You will see how difficult it would be, if it were attempted, to eradicate the indolent, careless, incogitant habits so formed in youth. But it is not systematically attempted, and the influences that continue to act upon a slave in the same direction, cultivating every quality at variance with industry, precision, forethought, and providence, are innumerable.
It is not wonderful that the habits of the whole community should be influenced by, and be made to accommodate to these habits of its labourers. It irresistibly affects the whole industrial character of the people. You may see it in the habits and manners of the free white mechanics and trades-people. All of these must have dealings or be in competition with slaves, and so have their standard of excellence made low, and become accustomed to, until they are content with slight, false, unsound workmanship. You notice in all classes, vagueness in ideas of cost and value, and injudicious and unnecessary expenditure of labour by a thoughtless manner of setting about work.[22] For instance, I noticed a rivet loose in my umbrella, as I was going out from my hotel during a shower, and stepped into an adjoining shop to have it repaired.
“I can’t do it in less than half an hour, sir, and it will be worth a quarter,” said the locksmith, replying to inquiries.
“I shouldn’t think it need take you so long—it is merely a rivet to be tightened.”
“I shall have to take it all to pieces, and it will take me all of half an hour.”
“I don’t think you need take it to pieces.”
“Yes, I shall—there’s no other way to do it.”
“Then, as I can’t well wait so long, I will not trouble you with it;” and I went back to the hotel, and with the fire-poker did the work myself, in less than a minute, as well as he could have done it in a week, and went on my way, saving half an hour and quarter of a dollar, like a “Yankee.”
Virginians laugh at us for such things: but it is because they are indifferent to these fractions, or, as they say, above regarding them, that they cannot do their own business with the rest of the world; and all their commerce, as they are absurdly complaining, only goes to enrich Northern men. A man forced to labour under their system is morally driven to indolence, carelessness, indifference to the results of skill, heedlessness, inconstancy of purpose, improvidence, and extravagance. Precisely the opposite qualities are those which are encouraged, and inevitably developed in a man who has to make his living, and earn all his comfort by his voluntarily-directed labour.
“It is with dogs,” says an authority on the subject, “as it is with horses; no work is so well done as that which is done cheerfully.” And it is with men, both black and white, as it is with horses and with clogs; it is even more so, because the strength and cunning of a man is less adapted to being “broken” to the will of another than that of either dogs or horses.