Some are induced to part with all they own, selling their little business and then, because of ill health or other difficulties that the agent might easily have known, are turned back broken-hearted and poverty-stricken to the village whence they came. Sometimes they are even sent to ports entirely different from those to which they had planned to go. This, of course, is all wrong.
The Employer. The reason back of the coming of many of these people is the employer, the man who manages the railways, the mines, or large contracts. He works through the padrones, and the Italian banks that “direct two-thirds of the stream of Italian immigration.” You may be surprised to know that the news of a big railroad contract reaches Italy as soon as we hear it. If we are to build subways or barge canals, or carry an underground river into New York, or let great railroad contracts, or make a garden of the desert with colossal irrigation reservoirs and canals, the message flies under the ocean to far-away Italy and there is spread through a thousand villages.
The employer is constantly looking for cheaper labor. Around his mine or factory are American homes, practising the “American standard of living.” This is a valuable term much in use and since it will occur again in this book we stop here to explain what it means. The American standard of living simply means the way most Americans live. Do you know that we live better than any other people in the world?
“I don’t think we live well,” one boy says, “we don’t have an automobile, or a pony, or a piano, and the people next door to us do.” But automobiles, and ponies and pianos, while pleasant to own, are not real necessities. Let us take a peep into the home of a Chinese boy. It is breakfast time and he is busy with a bowl of rice and a pair of chopsticks. Do you think you could eat rice with chopsticks? No! I think you would do much better with a spoon. “But doesn’t he like milk and sugar on his rice?” Perhaps so, but neither milk nor sugar are in sight. Now, let us look in at dinner. Here are the same boy, and the same chopsticks, and the same bowl with more rice. “Where are the bread and butter, the meat and potatoes, and the dessert? We always have different things like that for dinner,” you say. The Chinese boy does not seem to miss them; what seems to be troubling him is the small amount of rice left in the bowl.
Now take a look through this crack in the paper window, (the father of this little man is too poor to have glass windows in his home,) and see what our boy has for supper. Why there are the identical bowl, and the identical chopsticks, and what looks like the identical rice, though of course it is not. “So that is all this boy has had to eat for breakfast, dinner and supper—only rice?” Yes, that is all, and let me tell you he is very well satisfied, because he likes that much better than eating millet seed and that is what so many really poor Chinese live upon. As for shoes, our Chinese boy has none. His clothes cost only a few cents where yours cost dollars.
Nor is the Chinese boy so great an exception. The standard of living among the peasants in Russia is also very low; the same is true among the great mass of peasants in Sicily, and remember these peasants form the large majority of the population. That our standard is not the standard of living of some nations may be gathered from the question of the great Chinese viceroy, Li Hung Chang, when visiting America. After seeing the ever-present throngs of prosperous-looking people on the streets, he asked in great surprise, “But where are your working people?” He did not know that the happy-faced, well-dressed people he was looking at were working people practising the American standard of living.
The immigrant provides the cheap, unskilled labor. As he becomes influenced by American customs, he requires better clothes, a room for himself instead of sharing his room with ten other men, more pay as he becomes more skilled. He wants shoes for his wife. The American law compels him to send his children to school instead of making them wage-earners while little children. As his expenses increase he demands more money that he may live as the people about him live. Then the employer begins to replace him by labor costing what he formerly cost. Herein is a remarkable story that would fill many little books like this. It accounts for the procession of the Welsh, Scotch, Irish, Germans, and Huns in the coal regions. It accounts for practically all the civil war, in the form of bloody strikes, carried on in the Pennsylvania coal fields, and much of that which occurs in other industries throughout the country, this method of the employer seeking to replace those demanding higher wages by those willing to work more cheaply.
OPPRESSION
The Sicilian. Many come because of oppression in the home land. The Sicilian lives in a beautiful country, but while the sea and the mountains are good to look upon, the people are very poor. The farm worker cannot send his boy to school as boys go in America, for the rural schools are few. He must pay such heavy taxes he has little left for himself. Then, a few rich people own almost all the land and he must work for them, or starve. They pay him such small wages he cannot buy good, nourishing food for his children and they often suffer greatly in consequence. You draw a long breath when you are told his wages are from eight to thirty-two cents per day. Many of us use more each day in car-fare than a laborer in Sicily receives though he works from the time the top of Etna is crimson with morning, until the birds go to sleep. Even salt, so cheap with us, is taxed so heavily he cannot use it and when he cooks his corn meal in the salt water from the sea he is accused of smuggling. Oppression is what makes many of these people our neighbors.
The Jew. Let us step in and visit an old Jewish tailor, a saintly man who worships devoutly after the manner of his fathers. I am very careful not to give him any work on Saturday as it grieves him to disoblige his friends, and yet he will not work on his Sabbath day. He says, as do many others of the Jewish race: “I pray every day; my son prays once a week; my grandson does not pray at all.” This old tailor speaks such broken English, we will let his daughter tell the story. “My father is almost eighty years of age; he never worked with his own hands until he came to America. He was for many years the tailor of a Russian regiment, making all the uniforms for the officers and having a number of men employed under him; we were well-to-do, the officers loved my father, but when the riots arose it was all they could do to save his life and all we had was destroyed. Now he is an old man, he should not toil any more, but,” as she shrugs her shoulders, “who will give us bread?”