Part 15 (1/2)

Oftentimes, we know, the same cry has been heard in England--and alas!

even in America; our labor unions even now sometimes lend a willing ear to such nonsense. There were riots in England when manufacturers sought to introduce labor-saving methods in cotton-spinning; and when railroads were introduced among us there were doubtless thousands of draymen, stage-drivers, and boatmen who, if they had dared, would have torn up the rails and thrown them into the rivers, as the Chinese did along the Yangtze-Kiang. With much the same feeling the old-time hand compositors looked upon the coming of the typesetting machine.

And yet with all our engines doing the work of millions of draymen and cabmen, with all our factory-machines doing the {180} work of hundreds of thousands of weavers and spinners, with all our telegraphs and telephones taking the place of numberless messengers, runners, and errand boys, and with a population, too, vastly in excess of the population when old-fas.h.i.+oned methods prevailed, the fact stands out that labor has never been in greater demand and has never commanded higher wages than to-day.

With a proper organization of industry it seems to me that it must ever be so--certainly as far ahead as we can look into the future.

When a machine is invented which enables one man to do the work it formerly required two men to do in producing some sheer necessity for mankind, an extra man is released or freed to serve mankind by the production of some comfort or luxury, or by ministering to the things of the mind and the spirit.

And it is the duty of society and government, it may be said just here, to facilitate this result, to provide education and equality of opportunity so that each man will work where his effort will mean most in human service. Knowledge or education not only cuts the shackles which chain a man down to a few occupations, not only sets him free to labor where he can work best, but is also itself a productive agency--a tool with which a man may work better.

Take the simple fact that cowpeas gather nitrogen from the air: a man may harness this scientific truth, use it and set it to work, and get results, profits, power, from it, as surely as from a harnessed horse or steam engine. And so with every other useful bit of knowledge under heaven. Knowledge is power.

{181}

[Ill.u.s.tration: ”SOCIETY BELLES” OF MINDANAO, PHILIPPINE ISLANDS.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A STREET SCENE IN MANILA.]

{182}

[Ill.u.s.tration: TWO KINDS OF WORKERS IN BURMA .]

One of the pleasures of being ”on the road to Mandalay” was to see the--

”Elephints a-pilin' teak In the sludgy, squdgy creek”

The elephants of Rangoon are as fascinating as the camels of Peking.

But one never gets hardened to the every-day Oriental spectacle of human beings harnessed like oxen to weary burdens, many of which make those in the lower picture look light by comparison.

{180 continued}

All this doctrine Asia has rejected, or has never even got to the point of considering. In America a motorman or conductor by means of tools and knowledge--a street-car for a tool and the science of electricity for knowledge--transports forty people from one place to another. These men are high-priced laborers considered from an Oriental standpoint and yet {183} it costs you only five cents for your ride, and five minutes' time. In Peking, on the other hand, it takes forty men pulling rickshaws to transport the forty pa.s.sengers; and though the pullers are ”cheap laborers,” it costs you more money and an hour's time to get to your destination--even if you are so lucky as not to be taken to the wrong place.

Forty men to do the work that two would do at home! Men and women weavers doing work that machines would do at home. Grain reaped with sickles instead of with horses and reapers as in America. Sixteen men at Hankow to carry baggage that one man and a one-horse dray would carry in New York. Women carrying brick, stone, and timber up the mountainside at Hong Kong--and the Chinese threatened a general riot when the English built a cable-car system up the incline; they compelled the owners to sign an agreement to transport pa.s.sengers only--never freight! No sawmills in the Orient, but thousands of men laboriously converting logs into lumber by means of whipsaws. No pumps, even at the most used watering places, but buckets and ropes: often no windla.s.s. No power grain-mills, but men and women, and, in some cases, a.s.ses and oxen, doing the work that the idle water-powers are given no chance to do.

These are but specimen ill.u.s.trations. In the few industries where machinery and knowledge are brought into play ordinary labor is as yet but little better paid than in other lines because such industries are not numerous enough to affect the general level of wages. The net result of her policy of refusing the help of machinery is that Asia has not doubled a man's chances for work, but she has more than halved the pay he gets for that work. And why? Because she has reduced his efficiency. A man must get his proportion of the common wealth, and where the ma.s.ses are shackled, hampered by ignorance and poor tools, they produce little, and each man's share is little.

Suppose you are a merchant: what sort of trade could you hope for among a people who earn 10 cents a day--the head {184} of a family getting half enough to buy a single meal in a second-rate restaurant?

Or if you are a banker, what sort of deposits could you get among such a people? Or if a railroad man, how much traffic? Or if a manufacturer, how much business? Or if a newspaper man, how much circulation? Or if a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or preacher, how much income?

Very plain on the whole must be my two propositions:

(1) That the Asiatic laborer is poor, the American laborer well-to-do, because the Asiatic earns little, the American much--a condition due to the fact that the American doubles, trebles, or quadruples his productive capacity, his earning power, by the use of tools and knowledge, machinery and education. The Oriental does not.

(2) Your prosperity, in whatever measure you have it; the fact that your labor earns two, three, or ten times what you would get for it if you had been born in Asia; this is due in the main, not to your personal merit, but to your racial inheritance, to the fact that you were born among a people who have developed an industrial order, have provided education and machinery, tools and knowledge, in such manner that your services to society are worth several times as much as would be the case if you were in the Orient, where education has never reached the common people.

Pity--may G.o.d pity!--the man who fancies he owes nothing to the school, who pays his tax for education grudgingly as if it were a charity--as if he had only himself to thank for the property on which the government levies a pitiable mill or so for the advancement and diffusion of knowledge among mankind. Pity him if he has not considered; pity him the more if, having considered, he is small enough of soul to repudiate the debt he owes the race. But for what education has brought us from all its past, but for what it has wrought through the invention of better tools and the better management (through increased knowledge) of all the powers with which men labor, our close-fisted, short-sighted {185} taxpayer would himself be living in a shelter of brush, shooting game with a bow and arrow, cultivating corn with a crooked stick! Most of what he has he owes to his racial heritage; it is only because other men prosper that he prospers. And yet owing so much to the Past, he would do nothing for the Future; owing so much to the progress the race has made, he would do nothing to insure a continuance of that progress.