Part 19 (1/2)
The Grangers had in 1876 twenty State purchasing agencies, three of which did a business annually of $200,000, and one of which did an annual business of $1,000,000. They claimed to have, about the same time, five steamboat or packet lines, fifty societies for s.h.i.+pping goods, thirty-two grain elevators, twenty-two warehouses for storing goods. In 1876 one hundred and sixty Grange stores were recorded. In he same year it was officially stated that ”local stores are in successful operation all over the country.”
The Sovereigns of Industry also developed co-operative distribution largely. In 1877 President Earle reported that ”ninety-four councils, selected from the whole, report a members.h.i.+p of 7,273, and with an average capital of only $884 did a business last year of $1,089,372.55. It is safe to a.s.sume that the unreported sales will swell the amount to at least $3,000,000.”
There have been numerous stores started apart from these orders. The finest success won is by the Philadelphia Industrial Co-operative Society. Starting in 1875 with one store, it has now six stores. Its sales for the quarter ending February 18, 1882, were $51,413.63. A considerable increase of interest in such stores marks the opening of our decade. Stores are starting up in various parts of the country. The Grangers claim to have now hundreds of co-operative stores, upon the Rochdale plan, in successful operation. Texas reports officially (1881) seventy-five co-operative societies connected with this order. * * *
We had an epoch of brilliant enthusiasm over co-operative agriculture in 1840-50, but little has been left from it.
One form of agricultural co-operation, a lower form, has been astonis.h.i.+ngly successful--the cheese-factories and creameries. It is estimated that there are now 5,000 of them in the country. In co-operative manufactures we have had many experiments, but few successes, from 1849 onward.
Ma.s.sachusetts reported twenty-five co-operative manufactories in 1875. All of them, however, were small societies.
Now, co-operation has its clearly marked limitations. It is of itself no panacea for all the ills that labor is heir to.
But it can ameliorate some of the worst of those ills. It can effect great savings for our workingmen, and can secure them food and other necessaries of the best quality. If nothing further arises, the spread of co-operation may simply induce a new form of compet.i.tion between these big societies; but no one can study the history of the movement without becoming persuaded that there is a moral development carried on which will, in some way as yet not seen to us, lead up the organization of those societies into some higher generalization, securing harmony. It is constantly and rightly said that business can never dispense with that which makes the secret of capital's success in large industry and trade, namely, generals.h.i.+p. Co-operation can, it is admitted, capitalize labor for the small industries, in which it is capable of making workingmen their own employers, but it is said it can never, through committees of management, carry on large industries or trade. I can, however, see no reason why hereafter it may not enable large a.s.sociations to hire superior directing ability at high salaries, just as paid generals give to republics the leaders.h.i.+p which kings used to supply in monarchies. There are in the savings-banks of many manufacturing centers in our country amounts which if capitalized would place the workingmen of those towns in industrial independence; moneys which, in some instances, are actually furnis.h.i.+ng the borrowed capital for their own employers. In such towns our workingmen have saved enough to capitalize their labor, but for lack of the power of combination, let the advantage of their own thrift inure to the benefit of men already rich.
They save money and then loan it to rich men to use in hiring them to work on wages, while the profits go to the borrowers of labor's savings.
But the chief value of co-operation, in my estimate, is its educating power. It opens a training school for labor in the science and art of a.s.sociation.
Labor once effectively united could win its dues, whatever they may be. The difficulties of such a.s.sociation have lain in the undeveloped mental and moral condition of the rank and file of the hosts of labor. * * *
Now, of this effort at co-operation I find scarcely any trace in the trade organizations of our workingmen.
Trades-unions have until very lately pa.s.sed the whole subject by in utter silence. What has been done by workingmen in this country in the line of co-operation has been done outside of the great trade a.s.sociations, which form the natural instrumentalities for organizing such combination. They offer the mechanism, the mutual knowledge, the preliminary training in habits of combination, which together should form the proper conditions for the development of co-operation. Is it not a singular thing, considering the manifold benefits that would come to labor from such a development, that the attention of these great and powerful organizations has not heretofore been seriously called to this matter. * * *
The story of such attempts as have already been made in this direction is one of a sad and discouraging nature to all who feel the gravity of this problem. Again and again great organizations have risen on our soil, seeking to combine our trade a.s.sociations and promising the millennium to labor, only to find within a few years suspicion, distrust, and jealousy eating the heart out of the order, and disintegration following rapidly as a natural consequence. The time must soon come let us hope, when the lesson of these experiences will have been learned.
These are some of the salient faults of labor--faults which are patent to all dispa.s.sionate observers. The first step to a better state of things lies through the correction of these faults. Whatever other factors enter into the problem, this is the factor which it concerns labor to look after if it would reach the equation of the good time coming. No reconstruction of society can avail for incompetent, indifferent, thriftless men who cannot work together.
Self-help must precede all other help. Dreamers may picture utopias, where all our present laws are suspended, and demagogues may cover up the disagreeable facts of labor's own responsibility for its pitiful condition, but sensible workingmen will remember that, as Renan told his countrymen after the Franco-Prussian war, ”the first duty is to face the facts of the situation.” There are no royal roads to an honest mastery of fortune, though there seem to be plenty of by-ways to dishonest success. Nature is a hard school-mistress. She allows no makes.h.i.+fts for the discipline of hard work and of self-denial, for the culture of all the strengthful qualities. Her American school for workers is not as yet overcrowded. The rightful order of society is not as yet submerged on our sh.o.r.es. There are the rewards of merit for all who will work and wait. No man of average intelligence needs to suffer in our country if he has clear grit in him. ”The stone that is fit for the wall,” as the Spanish proverb runs, ”will not be left in the road.”
II
FAULTS OF CAPITAL
But--for there is a very large ”but” in the case--when all this is said, only the thorough going _doctrinaire_ will fail to see that merely half the case has been presented.
There is a shallow optimism which, from the heights of prosperity, throws all the blame of labor's sufferings on labor's own broad shoulders; steels the heart of society against it because of these patent faults, and closes the hand against its help, while it sings the gospel of the Gradgrinds--”As it was and ever shall be. Amen.”
Labor itself is not wholly responsible for its own faults.
These faults spring largely out of the defective social conditions amid which the workingman finds himself placed.
Before we proceed to administer to him the whole measure of the ”whopping” due for his low estate, we had better look back of him, to see why it is that he is as he is.
The inefficiency of labor is by no means the fault of the individual laborer alone. Heredity has bankrupted him before he started on his career. His parents were probably as inefficient as he is--and most likely _their_ parents also. One who sees much of the lower grades of labor ceases to wonder why children turn out worthless, knowing what the parents were. General Francis A. Walker, in opening the Manufacturers' and Mechanics' Inst.i.tute at Boston lately, said:
”There is great virtue in the inherited industrial apt.i.tudes and instincts of the people. You can no more make a first-cla.s.s dyer or a first-cla.s.s machinist in one generation than you can in one generation make a Cossack horseman or a Tartar herdsman. Artisans are born, not made.”
Our incompetents may plead that they were not born competent. It does not readily appear what we are going to do about this working of heredity against labor, except as by the slow and gradual improvement of mankind these low strata of existences are lifted up to a higher plane.
Meanwhile we must blame less harshly and work a little more earnestly to better the human stock.
The environment of labor handicaps still further this organic deficiency. In most of our great cities the homes of the workingmen are shockingly unwholesome; unsunned, badly drained, overcrowded. The tenements of New York are enough alone to take the life out of labor. City factories often are not much better. The quality of the food sold in the poorer sections of our cities--meat, bread, milk, etc.--is defectively nutritious, even where it is not positively harmful. The sanitary conditions are thus against labor.
This could be largely reflected by the State and city authorities, and ought to be rectified in simple justice to society at large, which is now so heavily burdened by the manifold evils bred under such conditions. Government guards carefully the rights both of land and capital by an immense amount of legislation and administration. Has not labor a fair claim to an equal solicitude on the part of the State?
Health is the laborer's source of wealth, but it is by no means so farefully looked after as are the resources of the other two factors of production. It is only within the last three years that in New York we have had a satisfactory tenement-house law or a fair administration of any law bearing on this evil. There ought to be the exercise of some such large wisdom as led the city of Glasgow to spend $7,000,000 in reconstructing three thousand of the worst tenements of that city, with a consequent reduction of the death rate from 54 per thousand to 29 per thousand, and with a corresponding decrease in pauperism and crime.