his value. It is not so much a question of the number of strokes per day of which he is capable, as of the power he has to buy and use what his fellows produce. In this country the workman’s consuming power is probably at least twice as great as it is in Europe. This means that forty per cent. of our people buy twice as much as the corresponding forty per cent. buy in Europe. The effect is to greatly enlarge the market which we are all supplying with various kinds of goods. The reduction of this growing section of our population to the European condition would cause a contraction of the market, and an arrest of our industrial development, such as we have never experienced. We should be able to make just as many goods as now, but the people who now buy them would be obliged to reduce their buying, and this reduction would make an appalling aggregate. If twenty millions of people should at once reduce their annual purchases by one-half, the effect would be a more complete bankruptcy of us all than we have ever dreamed of. The reduction might come about slowly and with less peril; but even then the stagnation would be fatal to a large portion of the community. The truth is that we have a new factor in our industrial life, a new economic co-efficient. It is the well-paid workman, who is a relatively large consumer. Relatively to population the market we are all engaged in supplying is a much larger market than exists in Europe. We are built upon a foundation of which this well-paid laborer is an important part. We added an immense mass to this foundation when we emancipated the slaves. We increased the demand for goods by the difference between the cost of supporting a slave and that of supporting a free man. The new factor is a sum to be estimated only by the study of our own country. It never before existed in any country. It is a fact without a precedent; and it is so large that the whole fabric of our prosperity rests upon it. Gradgrind may persuade himself that he does not care whether poor men can buy goods or not; but his persuasion to that indifference will give way just as soon as the poor cease to buy his goods. In short, Gradgrind can not afford to see the buying power of workmen reduced with complacency. It means, whenever it becomes a general fact, ruin for Gradgrind. Whoever has anything or produces anything has given bonds for the maintenance of workmen’s wages.
Well, then, the alarm has already been sounded. We do not refer to the “tariff reform”—though that may be fatal—but to more certain matters over which the tariff laws have no power. It is affirmed that the character, social status, aspirations and self-respect of workmen in this country has already fallen. An observer in a manufacturing center recently said: “The change in ten years is frightful. The old hands have risen in life or gone west. The new hands live in smaller quarters, care less for the comfort of their families, and buy fewer goods of any kind. They read less, take newspapers more rarely, are less careful to dress well on Sunday, and see their children in rags with a complacency which was unknown ten years ago. The new people are from Europe, and nine in ten of them have brought their old habits with them. Higher wages mean to them only more rum and more idleness.”
We hope that this is an exaggeration. But even if it be only very partially true, it opens an unexpected vista, and an alarming one. The only way to maintain workmen’s wages is to keep up workmen’s characters. If the character grows debased the wages will drop to that lower level. A higher grade of living is the only possible security for higher wages. Workmen can not long get high wages to spend in rum shops. Wages will sink to the level of their life. But if the common market is to suffer so great a loss as this fall in wages and consuming power would occasion, then we must all suffer. Nor is this all. The failure would be that of our civilization. We are, every way, in all sources, most deeply interested in arresting the threatened decline of the American workman.