And so, as New England has cut into old England, and has set her own machinery and steam to work making many things cheaper than old England can make them, and bids fair to starve out some of her garrisons of workers, just in the same way have Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati, and Chicago taken it into their heads to set their machinery and steam to work; and now torrents of hats, and shoes, and woollens, and cottons, and clothing, and furniture, and stoves, and pots are pouring out of those nests of industry, so that even they are beginning to cry out, "Why don't you buy what we want to sell, and thus make us rich?"
If, then, we in New England refuse to buy—refuse to buy at profitable prices the productions of old England—what does England propose to do with her millions of non-food-producing workmen? She demands free trade; says we are fools for not opening our ports and accepting with effusion the blessings of cheap goods she would so willingly send us? She does not quite like to open our ports, as she did those of China, nor does she incline at present to carry into France the civilizing influences of her cheap looms at the point of the bayonet. She must answer the question, not I.
And in New England—if that "West," with its fertile fields and its surplus food, will go to making cheap shoes and cheap cotton, and will not see how much happier she would be if she would only make corn and pork and swap them with New England for shoes and cotton—what will New England, what will Massachusetts do with her 507,034 workers who do not produce their own food? This is rather a vital question to those men and women who have no food. It is rather vital too to the capital invested in mills and machines in Lowell and elsewhere.
I come back now to my first proposition for the cure of the ills of life—cheap labor.
If trade be the true god, let us worship him; if to buy cheap and sell dear be the true gospel, let us extend that; if to convert men and women into tenders to machines be really the perfection of human nature, let us import the wild African and the heathen Chinee rapidly, largely, for nothing can be cheaper than they. Let us get ready our ships; let us open the ports of Dahomey, and Congo, and Canton, and Shanghai; let us exchange whiskey and tobacco for able-bodied men and women; let us fill this land with the black men and the copper men; let us perfect our civilization, for those men and those women can live cheap and work cheap; and if white men and white women do go to the wall—why should they not?
Gentle reader, you ask what is the moral?
I reply, Does not our civilization demand cheap cotton and not great men and women? Clearly it does.
Does it not demand free pauper immigration? Clearly it does.
Does it not demand cheap Chinese immigration? Clearly it does.
Does it not demand free pauper and free Chinese voting? Clearly it does.