"Pennsylvania Dutch," and other essays

by Phebe Earle Gibbons

So the men gave in. This bloody scene and the ensuing funerals probably broke the doughty spirit of the Welshmen. They gave in and went to work in the latter part of May, not entirely six months from the outbreak of the contest. They began at eighty-six cents, the price which the companies had fixed; but on the 1st of June their pay was raised to ninety-three cents.

Can strikes be prevented? In speaking to a miner about the great suspension, I asked whether it would not be better for the company and the men to meet and settle these matters.

“It could not be done,” he answered. The miners do not seem to have any desire to buy into the stock of the companies. Is it for fear that, as a miner’s wife said, “the big fishes would eat the little fishes up?”

But if the miner does not thus co-operate with his employers, or in the manner that the poorest sailor on a whaling vessel once did with the owners, the principle of joint-stock is not unknown to them. An intelligent man, once a miner, tells me that all working men are now aspiring to form co-operative associations for the purpose of carrying on mining and iron-works themselves. There are iron-mills on this system, he said, at Danville, and a number of furnaces and rolling-mills in Ohio. These are on the same plan as the renowned works at Rochdale, England, that have been in successful operation for many years.

There is, too, a co-operative store at Hyde Park, Scranton. This store has been in operation for several years, and pays stockholders from twelve to fifteen per cent. on stock and purchase. The majority of the stockholders are Welsh, and nearly all are miners.

IRISH FARMERS.

In 1881 I spent four weeks in Ireland, principally in the south, in the county Cork. Desiring to learn the condition of the farmer who himself follows the plough, I inquired among various classes of people. I boarded four days with a farmer, and about as long at a castle; down in the southwest I talked with a citizen who had been boycotted; travelling third-class on railways, I conversed with other passengers; in Dublin with fellow-boarders; in London with a prominent Irish politician. Of these interviews I took notes, so that I am not obliged to depend alone on memory for my simple story. I try to give conversations, but must allow the reader to draw inferences.

For many years I have known farmers living in comfort and accumulating property by the labor of their own hands upon their own soil. Such are Quaker farmers in Chester County and “Pennsylvania Dutch” in Lancaster. In Ireland I wished to visit a similar class. But I found no one who owns the land he ploughs, or ploughs that which he owns.

I was assured in Philadelphia by persons knowing Ireland that I could not find the house of a working farmer in which I would be willing to live. This discouraged me, but by means of introductions from two or three young women hying at domestic service, I obtained a good opening into the land. One gave me a letter to her confessor in Cork, whom we will call the “Riverend Lawrence O’Byrne.” I found him intelligent and genial; in person rather tall and thin but with a color in his cheek. He was at a loss to recommend me to any working farmer’s house, saying that I should live on potatoes and skimmed milk; but I thought that I could live so for some days if those people did all their lives.