America's Working People (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II THE NEW FACTORY TOWNS IN THE SOUTH When I was in Massachusetts, I heard absolutely nothing about English competition. More than half the manufacturers I talked with had a good deal to say about the competition of cheap workmen m America labour, but it was always the cheap labour of the South. The one manufacturer who did talk with me about English labour put in the strongest kind of terms its inferiority. An American weaver, he said, can handle eight looms, where an English weaver handles four.'' I told him that some Scotch and English weavers I had talked with had said that there was just that difference between the work they did in the old country and here, and I asked how he accounted for it. The English workman is too beer- soaked, he said, to look after more than four looms. The sentiment here, he continued, is against drinking, and those who come over learn to meet our expectations. I doubted whether this was the whole explanation, and thought of the brilliant passage in Henry Adams's History of the United States where he says that in the earliest days of the Republic it was a constant miracle to our foreign critics how the newly landed immigrant was changed into a new man by the hopes and ambitions which this country awakened in him. Be the explanation what it may, there is no doubt about the facts. American weavers turn out nearly twice as much work per day as their English competitors, and their wage per piece is absolutely a little less. It is not strange, therefore, that the New England manufacturers, who are shipping large quantities of cotton abroad, have ceased to talk of the cheap labour of old England. The cheap labour they do talk about, as has been said, is the cheap labour of the South. No one who talked with me, however, talked t...