The Workers: An Experiment in Reality. The East

by Walter A. Wyckoff

"I read in a book the other day that twenty-five men, with modern machinery, can produce as much cotton cloth as the whole population of Lancashire could produce in the old way; but there ain't any twenty-five men who could work the farms of this township with all the modern farming machinery.

"Take it day in and day out the whole year round on the farms, and a man's work or a team's work is pretty much what it was a hundred years ago.

"And here's another thing that makes a great difference between farming and other kinds of business. When I go to the city I most generally visit some factory and go through it as carefully as I can. The machinery is interesting and wonderful, and if it's something useful they're making, I like to compare the productive power of the factory hands with what it would be if they were all working separately by the old methods. But besides this, there's the wonderful economy that I see. The factory is built so as to save all the carting that's possible, and there's men always studying how they can make it more convenient, and can improve the machinery and cut down the costs. And then I don't find any leakage anywhere that can be helped; and it's most wonderful what they do in some kinds of manufacturing with what you'd think was the very refuse, working it up into some by-product that makes the difference between profit and loss in the whole business. It's close culture of the closest kind applied to manufacture.

"Sometimes I've had a chance to talk to a superintendent of a factory, and he's told me about the business from the inside—how carefully he must study the market and how closely he must calculate a hundred things; and how exactly his books must be kept, and how easy it is for a little thing that's been miscalculated or overlooked to ruin the business.

"I tell you that I've come to see pretty clearly that the business that pays in these times of competition is a powerful lucky one and powerful well managed. When the year's work is done and the wages have been paid, and the rent and the interest on the capital paid up, and the salaries paid to the brains that run the thing, it's a remarkable business that's got anything over in the way of profit.

"Now, the farming business, as I look at it, is a long way behind all that. We don't know much about close culture in farming in America, and I don't believe there's one farmer in five hundred that keeps books and can tell you exactly where he stands; and these things we've got to learn. It's terrible easy to let things go their own way pretty much—until the fences are falling down and your buildings are out of repair, and your tools are going to ruin with rust, and your children are not having good advantages. You may think that you're too poor to afford anything different and that it's economy to live so. But it ain't; it's the worst kind of waste. It takes a sight of hard work, brainwork, and handwork, too, to get good, substantial buildings and fences, and tools and stock, and to keep them good and to raise your children well. You've got to make a close calculation on every penny, but it's the only true economy. The difference between the economy of shabbiness and the economy of thrift is the difference between waste and saving.

"My father could not give me much school learning, but he learnt me to farm it thoroughly. I've been at it a good many years now, and I know by experience the truth of what he taught me. If there's ever been anything more than our living at the end of the year, it's only because we all worked hard, my wife and daughter as hard in the house as me and my son on the farm; and because we studied to raise the best of everything we could, and to get the best prices we could, and we saved every penny that could be saved.

"My son wanted to study to be a doctor when he was growing up, and so I gave him the best schooling that he could get around here; and when he was old enough, and I saw his mind was made up, I sent him to the best medical college I could find. And I've given my daughter all the schooling she's had the strength for. It's the best economy to get the best, whether it's buildings, or tools, or stock, or education; and there's a great deal more satisfaction in it besides. I tell you this because it's my experience, and I know it, but I owe it mainly to the raising my father gave me. It's hard work, and it's hard study, and it's awful careful economy in little things as well as big, that makes a man succeed in any business.

"You've heard the saying that 'the luxuries of one generation are the necessities of the next.' That's certainly true in the country. I've heard my grandfather say that when he was a boy it didn't take more than ten dollars a year to pay for everything that the family bought. All that they wore and ate and drank they raised on the farm, and they built their own buildings, and made their own tools, mostly, and worked out most of their taxes.

"I'm not saying that farmers must go back to that. It ain't possible. It's every way better now to buy your cloth than to make it, and so with your tools, and many other things; but when I see a farmer's family spend in a year for clothes and feathers and finery as much as ten families did for all they bought in the old days, and at the same time their fences are falling and their stock suffering from neglect, I see that these people don't know their business. And when I see a farmer mortgage a piece of land to give his daughter a fashionable wedding, and then complain that there ain't a living to be made any more in farming, I'm sorry for him.