The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe

by Booker T. Washington; Robert Ezra Park

They were formed in a broad double line across the avenue, and, marching rapidly, simply swept everything before them. At their head, bearing a heavy cane, was a man in plain clothes. I do not know whether he was an officer or the proprietor of the factory, but I was struck with the haughty and contemptuous air with which he surveyed the rabble as it melted away from in front of him. In a few minutes the street was empty and, so far as I could see, the strike was over.

It was a small affair in any case. There was no bloodshed and almost no resistance on the part of the strikers, so far as I could see. It was sufficient, however, to give me a very vivid notion of the ruthless way in which the governments of these stern military powers deal with rebellious labourers. European governments seem to have the habit of interfering, in a way of which we have no conception in this country, in all the small intimate affairs of life. So it is not to be expected that they would be able, like the police in this country, to act as a neutral party or referee, so to speak, in the struggles of labour and capital. That is the reason, I suspect, why in Europe strikes almost always turn out to be a battle with the police or an insurrection against the Government.

Almost anything may be made the occasion of a strike in Europe, it seems. Sometimes in Austria and Hungary, as I learned, members of the local diets or provincial legislatures go on a strike and refuse to make any laws until certain demands have been complied with by the central government at Vienna. Sometimes the students in one or more of the national universities go on a strike because a favourite professor has been removed by the Government, or because they are opposed to some particular measure of the Government. Not infrequently, in France or Italy, labour disturbances are fomented for political or party purposes, particularly among the employees of the state railways.

Strikes are a favourite weapon of the Socialists when they are seeking to force some political measure through parliament. Until a few years ago it seemed that the "general strike," in which all the labourers of a city or several cities, by suddenly laying down their tools and refusing to return to their work, sought to force some concession by the Government, was the means by which the Socialists proposed to overturn all the existing governments in Europe. Since the failure of the revolution in Russia and of similar movements on a smaller scale in Italy and elsewhere, this form of strike seems to have fallen into disrepute.

The most novel and interesting form of labour insurrection which I found while I was in Europe was the "strike of the agricultural labourers." In both Hungary and Italy the agricultural labourers have for some years past been organized into more or less secret societies, and the outbreaks which have been fomented by these secret societies have been, I understand, the most bloody and the most far-reaching in influence of any labour strikes in Europe.

The possibility that farm hands might be organized into labour unions, and make use of this form of organization in order to compel landowners to raise wages, had never occurred to me, and I took some pains to learn the conditions in Hungary and Italy under which these organizations have grown up.

I found that while the situation of the farm hands in Hungary differs from that of the farm hands in Italy in many ways, there are two important respects in which the situation of each is the same: First, a large part of the land of both countries is held in large estates; second, farm labourers, as a rule, particularly in Hungary, do not live, as is the case in America, on the land. On the contrary, they dwell apart in villages, so that they are hardly any more attached to the soil they cultivate than the factory hand is attached to the factory in which he is employed. In Hungary, for example, it is the custom for a group of labourers to enter, during the spring and summer, into a contract with a landowner to harvest his crop in the fall. A contractor, who either represents or employs the farm hands, will look over the field and bargain with the owner to do the work for a certain per cent. of the crop. At the harvest time the contractor will arrive with his labourers just as he would come with a gang of men to build a house or dig a ditch. While the work is going on the labourers, men and women together, practically camp in the fields, sleeping sometimes in the open or in such scant shelter as they are able to find.

It happened that I was in Hungary at the harvest time, and in the course of my journey through the country I have several times seen these gangs of men and women going to their work at daybreak. In this part of the country the strangest costumes are worn by the peasant people, and the women especially, with their bright kerchiefs over their heads, their short skirts and high boots, when they were not barefoot, were quite as picturesque as anything I had read had led me to expect. The labourers go to work at early dawn, because during the harvest season the field hands work sometimes as much as fourteen to sixteen hours a day, and then throw themselves down to rest for the night on a truss of straw or under a single blanket. After the harvest is over they return again to their villages.