Various

“ I met another very distinguished electrician—a man who has hid his light under a bushel—a man whose quiet modesty has kept him very much in the background, but who really has done as much work as any body on that side of the Atlantic, and few have done more on this—and that is Mr. Edward Weston. He is an Englishman who has established himself in New York. He has been working steadily for years at his laboratory, and works and produces plant with all the skill and exactitude that the electrician or mechanic could desire. ”

“ How does the American tariff affect wages? The idea that these are determinable by the tariff is the corner stone of protection in the States. The artisan has been so sedulously educated to believe that the chief object of import duties is to protect him from falling into a ruinous competition with what is called the "pauper labor of Europe," that no movement on the part of workmen in the direction of free trade is ever likely to arise in America. ”

“ Many of those present know that I am as ready to totally condemn gaseous fuel where it does not pay as to advise its use where some advantage is to be gained. You will understand that my remarks apply to coal gas only. As to producer or furnace gases, I know practically nothing, except that sometimes it pays better to burn your candle as a candle than make it into gas, and burn it as a gas afterward. The use of producer gas no doubt pays on a large scale; and things on a large scale, so far as gas is concerned, are not matters with which I have time to concern myself. ”

“ The Americans are the most charming people on this earth. When we enter their houses and come to know them, they treat us in a way that cannot be forgotten. I noticed a very great change since I was in America before. Whether it is a greater acquaintance with them or not I cannot say, but there is an absence of that which we can only express by a certain word called "cockiness." It struck me at one time that there was a good deal of cockiness on that side of the Atlantic, that has entirely disappeared. ”

“ I have tried to demonstrate that the tariff, to which the higher wages of America are so confidently attributed, has really no influence whatever upon them, and that it is not therefore an engine, such as it is glowingly represented to the American artisan, constructed for the purpose of raising his lot above that of the so-called "pauper labor of Europe." ”

“ If we ask ourselves, at the outset of the inquiry, "Who and what are the operatives of manufacturing America?" the answer involves a distinction which cannot be too strongly insisted upon, or too carefully kept in mind. These people consist, first, of native-born, and, secondly, of alien workers. The United States census, reckoning every child born in the country as an American, even if both his parents be foreigners, I would make it appear that only six and a half millions out of its fifty millions are of alien birth, but, for our purpose, these figures are misleading. ”

“ There was a conference of electricians appointed by the United States Government, that was chiefly distinguished on the part of the American Government by selecting those who were not electricians. But many attended the Electrical Conference who stand high as electricians, one especially, who, though perhaps from want of experience he did not shine very brilliantly as a chairman, certainly stands as one of the ablest electricians of the day—I mean Professor Rowland. ”

“ Wages in America, therefore, cannot possibly be regulated by the tariff, because, whatever wages can be earned by men engaged in the production of agricultural products—the prices of which are fixed in Liverpool—must be the rate of wages which will substantially be paid in other branches of business. Wages, like water, seek a level; if manufacture pays best, labor will quit agriculture; if agriculture pays best, manufactures will decline, and agriculture progress. ”

“ A glance at the condition of industrial society in America vividly illustrates this conclusion. Any man, with a few dollars and a strong pair of arms, can win far greater rewards from the soil than he could possibly obtain by the same effort in Europe. His wages are high, because the grade of comfort to be obtained from the land by means of a little labor is high, and the artisans' wages must follow suit, if men are to be tempted from the field into the workshop. American politicians, however, would have us believe that American labor owes its prosperity to taxation ”

“ A man usually appreciates the wits which have produced what he has considered impossible. In purely experimental work I think I may fairly state that the use of gas as a fuel in the private workshop and laboratory has done incalculable service in the improvement of processes and trades, and has played an important part in insuring the success and fortunes of many hundreds of experimenters, who have brought their labors to a successful issue in cases where, in its absence, neither time nor patience would have been available. ”

“ Aside from wages, which will be separately considered, the housing, education, sobriety, and pauperism of any given industrial community form together the best possible test of its social condition. In regard to the housing of labor, there is no more important fact to be discovered than the proportion of an operative population who possess in fee simple the houses in which they dwell. This proportion among the wage-earners of Massachusetts is remarkably high, one working man in every four being the proprietor of the house in which he lives. ”

“ For that purpose I proposed that 1,000 watts, or the kilowatt, should replace what is now called the horsepower, and suggested it for the consideration of engineers. It has been received with a great deal of consideration by those who understand the subject, and a considerable amount of ridicule by those who do not. It is rather a remarkable thing that, as a rule, one will always find ridicule and ignorance running side by side; and it is an almost invariable fact that when a new proposition is brought forward, it is laughed at. ”

“ I only need instance wire card-making and the brazing shops of wire cable makers to show that a large and free use of gas is compatible with the strictest economy and profitable working.
Of all the tools in a workshop, nothing saves more time and worry than two or three sizes of good blowpipes and an efficient blower. I have seen in one day more work spoilt, and time lost, for want of these than would have paid for the apparatus twice over; and in almost every shop emergencies are constantly happening in which a good blowpipe will render most efficient service. ”

“ Yet they have more leisure, and earn more money than the operatives of fifty years ago, but they do not know how to improve the one or use the other. These American-born children of foreign parentage are, indeed, under the control neither of their church nor their parents, and they, consequently, adopt the vices and follies instead of the good habits of our people. It is vital to the interests of the whole community that they should be brought under good moral influence; that they should live in better homes, and breathe a better social atmosphere than is now to be found in our factory towns. ”

“ Advocates who are not prepared to say that every bargain shall be controlled by beneficence, and who distinctly admire the chief results of competition, cannot logically demand that labor, alone of all salable commodities, shall be bought and sold on altruistic principles.
In what immediately precedes, I have endeavored to indicate the character of the pleadings which make American artisans universally supporters of the tariff, and we must now return to the question, What, after all, is really the effect of protection on wages in America? ”

“ Now bearing in mind that Massachusetts is essentially a Yankee State, where comparatively few European emigrants settle, it seems probable that, going back several generations, the numbers, even of Massachusetts men, who may be truly called "Americans" would dwindle considerably. These men, however, the children of equality, of the common school, and of democratic institutions, may be considered as leaven, leavening the lump of European emigration, and shaping, so far as they can, the character of the American; people that is yet to be. ”

“ New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, contain together nearly one-half of the whole manufacturing population of America, while Connecticut and Massachusetts are the very cradle of American manufacture, and the home of the typical Yankee artisan. In addition, the State of Massachusetts is distinguished by possessing a Bureau of Statistics of Labor, whose sole business is to ventilate industrial questions, and to collect such facts as will afford the statesman a sound basis for industrial legislation. ”

“ That a great change has occurred in the social condition of labor in the United States during the last forty years, and that, spite of all the existing agencies of improvement, it is doubtful whether the working classes of America are not, at the present moment, falling still further from those high ideals of operative life which once so brilliantly distinguished the United States from European countries. ”

“ In these cases, however, where often the children have had no schooling at all before they are old enough to work, it is quite clear that the school cannot do all that is required to raise the labor of to-day up to the levels it occupied in the past. And, if the school itself is ineffective in this regard, how much more so must be the Church, to which immigrant youth is a comparative stranger; or those democratic institutions which are based, to quote the words of Washington himself, upon "the virtue and intelligence of the people." ”

“ The county of Barnstaple in Massachusetts, for example, with a population of 32,000 souls, and having no licensed liquor saloons, yields a crop of only three convictions per annum for drunkenness. The county of Suffolk, on the other hand, with a population of nearly 400,000, and a license for every 175 of its inhabitants, acknowledges one drunkard for every 50 of its population. The labor in one case is nearly all native; in the other, largely foreign.
It is almost, if not quite, impossible to obtain the statistics of pauperism in America. ”

“ In spite of the love of money and luxury which is so conspicuous a feature of certain sections of American society, a high ideal of the proper function of wealth has arisen in the States, where large fortunes are chiefly things of recent date, among large and influential classes having an enlightened regard for the best welfare of the country. ”

“ In a large number of cases, the fact that the coal does not seem to be organized must be due to the too great compression that the carbonized cells and vessels have undergone when yet soft and elastic, at the time this slow but continuous pressure was being exerted.
It also became of interest to find out whether, through the very fact of carbonization, the dimensions of the organic elements had perceptibly varied—a sort of research that presents certain difficulties. At present we have no living plant that is comparable, even remotely, with those that grew during the coal epoch. ”

“ It has been proved, by a recent investigation, whose details we need not follow, that the expenditure of working men's families, of similar size, in Massachusetts and in Great Britain, stand to each other in the ratio of 15 to 10. By introducing this new factor into our calculations, we find that a man who spends £60 per annum in England would spend £90, instead of £77, per annum in the States, paying American prices for subsistence, and living up to American standards. ”

“ The primary schools of great industrial towns, such as Fall River, the Manchester of America, are filled, to quite as great an extent as similar schools in Europe, with ignorant, ragged, and bare-footed urchins. These children are, indeed, no less well cared for and taught than their Yankee fellows, and one cannot sufficiently admire the energy and enthusiasm with which school-teachers generally endeavor to "make Americans" of their stolid and ragged little alien charges. ”

“ That man, however, is not worthy of a home in the great republic, who does not appreciate the higher social levels at which native labor desires to live, who is not anxious to make the most of the advantages which democratic institutions offer him, who does not, in short, ardently desire to become a "good American." ”

“ The application of gas will often enable you to go over his head, and do what, if the workman had his own way, would be an impossibility. When a man is unable or unwilling to see a way out of a difficulty, a master or foreman has the power to take the law in his own hands; and when a workman has been met with this kind of a reply once or twice, he usually gives way, and does not in future attempt to dictate and teach his master his own business. In carrying out this matter, it is not necessary that a specimen of fine workmanship shall be produced. ”

“ We are always glad of an excuse to get out of our offices. In America, too, servants and messengers are the exception, a boy is not to be had, whereas in England we get an errand boy at half a crown a week. That which costs half a crown here costs 12s. to 15s. in America; and, that being so, it is much better to pay the telephone company a sum that will, at less cost, enable your business to be transacted without the engagement of such a boy. ”

“ The shrinking on of collars, forging, hardening, and tempering of tools, melting lead or resin out of pipes which have been bent, and endless other odd matters, are constantly turning up; and on these, in the absence of a blowpipe, I have often seen men spend hours instead of minutes. Things which need a blowpipe are usually most awkward to do without one; and men will go fiddling about and tumbling over each other without seeing really what they intend to do. They are content, as it all counts in the day's work; that it comes off the profits is not their concern. ”

“ In other words, a workman earning £60 per annum in Great Britain would receive £99, or 62 per cent. more wages in the States, but living there would cost him £77, or £17 more than here, giving him a net advantage of only 28 per cent., instead of 62 per cent., derived from living and working in America.
But this result does not exhaust the question. The standard of life is very different among working men in the States and in Great Britain, and the almost inexhaustible statistics of the report, already so often quoted, enable us to gauge this difference with accuracy. ”

“ It is not in the valleys of Massachusetts, however, that the greatest manufacturing cities of the Union are to be found, the towns already referred to containing usually only a few thousand inhabitants, and being still, for the most part, rural in their surroundings. They are, indeed, the fastnesses, so to speak, to which the Yankee artisan has retired, after having been almost literally swept out of the great manufacturing cities by successive waves of emigrant labor, chiefly of Irish and French-Canadian nationality. ”

“ It is not generally known that any burner used at ordinary pressures of gas gives a much better light when it is turned over with the flat of the flame horizontal, until the flame becomes saucer-shaped, as I show you. You can see for yourselves the increase in light; and in addition to this the workman has the great advantage of a shadowless flame. In practice, a burner consuming 5 cubic feet of gas per hour with a horizontal flame is a better fitter's than an upright burner with 6 cubic feet per hour. I do not believe in the policy of giving a man a poor light to work by—it does not pay ”

“ My own experiments with alloys of the rarer metals, which have not been concluded without profit to myself, would certainly never have been undertaken except with the use of gas furnaces, which were both practically unlimited in power and admitted of the most absolute precision in use; and I may safely say, without violating any confidence, that many of the precious stories and so-called "natural" products make their appearance in the world first in a crucible in a gas furnace. ”

“ If the men's dinners have to be heated, it is easy to purchase ovens which will do all the work required by gas at a much cheaper rate than by coal, if we consider the labor and attention necessary with any coal fire. Not that gas is cheaper than coal; but say we have 100 dinners to warm. This can be done in a gas-oven in about 20 minutes, at a cost for gas of less than 1d.; in fact, for one-fourth the cost of labor only in attending to a coal fire, without considering the cost of wood or coals. Gas, in many instances, is an apparently expensive fuel ”