Chapter IX: In Society (2)

Let us look at England for a moment, as she is to-day. She has built magnificent temples dedicated to her great god all over England: at Birmingham and Manchester, at Glasgow and Paisley; at Birkenhead and Liverpool, at Preston and Salford, at Leeds and Nottingham--and where not? England has become a great workshop in which the god of trade is ministered to.

Her land? Yes, it is beautiful, but her _yeoman have disappeared_--all have been drawn into the maw of the manufacturing monster. Forty millions of people now has England, and only some seven per cent. of them raise the food they eat. And how do the rest get their food? It is quite simple: by selling to other nations the things they make, and bringing back the food which other nations make.

It has been the boast of England that she had a larger population to the square mile--389 human bodies--than any other land except one, and more great cities than any other land but the "far Cathay"--if even she be an exception.

That "inspired idiot" Goldsmith once sang in his pretty, sentimental way,

Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish or may fade;
A breath can make them as a breath has made:
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.

"Bold peasantry," "stalwart yeomen," "hard-handed farmers"--what preposterous phrases these seem now when we have the immense advantages of "cheap labor"!

And we here in America--we too? But of us, anon, anon.

Great factories, great halls, great shops, abound--abound and magnify that English land, so that a glamour has come over mankind, and moon-faced idiots in all lands have cried, "Behold the glory of England. Let us do likewise." Those great cities have glorified themselves and have glorified England, and who has cared to look deeper down into the mire? Have we seen these men and women, childhood and age, reeking in squalor and vile with filth in the purlieus of every temple? Have we looked into the slums of Liverpool and Glasgow, of Edinburgh and Newcastle, to see men and women, childhood and age, in all their divinity--or their damnation? Is all lovely--is it indeed? Is this "progress"? Is it civilization? Is it Christianity? Of course it is, all three.

I have mentioned the word _revolution_--social revolution. What is it? Is it at hand? It is quite clear that this amazing power of steam and machinery is doing _something_. It is quite clear that every machine does the work of twenty men, and nineteen of these have got to seek other means of support--they and their wives and their little ones.

It is well known that every man out of work means four mouths bare of food. Who fills them? The rates (taxes) of course, and in London, the last winter I was there, some six years ago, 80,000 paupers and beggars were receiving public aid. "The laws of trade" is to make things right. I think that is the name of the modern redeemer of men. If work is not there and food is not there, man will flow at his own sweet will, like water seeking its level, until he finds his food and his work somewhere. But if man's "sweet will" decides not to flow, but to lie down and make his bed in your _pockets_, and feed on the contents in the shape of taxes--what is to come then? Why, he must be depleted, or he will deplete _you_. How to deplete him is a most interesting question? He does not deplete himself, for it is manifest to men that paupers in England and America get children as fast as they can; and the clergy applaud and say, "Be fruitful and multiply." There is no continence among them--none anywhere except in wicked France.

In the "good time coming" in England, the pauper will lie down with the prince, and there will be peace while the pauper devours the prince; or there will be pestilence, which is a sure depleter; or the idle army may be used to deplete the mob. Who can say?

"But there is no danger! Of course not. Why croak?"

What has been will be, under the benign influence of cheap labor and free trade--perhaps! Let me go on with my pleasant tale--do not interrupt--I have the word--by and by you.

At this moment, to-day, this year of our Lord 1877, the merchant princes of London, the manufacturing barons of Manchester are at their wits' ends; for people refuse to buy the products of their mills. Germany will not have them, and France will not, and America chooses to make her own; and even India, ungrateful that she is, has gone to spinning her own cotton. Mills are being closed in England, furnaces are blown out, wages are reduced, and workmen are threatening to _strike_, or have struck, and are settling down for a comfortable winter upon the _rates_. All right! England has "developed her resources," and trade is free. Let her sing hosannahs, and cry, "Glory be to our god," for no such beautiful "progress" was ever seen on earth before.

What is to happen to the 300,000 or half million land-owners of England, if outside pig-headed peoples wilfully and maliciously refuse to buy the mill products of England and so to feed the 37,200,000 people of England who have no land upon which to raise their own food? What is to happen if some fine day the 37,200,000 take it into their foolish heads to say:

"We do not like to starve. We are many, you are few. We will take the land and raise our own food, and you can emigrate if you like, or you can stand out in the cold as we have done. We don't like it."

It is not quite easy to shoot those people; and if they choose to stay in England, it is not quite easy to _make_ them emigrate--not even if the "laws of trade" tell them they really ought to go.

And besides, it is so easy for 100,000 paupers to emigrate--to take their wives and their children, their flocks and their herds, their camels and their asses, their beds and their tents, and go forth to seek the promised land--the land flowing with milk and honey. It is so simple, so pleasant, that one is lost in amazement that they do not go--that they wickedly persist in staying where they are paupers, and refuse to obey the law of "supply and demand."

Such conduct is quite unworthy of enlightened Britons who "never will be slaves."

It is too bad--it really is--and political economy ought to be preached at them severely. Why is it too that outside barbarians refuse to buy the divine productions of England? Some think we may do well to take a look at this part of the problem before _we_ go on with our plans for introducing more cheap labor into our own happy land.

A century ago, as has been said, England discovered the wonderful way of applying the _steam giant_ to the creation of manufactured goods, and for three-quarters of the century she has had a practical monopoly; has turned the golden streams of the whole world to enrich herself; has preached free trade; has said, "Buy cheap and sell dear," and has set her god on a high throne. But slowly and haltingly other and stupider nations have caught the tricks of the new Cultus; have caught little steam giants, and have set them to work to turn their mills and grind their grists. Germany and the United States are two of these dull nations who have done a stroke of work in this way. France has really been too stupid to do much at it--has indeed gone back to a tariff after having tasted of the new gospel, and now obstinately refuses to live by it--_will_ pay her debts, and will _not_ enjoy unlimited pauperism.

Germany has, however, done well. She now makes woollens, cottons, linens, irons, steels, penknives, and Bibles quite as cheap as England, and, as some say (one of her own Centennial Commission), "cheaper and nastier." Now _her_ traders are ubiquitous; they go, with the wandering Jew, the fascinating Englishman, the penetrating Yankee, into all heathen lands, carrying everywhere the new gospel of trade, and introducing to youthful minds the civilizing influences of lager beer and free lunches. Aided by the persuasive tones of the patient and soothing Yankee, they are doing wonders in teaching the value of time, by founding establishments for "stand-up drinks" in every lazy and luxurious land, by giving prizes to all who _smoke while they work_, thus making labor cheerful if not respectable. So patient and indefatigable has Germany been, that at Manchester in England, which may perhaps be termed the Delos of the new faith, I was told some five years ago that she had just taken the contract, had bought from Germany the iron beams and rafters for a new city building, and had put them up under the very noses of the worshippers who burn their sacred fires at Birmingham and Wolverhampton. And so, in the whirligig of time, Trade brings his pleasant revenges.

I was told also--the newspapers said it, and it must be true--that Mr. Mundella, an enterprising M.P., and a devout worshipper of the new god, who is a vast producer at Nottingham of stockings and hosiery of every sort--had found it best--well, absolutely necessary--in order to compete with the new disciples in Germany, to remove a part of his machines and machinery to Germany, and make his stockings there, in order that those ridiculous and cheap Germans should not quite put a stop to his trade. It was whispered about that French-made tools were being bought and brought into England for use there, and it was said openly that American saws, vises, and axes were playing the very deuce; and now, just after the triumphs of the "Centennial," Englishmen are writing home that Yankee silks will also play another very deuce with them if they don't get more and cheaper labor. I see too, by late letters from England, that they propose to cheapen iron by putting cheap Chinese labor into the iron works!

And yet in Germany they cry out that _they_ have a panic, and that trade is dull, and people will persist in failing, and that other people won't buy all they can make; they too are at their wits' ends. There must be something wrong, the "doctrinaires" say, about the gases. Trade is not free enough, or labor is not cheap enough, or they have too much or too little paper money, or they don't try woman suffrage. At any rate the new gospel is right--_must be right_, because if you obey the laws of trade and buy cheap and sell dear, you are sure to be happy.

And France--it is frightful to think of France. Steeped in stupidity and enveloped in Cimmerean fog, she resists the new gospel. She will not send her missionaries abroad over the world; she will not build great factories and temples; she will not take her whole people from their small farms, where they raise great surpluses of food, to put them into the new temples; she does not even work her land with steam, nor does she hanker for the cheap (and nasty) things which England and Germany are so ready, willing, and anxious to pour into every household; indeed, will not have them at all. Oh, the economic condition of France makes the heart of the enlightened priest of the new gospel weep. France has taken no steps to introduce the cheap labor of Ireland or China, or even of Africa--right at her doors--into her own wretched country, and there is no sign that she will. What feeling but contempt can the sincere doctrinaire entertain for France?

It would be indeed strange--and yet it is not wholly impossible--that England and Germany and the United States, all of whom have for centuries been cursing work, and crying out against work, and doing all manner of things to get rid of work, and educating their best and wisest not to do it--it would be indeed strange if some day they should be crying out, "Give us work, in God's name." Strange, but not wholly impossible.

We come back now to our own country--to the

Land of the free, and the home of the blest.

We are the child of England, and we revere, we love, we emulate her. We adopt her methods, we worship her god. We follow in her footsteps, and emulating her example, we send out missionaries to extend the gospel of trade; we love to buy cheap and sell dear; we love to scheme; we delight in speculation, for that is an intellectual operation. We have been taught for centuries that the mind is divine, the body devilish. We do well, therefore, to despise the devilish body and exalt the godlike soul. We do well to depress and belittle the hand, and to glorify and enlarge the head. We do well to say it, and to make men believe it if we can, that the "pen is mightier than the sword" or the plough. We do well to convert our boys and girls into exaggerated heads, even if they are useless, because we thus exalt them toward gods. We do well to leave out of view all just balance between head and hand because that is common and vulgar. We do well to say that the man who _says_ a good thing is greater than he who _does_ a good thing, for the spiritual _is_ divine, and the earthly _is_ base!

Keeping in view the short time we have possessed this land, we may fairly arrogate to ourselves what England has long claimed for herself, great "progress." We have created more great cities, more luxurious habits, more free whiskey, more useless railroads, more brokers' boards, more wild-cat banks, more swindling mining companies, more political jobs, more precocious boys and more fast girls, more bankrupt men and more nervous women than any country known in history. Following the "example of our illustrious predecessor"--England--we have done one thing of which we are justly proud, and the full account of which, illustrated with pictures, our "Government" (as we facetiously call it) has published in some ten fine volumes. And what is the example we followed? It is this: England, having possessed herself of the vast kingdom of India, found a production there of opium very lucrative to her and very desirable to many of the Chinese, who enjoyed the smoking of the pleasing drug. England greatly desired to sell this drug to China, for it was all in the interest of trade. One fine day some Chinese emperor or mandarin took it into his meddling head to check or forbid the freedom of this trade: and then the virtue, the religious fervor of the devoted Briton was roused. Ninety-three thousand chests of good merchantable opium, worth many taels, was not a dogma to be trifled with, not even by the Emperor of the Flowery Kingdom. What! Should trade be impeded by this yellow Mantchu, this devotee of Confucius, this long-eyed heathen, because he had some sentimental notions about his people's morals or manners? Good heavens! Could trade stand that? By no means. Persuasion must bring him to his senses if he had any. Persuasion was tried, and various iron arguments were used. They battered down Canton, they assaulted and took the cities of Amoy, Chusan, Ningpo, Woosung, Shanghai, Nanking; and thus the English missionaries kept on persuading until at last the heathen Chinee yielded: was persuaded to pay $12,000,000, to open the ports of Canton, Amoy, Foochoo, Ningpo, Shanghai to trade; to welcome all future opium with open arms; to make the good Queen Victoria a present of the port of Hong Kong; and so on and on. Thus, under the persuasion of a fraternal war, "trade, civilization, and Christianity" made themselves safe in the high places of China; since which happiness has bourgeoned there if not in England!

Could our youthful but pious nation do better than follow this illustrious example? Certainly not. Something must be done. If China could thus be persuaded to trade by the English, poor little Japan might be persuaded to trade by the United States. We could but try. We did, and Perry sailed away, with his ships and his cannons, to try. The Japs were benighted, foolish, and weak. They declined, and said, "No, we don't want any of your trade. We make _all we want_, and don't care either for your religion, your opium, your whiskey, or your stovepipe hats."

"But," said the gallant Perry, "that is a wicked sentiment. The brotherhood of nations is the cornerstone of modern civilization. Trade is divine, and stovepipe hats mark the intellectual races. We are your brothers. God has made of one blood all the nations of the earth. If you will not be our brothers, and trade, we shall be obliged to shoot. Don't want to, but must. One--two--three. Bang!"

Well, the Japs also yielded to these arguments, and thenceforth have been happy. Trade has prevailed. Rice has gone up, and a good many Japs have gone to the ethereal spaces, overcome with hunger. Railways have been built, national debts have been created; the Mikado and Tycoon have fought, the Daimios have quarrelled, white men have been assassinated, beggary has begun, taxes press upon the people; and indeed all the signs which mark the high civilization of trade have appeared. "Progress," we are assured, is now certain, and Japan is "developing her resources." Bliss ensues. All of which is written down and printed in many volumes for all men to read. And "Perry's Expedition" can be read in beautiful volumes which cost you, we'll say, $50 for the books and a million for the glorious expedition.

We make any sacrifices for the new religion, and are willing to waste the filthy lucre of gold to extend a divine idea.

We did it!

We opened their ports!

We extended the blessing of trade!

We have made the Japs into Yankees!

They are learning the benefits of cheap and nasty!

Glory be to the new god!

Massachusetts! Massachusetts has held herself and has been held as the heart and the brain of New England. She has had (so she has believed) the heart to feel a moral principle and the head to accept a great thought. She has had brave-hearted men and clear-eyed women. Once--let us make a brief retrospect--she had "pilgrim fathers." She had what she and the world too thought a religion, which she believed in. She had a people of sound English stock, who in this clear New England air grew to hate squalor, vice, beggary, debt, and damnation. Once, fifty years ago, she had no great cities; her "Hub," Boston, in 1830 had but the poor population of 61,392, nearly all born on her soil, few of them dirty or beggared. Once, fifty years ago, all through Massachusetts were clean, decent, white-housed towns, such as Worcester, and Springfield, and Northampton, and Concord, and Salem, and Newburyport, centres of small but most cultivated and earnest social life.

Then small farms were cultivated by families of New England birth, out of whom came able men and handsome women. Children lived with parents, and did not tyrannize them. Silk gowns were rare, and pianos unknown; "art" and "culture" had not become household words, but butter was made at home, and the mystery of bread was known to ladies. Few then had been to Paris, and few therefore knew how vulgar they were. But "where ignorance is bliss," etc. They got on, and did not know what poor creatures they were.

Every child was expected to learn the three R's at the little red school-house, and to _perfect_ his education by taking hold of material nature with his hands, and learning what it was by mastering it. That was education. The parson knew a little Latin, and he was all. They thought this worked well. Lamentable indeed!

The man expected to marry a capable wife, and to bring up children; he expected to work on his land or in his shop, to dress decently in clothes which his wife had made, securing a reasonable support in this world by his own labor, not by _hocus-pocus_; he provided for his future salvation by imbibing the five points of Calvin through fifty-four sermons a year, with now and then a Thursday lecture to fill in the cracks. Thus he was sure of his food here and of salvation hereafter--through the merciful providence of God, and not his own righteousness. New England thus produced a breed of people unlike and they fancied not inferior to any that history tells of.

But it would not do. There was no progress--it was a lamentable condition of things. They had _not_ got a population of 211.78 to the square mile, raked together from the four corners of creation, making the State the sixth in density of all in the world, as she now boasts she has, and thus she had totally failed to secure the higher and better civilization.

They had not "developed their resources"; they had not built up splendid great cities; they had little knowledge of the delights of trade. Things could not get on so--that was not "progress." Here was water power running to waste all over Massachusetts; there were keen and able heads who believed they knew how to set these powers to work to grind their grists; it was quite ridiculous that these tumbling streams should not be turning millwheels and spinning cheap cotton. And then too not a railroad ran through Massachusetts--no transportation except in wagons. "Good God!" the pious people naturally exclaimed; "what misery, what a slow set!" Money--money was then loaned at only six per cent.! Things must be changed. They were changed. Mill after mill was built, among them the "_Atlantic_." Railway after railway was built, among them the "_Eastern_," and the stock was quickly paid up, and all went merry as a marriage bell. But some people own those stocks now, and do _not_ find themselves happy!

What is the cure for these shrivelled dividends? Clearly, is it not, _to bring in cheap labor_? Let every man who has nothing and wants much, take shares in

"THE CHEAP LABOR SOCIETY."

Seeing what has been done for Massachusetts, it is easy to see what can be done. And what has been done? In fifty years she has built up Lowell, and Lawrence, and Worcester, and Holyoke, and many more great towns. She has increased Boston to a population of 341,919 souls--or bodies--in the year of grace 1875. She has "improved" things so, has made such progress, that Boston now spends yearly $15,114,389.73 (auditor's report 1875-6), which means that out of every man, woman, and child of Boston was taken in 1875, for public expenses, the sum of _forty-four dollars_! The happiness resulting from this may be partly understood when I relate that this tax is some four hundred per cent. greater than the "effete aristocracies" of Europe have ever got out of their down-trodden serfs, or have even dared to try to get. One other charming effect of this style of self-government (?), as we please to call it, is, that it has driven out of Boston a set of bloated money getters, who fancy it is not pleasant to pay large taxes, so they go to Nahant, and Barnstable, and Concord for a few months, and rid Boston of themselves and--their taxes! Shrewd fellows those Boston Democrats! They know how to _govern_ a city. So they do in New York. So they do in Cambridge.

But let us look at another of the evidences of true progress. Every man votes, you must know, whether he owns any property or not. Now, Mr. Daniel L. Harris has discovered, in his researches at Springfield, that of the voters there, _four_ pay taxes and _five_ do not; that is, four-ninths of the voters pay the taxes and five-ninths who pay none outvote the four who pay all. This is so generous on the part of the four that we ought to try to see what it is the four really are about. Applying the same ratio to Boston, we find that every tax-payer, every man of the four-ninth party, really paid to the yearly expenditures of the city of Boston, in the blessed year 1875-6, the neat little sum of three hundred and ninety-nine dollars, money of this realm.[1]

[1] Total polls of Boston, 85,243. Four-ninths of these will go
into $15,114,389--total expenditure of the year 1875-6--$399
times.

And yet the business men of Boston complain that they have made no money for three years, and that they can't make any. How absurd that is, when they can pay such taxes as these! And then think what they do in Boston for the intellect (as it is called). While they stupidly complain that they can't make any money, they spend on their common schools every year--over two millions of good dollars (2,015,380)--and they teach what--what don't they teach? I counted, I think, _thirty-six branches_ as being taught in the Boston schools last year. "Art" and "culture," you know! And in those brutal old times of fifty years ago, they taught only the three R's. Unhappy and despicable! Did they not deserve it?

And then the generosity of these Boston merchants who can't, as they pretend, make anything. Look for a moment at that!

They paid in 1865 for the teaching of each one of those children those thirty-six branches, so necessary to salvation, the sum of $21.16; in 1875 the sum of $35.23. That is, they voluntarily and gladly paid somebody sixty-six per cent. more for their work in 1875 than in 1865, and all the while those merchants pretend they are making no money. Do they expect us to believe that?

If they want to make money, why not at once bring in more cheap labor? The Chinese are ready to come, and the negroes, even if Ireland can spare no more of her enlightened people. And then what a boon this class of people would be to our aspiring statesman. For the sum of two dollars they are entitled to vote, and then any man who feels a desire to be a governor or an M.C. can, by paying this paltry pittance, secure the votes of a grateful constituency. Is it not, therefore, our supreme duty to bring in this class of voters as rapidly as possible? We need _population_ and we need _voters_. England has a population of 389 to the square mile and we in Massachusetts have only 211! Should we not hide our faces with shame while such an inferiority lasts?

There are people now who are getting up a scare about the wonderful growth of the Holy Catholic Church, claiming that that church demands of all its members (as it does) allegiance _first_ to the Church, and then _second_ to the government where its subjects happen to be. I do not think much of this now that Antonelli is dead; but there may be something in it. I question whether Massachusetts can any longer put forth pretensions to being a Puritan or a Unitarian or religious State of any sort unless it be a Catholic one. Go with me to the U.S. census report of 1870:

The whole population of Massachusetts in 1870 was 1,457,351

Of these were born in foreign lands 353,319

Born of foreign parents in Massachusetts 626,211 979,530

Thus, it seems, the population of Massachusetts is already foreign-born and of foreign parents, _over two-thirds_. What number of these foreign people are Roman Catholics, any other person can guess as well as I can. But it is quite certain that this blessing, such as it is, has reached us incidentally through our cheap labor; that is, it is a sort of superadded bliss, coming as an unexpected reward of unconscious virtue. In the words of Shakespeare, "We are twice blessed." We have got cheap labor and we have got the Catholic church crowning every hill and blooming in every valley.

At any rate it is quite certain that few if any of this class of the Massachusetts people are either Puritans, Unitarians, or Episcopalians; and some of them I strongly suspect are like the good sailor, neither Catholics nor Protestants, but "captains of the fore-top!" In Massachusetts, as I have said, there was in 1870 of this kind of population sixty-six per cent., and all have votes. In the whole United States there was forty-five per cent. of this sort, all of whom have votes. It is known also that New York, and Boston, and Lowell, and Fall River are intrinsically foreign cities. It is known that the majority of voters in those cities have no property which pays taxes; it is known that this class of voters are now well organized, and can and do vote and do elect such men as will _please them_--men who "will tickle me if I'll tickle you"--that is the sort of statesman we now welcome with effusion; indeed, we seek no other. We mean to deplete all over-grown fortunes; we mean through the taxes to equalize things and make Saturday afternoons pleasant. I have not at hand, just this moment, the figures to tell what good was done in Boston last year to the class called "the poor." But I have them for Cambridge, a small city almost a part of Boston. In that small select and intellectual city the expenditures in direct aid of "the poor," not counting work which was _made_ for them, was in dollars, $80,000, and that does not count a large sum besides given in private charity. This help was given to some 5,400 persons; stating it simply, in the words of political economy, one person in seven or eight of that cultivated and select community was a pauper. Another feature of this new and peculiar social state is this: that the voters who have no property and pay no taxes do not enjoy the possibility of starving, nor do they look with favor upon advice which tells them to "Go West." Why should they go West? They do not know where to go--indeed, they have no money to go with--nor do they know that there would be any work for them there. They _choose_ to stay where they are, and they will vote for people who will help them to stay; and they have five votes to the tax-payer's four, which significant little fact should not be lost sight of!

In our laudable desire for "progress," in our vital wish "to develop our resources," we have produced many results, some interesting ones, quite unexpected. We have got cheap labor and we have got cheap cotton cloth and cheap boots and shoes, and a good deal of all of them. The smart little city of Lowell was begun by the most capable and enterprising of Boston's "solid men"; it was begun upon a theory that men and women in New England ought to be clean, decent, and virtuous. In its beginning nearly all the operatives were of New England birth, descendants of Puritans who were used to decency, cleanliness, and virtue. Then they lived and lodged in houses belonging to the mills, which were _regulated_--the men in their own boarding houses, the women in theirs. All were expected to be in their houses by or before a certain hour, say ten o'clock at night.

Then every young lady had a green silk parasol for Sunday's use, and she wrote poetry for the "Lowell Offering," if she felt the divine movement. At that early undeveloped time an English gentleman, one Anthony Trollope, visited the nascent city. He lamented the narrow-mindedness of the projectors, and predicted it would not work; that the little Lowell could never compete with such highly developed cities as Manchester and Preston, where they knew the magic of "cheap labor." In other words, Lowell could not be a great success.

That Arcadian simplicity worked for a while, but inevitably the magic of cheap labor made itself felt--it was potent--it came, it saw, it conquered. And now the best information I have convinces me that the squalor, filth, recklessness, and happiness are nearly or quite equal to what they are in the noble cities of Manchester and Glasgow in England. Should Mr. Trollope revisit those scenes of his youth, he would be as much delighted as any Englishman could permit himself to be with anything outside his "Merrie England" at the delectable advances made there.

He would find labor cheap and cotton cheap--as cheap as they are in his beloved Manchester. He would find, as in his beloved Manchester, that they made more than they could sell; which is the secret of cheapness. He would find that in that small elysium, in the year 1874, they made 135,000,000 yards of cotton cloth, which gospel of cotton they were then spreading abroad over all the earth, sending some of it to his beloved Manchester. He would learn also that there was invested there some $20,000,000 of good money of the realm, a large proportion of which paid no dividends; which also is an excellent method of securing cheapness. He would find all "narrow-minded regulations" quite done away with, and the full liberty of the subject enjoyed by all; that people staid "out nights" according to their own sweet wills; that men slept when they pleased and where they pleased, and with whom they pleased--women too for that matter; and that life was as free and pleasant as his good English heart could wish. He would find that the old-fashioned, narrow-minded New England stock had disappeared--not being cheap enough--and their places were fully supplied with a delightful conglomeration of gentlemen and ladies who had fled from poor Ireland, from the Azores, from Germany, from pastoral Acadie; and here and there he would note the pigtail of the frugal Chinese, the _avant courier of a better time coming_.

Thus he would find that Lowell, having rid herself of narrow-minded notions, having followed reverently in the footsteps of his illustrious Manchester, was _a success indeed_.

And _Lynn_ too. She discovered thirty years ago the surprising swiftness of "teams," whereby six or eight men working in partnership, each one doing only one thing, say one a welt, and another a bottom, and another the eyelets, etc., could put a shoe through in one-eighth the time of the old "one-man" way. Millions of shoes were made, and shoes were cheap. Much money flowed in, and life was lovely at Lynn. But Paradise pales if too long continued. The sewing-machines came, and McKaye was a god--for the master. One man with his machine could do the work of twenty or forty men in the teams. Shoes were now amazingly cheap. The Crispins wept, the master laughed, and the making of shoes went merrily on. And what became of the Crispins? They struck! and then--they disappeared, vanished, went too "where the woodbine twineth." They too were not wanted. Let them get themselves out of the way! the Chinese are coming!

They got much consolation from a certain set of preachers, who assured them it was all right--"Laws of trade, you know," "cheap shoes good for the masses," "water will find its level," "the masses in Africa will now be able to wear shoes," "the best government is _no_ government," "all one great brotherhood," "every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost."

Paradise was just beyond their noses, and it lay just here: "When things get very cheap every man will only work three hours a day. All men can play the rest of the time, or they can cultivate their _minds_!" "Beautiful! Beautiful! Hosannah to the highest!" was what every disbanded Crispin ought to have said; but, foolish man as he was, he kept saying, "My _body_ is hungry, and I have no work, and I will steal some food--or become a broker! You had better look out."

But luckily the Southern war came, and it made places for a good many men, and the "Government" (not us men and women)--the Government paid _the bills_, and so we were tided over. And now we have got the bills, and we have got cheap labor too! And we are as near to "no government" as any people ever was except wild Indians; and that we know--for the doctrinaires say so--is Paradise. If it is not that, what in Heaven's name is it?

There was once a notion that the men who had knowledge, and experience, and strength, should think for and act for those who had not; in short, that those who were strong should protect and care for the weak. The father in some countries--not all--yet does pursue this plan; he is head and master of his household, and is expected to know how to act and what to do better than his boys and girls.

We have exploded that idea. Under this "best government upon which the sun ever shone," we have made discoveries. We find that children know what _they_ want better than their fathers; that women are really stronger than men, have larger brains, more sense, more heart, and more purity; and that when women and children both vote (mistress Biddy too) the world will go right--for they--the pure, the honest--_will_ "holler out gee!"

This old paternal or family government was a _despotism_, tempered with love, to be sure, but a despotism not to be tolerated in an enlightened age. Shovel it out, shovel it out!

It is a sad fact that children now, while wiser and purer than their fathers, are not physically quite so strong. But it is found that the pistol puts the holders upon a _perfect equality_, and that is the thing to be aimed at. The redress of the weak is therefore in the pistol, which I expect to see in every child's pocket soon. The tyrant man will then be degraded to his place. With women voting, and children holding pistols, men and fathers will be pulled down from the pedestal they have usurped so long.

We know that women have more virtue than men (?), and that children have more purity, and therefore, knowing well the "good, the true, and the beautiful," they must and shall govern the land. They shall be tyrannized no longer.

And so, as New England has cut into old England, and has set her own machinery and steam to work making many things cheaper than old England can make them, and bids fair to starve out some of her garrisons of workers, just in the same way have Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati, and Chicago taken it into their heads to set their machinery and steam to work; and now torrents of hats, and shoes, and woollens, and cottons, and clothing, and furniture, and stoves, and pots are pouring out of those nests of industry, so that even they are beginning to cry out, "Why don't you buy what we want to sell, and thus make _us_ rich?"

If, then, we in New England refuse to buy--refuse to buy at profitable prices the productions of old England--what does England propose to do with her millions of non-food-producing workmen? She demands free trade; says we are fools for not opening our ports and accepting with effusion the blessings of cheap goods she would so willingly send us? She does not quite like to open _our_ ports, as she did those of China, nor does she incline at present to carry into France the civilizing influences of her cheap looms at the point of the bayonet. _She_ must answer the question, not I.

And in New England--if that "West," with its fertile fields and its surplus food, will go to making cheap shoes and cheap cotton, and will not see how much happier she would be if she would only make corn and pork and swap them with New England for shoes and cotton--what will New England, what will Massachusetts do with her 507,034 workers who do not produce their own food? This is rather a vital question to those men and women who have no food. It is rather vital too to the capital invested in mills and machines in Lowell and elsewhere.

I come back now to my first proposition for the cure of the ills of life--_cheap labor_.

If trade be the true god, let us worship him; if to buy cheap and sell dear be the true gospel, let us extend that; if to convert men and women into tenders to machines be really the perfection of human nature, let us import the wild African and the heathen Chinee rapidly, largely, for nothing can be cheaper than they. Let us get ready our ships; let us open the ports of Dahomey, and Congo, and Canton, and Shanghai; let us exchange whiskey and tobacco for able-bodied men and women; let us fill this land with the black men and the copper men; let us perfect our civilization, for those men and those women can live cheap and work cheap; and if _white_ men and _white_ women do go to the wall--why should they not?

Gentle reader, you ask what is the _moral_?

I reply, Does not our civilization demand _cheap cotton_ and not great _men and women_? Clearly it does.

Does it not demand free _pauper immigration_? Clearly it does.

Does it not demand cheap _Chinese immigration_? Clearly it does.

Does it not demand free _pauper_ and free _Chinese voting_? Clearly it does.

Does it not demand that "Trade" shall be god, and the _laws of supply and demand_ shall rule? Clearly it does.

Does it not call this "progress"? Clearly it does.

And is not all this leading us directly to--_Heaven_ or to _Hell_? Clearly they are.

And you, gentle reader, can decide which.

CHARLES WYLLY ELLIOTT.

THE TWO WORLDS.

Two mighty silences, two worlds unseen
Over against each other lie:
For ever boundlessly apart have been,
For ever nigh.

In one is God Himself, and angels bright
Do congregate, and spirits fair;
And, lost in depths of mystic light,
Our Dead dwell there.

All things that cannot fade, nor fall, nor die,
Voices beloved, and precious things foregone,
Float up and up, and in that silence high,
With God grow one.

No barren silence, nay, but such as over
Lips that we love its spell may fling,
Where tender words like nested swallows hover,
Ere they take wing.

Sometimes from that far land there comes a breeze,
Soft airs surprise us on our way,
As dew-drops from above; then on our knees
We fall and pray.

And oft in some low crimson coast of cloud
We deem we see its far-off strand:
Our hearts, like shipwrecked sailors, cry aloud,
"The Land! the Land!"

And side by side that other world unknown,
Drenched in unbroken silence lies,
World of ourselves, where each one lives alone,
And lonely dies.

With our unuttered griefs, our joys untold,
Our multitudinous thoughts swift throng,
We dwell; one silence them and us doth fold
All our life long.

Out from those depths there comes a cry of pain.
Ah, pitifully, Lord, it calls,
"Behold the sorrows of our hearts!" and then--
A silence falls.

Nought but the narrow strip doth lie between
Of sounding surf that men call life;
Yet none can pass between those worlds unseen,
And end the strife.

Die down, die down, O thou tormented sea!
Suffer my silent world to fill
With voices from that land which cry to me,
"We love thee still."

In vain: I hear them not! but o'er my loss
Comes an apocalyptic voice,
"There shall be no more sea, and thou canst cross."
Rejoice! rejoice!

ELICE HOPKINS.

SISTER ST. LUKE.

They found her over there. "This is more than I expected," said Carrington as they landed--"seven pairs of Spanish eyes at once."

"Three pairs," answered Keith, fastening the statement to fact and the boat to a rock in his calm way; "and one if not two of the pairs are Minorcan."

The two friends crossed the broad white beach toward the little stone house of the light-keeper, who sat in the doorway, having spent the morning watching their sail cross over from Pelican reef, tacking lazily east and west--an event of more than enough importance in his isolated life to have kept him there, gazing and contented, all day. Behind the broad shoulders of swarthy Pedro stood a little figure clothed in black; and as the man lifted himself lazily at last and came down to meet them, and his wife stepped briskly forward, they saw that the third person was a nun--a large-eyed, fragile little creature, promptly introduced by Melvyna, the keeper's wife, as "Sister St. Luke." For the keeper's wife, in spite of her black eyes, was not a Minorcan at all; not even a southerner. Melvyna Sawyer was born in Vermont, and, by one of the strange chances of this vast, many-raced, motley country of ours, she had travelled south as nurse, and a very good, energetic nurse too, albeit somewhat sharp-voiced, to a delicate young wife, who had died in the sunny land, as so many of them die; the sun, with all his good will and with all his shining, not being able to undo in three months the work of long years of the snows and the bleak east winds of New England.

The lady dead, and her poor thin frame sent northward again to lie in the hillside churchyard by the side of bleak Puritan ancestors, Melvyna looked about her. She hated the lazy tropical land, and had packed her calf-skin trunk to go, when Pedro Gonsalvez surprised her by proposing matrimony. At least that is what she wrote to her Aunt Clemanthy, away up in Vermont; and although Pedro may not have used the words, he at least meant the fact, for they were married two weeks later by a justice of the peace, whom Melvyna's sharp eyes had unearthed, she of course deeming the padre of the little parish and one or two attendant priests as so much dust to be trampled energetically under her shoes, Protestant and number six and a half double-soled mediums. The justice of the peace, a good natured old gentleman who had forgotten that he held the office at all, since there was no demand for justice and the peace was never broken in the small lazy village, married them as well as he could in a surprised sort of a way, and instead of receiving a fee gave one, which Melvyna, however, promptly rescued from the bridegroom's willing hand, and returned with the remark that there was no "call for alms" (pronounced as if it rhymed with hams), and that two shilling, or mebbe three, she guessed, would be about right for the job. This sum she deposited on the table, and then took leave, walking off with a quick, enterprising step, followed by her acquiescent and admiring bridegroom. He had remained acquiescent and admiring ever since, and now, as light-house keeper on Pelican island, he admired and acquiesced more than ever; while Melvyna kept the house in order, cooked his dinners, and tended his light, which, although only third class, shone and glittered under her daily care in the old square tower which was founded by the Spaniards, heightened by the English, and now finished and owned by the United States, whose light-house board said to each other every now and then that really they must put a first-class Fresnal on Pelican island and a good substantial tower instead of that old-fashioned beacon. They did so a year or two later; and a hideous barber's pole it remains to the present day. But when Carrington and Keith landed there the square tower still stood in its gray old age, at the very edge of the ocean, so that high tides swept the step of the keeper's house. It was originally a lookout where the Spanish soldier stood and fired his culverin when a vessel came in sight outside the reef; then the British occupied the land, added a story, and placed an iron grating on the top, where their coastguardsman lighted a fire of pitch-pine knots that flared up against the sky, with the tidings, "A sail! a sail!" Finally the United States came into possession, ran up a third story, and put in a revolving light, one flash for the land and two for the sea, a proportion unnecessarily generous now to the land, since nothing came in any more, and everything went by, the little harbor being of no importance since the indigo culture had failed. But ships still sailed by on their way to the Queen of the Antilles, and to the far Windward and Leeward islands, and the old light went on revolving, presumably for their benefit. The tower, gray and crumbling, and the keeper's house, were surrounded by a high stone wall with angles and loopholes--a small but regularly planned defensive fortification built by the Spaniards; and odd enough it looked there on that peaceful island, where there was nothing to defend. But it bore itself stoutly nevertheless, this ancient little fortress, and kept a sharp lookout still over the ocean for the damnable Huguenot sail of two centuries before.

The sea had encroached greatly on Pelican island, and sooner or later it must sweep the keeper's house away; but now it was a not unpleasant sensation to hear the water wash against the step--to sit at the narrow little windows and watch the sea roll up, roll up, nearer and nearer, coming all the way landless in long surges from the distant African coast only to never quite get at the foundations of that stubborn little dwelling, which held its own against them, and then triumphantly watched them roll back, roll back, departing inch by inch down the beach, until, behold! there was a magnificent parade-ground, broad enough for a thousand feet to tread--a floor more fresh and beautiful than the marble pavements of palaces. There were not a thousand feet to tread there, however; only six. For Melvyna had more than enough to do within the house, and Pedro never walked save across the island to the inlet once in two weeks or so, where he managed to row over to the village, and return with supplies, by taking two entire days for it, even Melvyna having given up the point, tacitly submitting to loitering she could not prevent, but recompensing herself by a general cleaning on those days of the entire premises, from the top of the lantern in the tower to the last step in front of the house.

You could not argue with Pedro. He only smiled back upon you as sweetly and as softly as molasses. Melvyna, endeavoring to urge him to energy, found herself in the position of an active ant wading through the downy recesses of a feather bed, which well represented his mind.

Pedro was six feet, two inches in height, and amiable as a dove. His wife sensibly accepted him as he was, and he had his two days in town--a very mild dissipation, however, since the Minorcans are too indolent to do anything more than smoke, lie in the sun, and eat salads heavily dressed in oil. They said, "The serene and august wife of our friend is well, we trust?" And, "The island--does it not remain lonely?" And then the salad was pressed upon him again. For they all considered Pedro a man of strange and varied experiences. Had he not married a woman of wonder--of an energy unfathomable? And he lived with her alone in a light-house, on an island; alone, mind you, without a friend or relation near!

The six feet that walked over the beautiful beach of the southern ocean were those of Keith, Carrington, and Sister St. Luke.

"Now go, Miss Luke," Melvyna had said, waving her energetically away with the skimmer as she stood irresolute at the kitchen door. "'Twill do you a power of good, and they're nice, quiet gentlemen who will see to you, and make things pleasant. Bless you, _I_ know what they are. They ain't none of the miserable, good-for-nothing race about here! Your convent is fifty miles off, ain't it? And besides, you were brought over here half dead for me to cure up--now, warn't you?"

The Sister acknowledged that she was, and Melvyna went on.

"You see, things is different up north, and I understand 'em, but you don't. Now you jest go right along and hev a pleasant walk, and I'll hev a nice bowl of venison broth ready for you when you come back. Go right along now." The skimmer waved again, and the Sister went.