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furnaces, for which the negroes were employed, he thought that just as many extra men on the pay-rolls would be needed if all the labor were white. And when I found that the day's labor was a twelve hours' stretch in the intense heat, I did not wonder that the negro averaged hardly four days out of five. This favorable testimony at Birmingham was supported whenever I talked with men who employed enough negroes to generalize from. On the great cotton plantation which I visited in the Black Belt, the planter told me that his negro tenants worked from sun-up till sun-down day after day, except during the season when the crops were laid by and the "protracted meetings" were held. At the barrel-head factory at Jonesboro', where negro labor was employed almost exclusively, the proprietor, an Indiana man, said that one of the reasons he hired negroes was because he found it difficult to get white men who worked steadily, though he paid the same wages as at the North. This was probably an exaggeration on the other side. But while negro labor, on the whole, did not seem to be quite as steady as white, the difference was so small that it was hard to account for the gross exaggerations of negro laziness uttered with such confidence by intelligent whites. Apparently the good-humored contempt in which negroes are held keeps the whites from learning what the negroes themselves think upon such matters, while the disposition to ridicule the inferior race keeps the generalizations to its discredit in perpetual circulation, while those to its credit are rarely made and never repeated. Richard T. Ely once said with truth that in the North a fact unfavorable to monopoly rarely got beyond the paper in which it first appeared. In the South facts favorable to the negroes stand just as little chance of wide citation.

With my strong prejudice in favor of the

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when they talked freely that their testimony weighed. This first day at Fulton, what the negroes said in answer to the sweeping charge of laziness was one of the less interesting parts of the talk. One of the group turned from this charge of laziness to the charge of stealing, which, as he said, "the white folks is always bringing up against us colored people." "Why," he exclaimed, "if us colored people did as much stealing as white folks say we do, we would all be living in brick houses." Then he went on to say that when colored people did steal, they never stole much. "One day," he said, "a storekeeper down here had his store broken into, and just a few groceries taken. He was talkin' to me about it, and I told him that negroes had done the stealing. 'What makes you say that?' he says. Why,' says I, if white folks had done the stealing they'd have taken all you had, while colored people only take what they want for a few days, and leave the balance.' And, sure enough," he concluded, "it turned out that it was negroes that had done the stealing." This statement about the amount that negroes stole was confirmed by the whites, while nearly all the testimony was to the effect that the amount of stealing done was less than it used to be. My host on the plantation in the Black Belt told me that the negroes would "run out" of the neighborhood a negro family that stole. When all the chickens were owned by the white people, the negro sentiment against chicken-stealing was naturally lukewarm; but now that a great many negroes own chickens, the rights of property have gained in sanctity. I was told by the negro financier at Concord that sermons against stealing are now common. It makes a great deal of difference in morals whether our class owns the ox that is gored; and when the time comes when there are wealthy negro congregations, their pulpits, I doubt not, will ring with denunciation of all that assails vested rights, even though they become silent regarding pride, extortion, and other forms of inhumanity hated only by moralists in touch with the poor.

But while all that I saw confirmed my Who prejudice that there is a great deal employ of our common human nature in negroes the negro, some of my prejudices were all out of harmony with the facts.

The most important of these was my prejudice in favor of the men who gave negroes employment. I have no doubt still that there are men in the South who give negroes the preference because of their sense of the injustices practiced against the race; but they are men of the missionary type, whose broad human creed cannot be narrowed by the feeling of those about them. I certainly met none of them, and I met several employers whose conscience was alive upon the question whom they em ployed. All of these gave the preference to men of their own race. This was first deeply impressed upon me at Jonesboro', where, not far from the "heading" factory, which employed chiefly negroes, was a stave-factory which had never employed anything but white labor. It was in the stave-factory that I found cordial relations between employer and employed, and the employer-who bore the strangely selected Scriptural name of Moloch-was clearly expressing his own feeling when he said, "People don't think it right to employ negro labor when there is white to be had." This was the universal feeling among those who did not hold that the hiring of labor was purely a matter of cents, and not of sentiment. So strong was this feeling among the farmers thereabout that when a manufacturer named Adams opened a stave-factory in competition with Moloch's, and attempted to run it with negro labor, the farmers would not sell him lumber. "Moloch's factory," I was told, "was just lined with bolts, but Adams couldn't buy any at all, unless he shipped them in on the railroad, and that was too expensive. Nobody would sell to him, and he just had to give it up. He didn't hire white labor himself, but he sold out to a man who has never hired anything else." Here was a boycott of a new kind on this side of the water. Boycotts where the boycotters refuse to buy have been common enough ever since our Revolutionary fathers set the example. But a boycott where men of Anglo-Saxon instincts refused to sell is novel in our annals. No mixed motives of sentiment and economy could be counted on to keep it alive. It was pure self-sacrifice in behalf of a cause.

Of course it may be said that the cause was a bad one, but this does not destroy the moral quality of its support. What

your character is does not depend upon what you believe, but on how much you are ready to sacrifice yourself for your beliefs. The South believes in giving the preference to white men, and it is the conscientious men of the South who give this preference. Particularly did I find this to be the case among farmers. Of these the men who wished to treat their hands as men preferred white labor; while those who wanted servility, and particularly those who wished to underpay their help, to drive them contemptuously to menial or excessive work, to feed them scraps and lodge them in disreputable shanties, could not get along with anything except negroes.

As a rule, however, men at the South, as at the North, hire white men or negroes from economic rather

The kind of work

negroes do

than moral considerations, and nearly all large employers hire both. Where both are employed, the kind of work done by men of each color is usually distinct. At the cotton-factory at Lindale, for example, the whites were employed for all the "inside" work, and blacks for the "outside." In the "yard " the monopoly of the blacks was as complete as the monopoly of the whites in the factory. A white man, I was told, who tried to do any teaming or hauling would soon be laughed out of his "nigger job." At the box-factory in Jonesboro' there was the same distinction, though a different reason was given. "We have negroes," I was told at the office, "to do the driving, unloading, and so on, because white men won't work outside in all kinds of weather." At the "heading" factory in the same town, where negroes had been employed for inside work (in spite of a warning the employers had received, signed by "The Jonesboro' Mob"), the employer told me that he hired negroes for "the hardest work," and white men for "the work requiring the most skill." This distinction was the most common one. Closely akin to it was another, due to the greater ability of the white to take responsibility. In the furnaces at Birmingham, where the negroes outnumbered the whites about ten to one, all the foremen I saw were whites. The reason for this, I was told by the superintendent, was not merely the greater ability of the whites to take the responsibility of management, but the unwillingness of the

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negroes to be bossed by their own race. Thus the "fourth estate "-like our own third estate in the past-is being kept down by its preference for leadership from the class above. On the largest cotton plantation I visited I was glad to find that the foreman was a negro and a most successful manager in every part of the work-even when his employer hired convict labor to supplement that of his regular tenants and hands. But such cases were rare. Farmers who expressed to me the strongest preference for negro labor because of its cheapness told me that it did not pay to hire a negro to clear land or to do any work where he had to be left to manage for himself. Negro labor, in fact, was spoken of by Southern farmers as Italian labor is by Northern contractors. You can drive it to do a great deal, but it requires a great deal of driving. or two farmers who preferred white labor put their preference solely on the ground that you could go away and leave a white workman to shift for himself, while the negro didn't do well unless you were standing over him. The owner of the great cotton plantation, it is true, said that he had no difficulty whatever in getting good work from negro hands by letting them know how much work he expected of them, and praising them for doing the work well. By spurring a negro's ambition, he said, you could get any amount of work out of him. This employer, however, was the exception both in judgment and in kindliness. Under ordinary employers the great mass of negroes-even more, perhaps, than the great mass of Italians-work inefficiently when not under close supervision, and even goading. The proverb that "every country has the Jew it deserves " can be applied with equal truth to the laborers. Every country has the labor it deserves. The methods used for generations with the slave labor of the South, as with the servile labor of Italy, have left their marks in the irresponsibility of the workmen, their inability to manage for themselves, and a disposition to relax effort when external pressure is removed. They have also left their impress in the negro's unreadiness and inability to handle machinery. Again and again I was told that "machinery doesn't pay with negro labor." Here again the situation is only a little worse than in the countries of Continental

Europe where the servility of the laborers has long been demanded. The first, the one, prerequisite to the industrial elevation of the negro is the development of selfreliant manhood.

Town wages

My first glimpse of Southern wages upon the present trip came to me at Tennessee City-called "city" only because that is its name. At this little settlement the woman who came to do the washing for the doctor with whom I stopped received twenty-five cents for her morning's work. "The price used to be fifty cents," the doctor's wife told me, but during the hard times it had come down to a quarter. In this particular case it was a poor old white woman who received these wages. On my way to Jonesboro', a lady who was my table companion at a junction where we both changed cars said that domestic servants -always negroes-in the town of two thousand people where she lived received $6 a month. When, therefore, I reached Jonesboro', and began to inquire about the wages of negro men in the box and barrel factories, I was surprised to learn that most of them received as much as $1.25 a day, and a few of them, I was told, as high as two dollars. Where their work was practically the same as that of the whites, their wages were practically the same. Furthermore, I found that there had been no reduction of wages since the hard times set in, in 1893. The growing lumber industries in that district had not yet known what slack work was, and there had been no intimation of a cut in wages. Jonesboro', therefore, will furnish a favorable source of statistics when the next Senate Commission attempts to prove that wages have not fallen. In New Orleans my inquiries were confined to the workmen in the sugar industries. In the works of the American Sugar Refining Company I found that the ordinary workmen were getting thirteen cents an hour-a reduction of only three cents an hour "since the passage of the Wilson Bill" in 1894. The outside workmen had suffered heavier reductions, but their wages, even when paid by the hour, were for such irregular work that the average day's earnings could not be safely reckoned. The weighers at the docks, for example, each couple of whom received seventy-five cents a hundred barrels before

the passage of the Wilson Bill, had been reduced to fifty cents with the withdrawal of protection, and still received fifty cents in spite of protection's restoration. The greater reduction in the wages of the outside workmen was perhaps due to the fact that their labor was of a lower grade and therefore more exposed to the strain of competition during the hard times. The "roustabouts" who did the loading and unloading of vessels at the wharves were perhaps the lowest class of laborers in the city, and were driven like beasts by their overseers-degradation causing brutality and brutality causing degradation. The superintendent who was explaining the situation to me narrated that one day one of the roustabouts carrying a barrel up the plank to a vessel slipped and fell into the river, and the foreman's only shout was, "Look out for that man's barrel !" The fall in wages in the city was largely due to the fall in the country, Country wages and was greatest where country and rations labor could compete. When I went from New Orleans to a great sugar plantation, I found that wages had been reduced from ninety to sixty cents a day the year of the passage of the Wilson Bill. On the passage of the Dingley Bill restoring protection, they had been increased to seventy cents a day, but this increase seemed to be due rather to the exceptional fairness of my host than to the necessities of the economic situation. When I reached the cotton plantations where tariffs had never affected pricessave of the things that were bought-I found the greatest reductions of all. Six or eight years ago, I was told wages were seventy-five cents a day, but now they are from thirty to forty cents. could scarcely credit these statements at first, but they were repeated by different persons with only slight variations. At one time I thought I saw an important qualification when the son of my host on the great cotton plantation in the Black Belt conceded that the old wages were without "rations," while his father was now paying thirty-five cents with rations. "It seems to me," I said, "that that makes a good deal of difference." "Not much," he replied. "Rations only cost about five cents a day." And so it was. "Rations "-pronounced rash-uns-was not a term whose meaning varied with the

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generosity of the employer and the capacity of the hand. A week's ration was always the same thing: "three and a half pounds of bacon and a quarter of a peck of meal the former worth about twenty-five cents, and the latter but little more than a dime. These, of course, were country "rations." Even in the towns, however, the question whether rations were supplied was but little more important. My negro financier at Concord, who employed a good many men, often had them take their meals at a restaurant, and his bill for each hand was always ninety cents for a full week-eighteen meals at five cents a meal!

But the lowness of money wages on the cotton plantations in the Black Belt is not yet fully stated. If weather prevented work, wages stopped. Wages by the month were not twenty-six times thirty or forty cents, but twenty times those amounts, or six to eight dollars. There were no white farm-hands in this district, so that I was unable to make any exact comparison of farm wages for the two races; but in northern Georgia, where I spent a night upon a much smaller cotton plantation, I found that eight dollars a month with board was now considered fair wages for a white man. In the case of a white man, however, board is considered a much more important item, for the South recognizes "equal rights among white men to a greater degree than the North. The white hand is treated as one of the family, and my hostess in North Georgia reckoned his board at five dollars a month. A good white farm-hand who lives at his own home and gets his meals from there commands thirteen dollars a month.

Domestic servitude

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The negro hand lives in his own cabin. Even domestic servants, not only on the plantations, but in the towns, almost always spend their nights in their own homes. They would rather, I was told, pay two dollars a month rent for a shanty (and two dollars a month in the Black Belt is from one-third to onehalf of a woman's wages) than room in the house of their employer. In most cases this arrangement is essential, for the negro girls marry young, and there are very few years in which they ought not either to be at home with their parents or at home with their children. But, whether essential or not, this arrangement is insisted upon, and these domestic servants at the South

have a degree of liberty known only to the higher ranks of labor at the North. Of course this custom had its origin in feelings hostile to the negro, but the negroes cherish their liberty as much as the white girls at the North who work in factories and even laundries where they are their own mistresses during stated hours, rather than do lighter work for larger material rewards in households. Needless to say, the arrangement not only lightens domestic servitude for the servants, but for the mistresses as well.

46 Pluck-me" stores

Of course the pitifully small wages of men in the country are generally supplemented by the produce of garden or poultryyard, and often by the privilege of cutting all the wood needed for fuel, and even the loan of horse and wagon with which to haul it. In the towns, however, the wages of negroes are in reality even smaller than they seem from the pay-rolls. To an extent unknown in the North, save in the backward parts of Pennsylvania, the system of company stores prevails, and the extortions practiced exceed even Pennsylvania endurance. It was at Birmingham, Alabama, that the extent of this system was first impressed upon me. Here I found that not only coal and iron companies, but even railroads, employed this ancient instrument of oppression. In the case of the railroads, however, I was told, the company itself did not manage it, but local officials for their own private profit. One official, I was reliably informed, had even taken advantage of his position to raffle off his horse and buggy by the sale of tickets to his subordinates. At the railroad "commissary," however, the white employees were in no way required to make their purchases. One of them said that he had never bought a dollar's worth there, and had never been asked to. It was the employees who didn't get ahead, and thus, as a rule, the negroes, who furnished the business for the commissary. The companies are generally two weeks and often a full month in arrears with their wage payments, and meanwhile the poorer employees are given tickets with which they can buy whatever they want at the company store. One official who talked with me frankly about the system said that where his company paid one dollar in wages it expected to get fifteen

cents back in the profits of the commissary. Those aggrieved by the system—including, of course, merchants-were inclined to put the pluckings higher. When I visited the surburban works of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, whose commissary was not classed among the worst, I asked a negro employee what sort of prices were charged. "Something awful!" he replied. "Yesterday, when the clerk handed me out ten cents' worth of sugar, I just stood and looked at it to see how shrunk up it was !" As the commissary was not far off, I also went and bought a dime's worth of sugar, receiving a little package that was one of a pile already done up. I had it weighed at a competitive store in Birmingham. The weight was exactly one pound. At the Birmingham store they kept no pound packages, but the price of sugar in the larger packages was a trifle less than seven cents a pound. In New York it was six cents for a single pound. The negro's story was thus fully confirmed, but I judged that his illustration had been well selected for his side of the case. At all events, an official whom I thoroughly trusted said that the negroes who got hard up for money had no difficulty in selling their tickets to white employees for seventy-five cents on the dollar. The ordinary wages of the negroes at these furnaces were ninety cents a day, so that the ticket for a day's work was worth seventy cents in cash. The white employees who bought the tickets and used them for their own purchases profited by the system.

In Birmingham I heard of tickets on various commissaries selling as high as eighty-eight cents on the dollar, and as low as fifty cents. I had no opportunity to verify the more extreme stories, but when a week later I visited North Georgia, I stopped at a blast furnace a few miles from Rome, where disinterested neighbors told me that for months at a time all the employees, white as well as black, received their wages exclusively in store orders, and that the price for this scrip had frequently fallen below seventy-five cents on the dollar. One Northern manufacturer, who had refused to introduce the demoralizing system into his own factory, spoke of its evils with peculiar freedom. His associate, he said, had kept store in the North, and had been interested in

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