North America-1 [77]
a dollar a day. A dollar may be taken as representing four shillings, though it is in fact more. Food in these parts is much cheaper than in England, and therefore the wages must be considered as very good. In making, however, a just calculation it must be borne in mind that clothing is dearer than in England, and that much more of it is necessary. The wages nevertheless are high, and will enable the laborer to save money, if only he can get them paid. The complaint that wages are held back, and not even ultimately paid, is very common. There is no fixed rule for satisfying all such claims once a week, and thus debts to laborers are contracted, and when contracted are ignored. With us there is a feeling that it is pitiful, mean almost beyond expression, to wrong a laborer of his hire. We have men who go in debt to tradesmen perhaps without a thought of paying them; but when we speak of such a one who has descended into the lowest mire of insolvency, we say that he has not paid his washerwoman. Out there in the West the washerwoman is as fair game as the tailor, the domestic servant as the wine merchant. If a man be honest he will not willingly take either goods or labor without payment; and it may be hard to prove that he who takes the latter is more dishonest than he who takes the former; but with us there is a prejudice in favor of one's washerwoman by which the Western mind is not weakened. "They certainly have to be smart to get it," a gentleman said to me whom I had taxed on the subject. "You see, on the frontier a man is bound to be smart. If he aint smart, he'd better go back East, perhaps as far as Europe; he'll do there." I had got my answer, and my friend had turned the question; but the fact was admitted by him, as it had been by many others. Why this should be so is a question to answer which thoroughly would require a volume in itself. As to the driving, why should men submit to it, seeing that labor is abundant, and that in all newly-settled countries the laborer is the true hero of the age? In answer to this is to be alleged the fact that hired labor is chiefly done by fresh comers, by Irish and Germans, who have not as yet among them any combination sufficient to protect them from such usage. The men over them are new as masters, masters who are rough themselves, who themselves have been roughly driven, and who have not learned to be gracious to those below them. It is a part of their contract that very hard work shall be exacted, and the driving resolves itself into this: that the master, looking after his own interest, is constantly accusing his laborer of a breach of his part of the contract. The men no doubt do become used to it, and slacken probably in their endeavors when the tongue of the master or foreman is not heard. But as to that matter of non- payment of wages, the men must live; and here, as elsewhere, the master who omits to pay once will hardly find laborers in future. The matter would remedy itself elsewhere, and does it not do so here? This of course is so, and it is not to be understood that labor as a rule is defrauded of its hire. But the relation of the master and the man admit of such fraud here much more frequently than in England. In England the laborer who did not get his wages on the Saturday, could not go on for the next week. To him, under such circumstances, the world would be coming to an end. But in the Western States the laborer does not live so completely from hand to mouth. He is rarely paid by the week, is accustomed to give some credit, and, till hard pressed by bad circumstances, generally has something by him. They do save money, and are thus fattened up to a state which admits of victimization. I cannot owe money to the little village cobbler who mends my shoes, because he demands and receives his payment when his job is done. But to my friend in Regent Street I extend my custom on a different system; and when I make my start for continental life I have with him a matter of unsettled business to a considerable extent. The American laborer