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LABOR.
dissensions. No, they come from the peasant class; they are the industrious poor, the trades-men and mechanics who, dissatisfied with their condition at home, seek employment in the golden west. These are naturally content to fill the humbler walks of life, to till the soil, to work in the shops, to build our railroads, and we are willing to let them. Thus it becomes an easy matter for us Americans to foster a spirit which may one day be the cause of serious trouble.
As a people we are too superficial. Skilled labor is always in demand, and in Europe individual competition has made the greatest possible skill absolutely necessary. Therefore a system of apprenticeship has grown up there, and tradesmen and mechanics do not spring up in a day, but are made by long years of careful training. In America, however, we are yet new and think there is room for all; that our acres will never be overcrowded; that, if we must work, tomorrow we can turn our hands to new tasks without previous training. Industry, however, has its own reward, indolence its penalty. In the factories and workshops; in those trades that require skill and proficiency, the positions are already filled by foreigners educated in the trade schools of Europe and, if we seek admission, we find the doors locked against our inexperience. Do not the Americans of to-day see that while they are trying to avoid work, trying to escape the sentence pronounced upon all mankind; while they are endeavoring to make themselves aristocrats to lord it over labor; while they let the shops and trades fill with foreigners, that they are undermining our own nationality and building up an European state? Prosperity depends upon exertion. Educate the child or nation to idleness or petty labor and you destroy both its mental and physical health and vigor, and thereby turn it into the street.
The tendency among Americans to avoid
labor is early leading to many difficulties. The disposition, sorry to say, is becoming manifest among all classes, all sexes. An evidence of the evil is shown in the struggle between capital and labor. Here the contest is made more intense by the fact that the capitalists are Americans and the laborers mostly foreigners who have no adequate conception of our laws, institutions and social distinctions, but look at everything through European eyes. They cannot see the necessity of harmony or of the amicable adjustments of differences between the great powers of capital and labor, and unreasonably insist upon every demand.
Our propensity to indolence is also giving rise to other serious questions. Not only are the men, but the women even are beginning to shun their province. Domesduties seem to have but little charm for them, and how to provide a table with delicious wholesome food, is fast becoming a real problem. They seem to forget that vants cannot be trusted altogether; better into what position in life a complete knowledge of home is necessary, kitchen as well at the posi- that of
Again there is an immutable law that every man owns the product of his own labor, that he who does the work must have the wages. This is proven by a problem now forcing itself upon the American people. If anywhere the relations of master and slave could be successfully and profitably carried out, we would naturally think that the state could maintain such an attitude towards the convict, a person who has forfeited his citizenship, liberty, social and domestic privileges, and all it would seem, except life itself; but not so,for he has one thing the state cannot take from him, and that is his own
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