USA > Indiana > Perry County > Cannelton > Cannelton, Perry County, Ind., at the intersection of the eastern margin of the Illinois coal basin, by the Ohio River : its natural advantages as a site for manufacturing > Part 6
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It will be seen under the next head what of these requisites we may expect from abroad.
LABOR AND SKILL.
The first, and, as is supposed, the strongest objection made to the pre- sent commencement of manufactories in the West, is the scarcity and high price of labor.
In view of the millions of acres we have untilled, labor is indeed scarce-but in view of the prices obtained for our agricultural surplus products, labor is abundant.
The money price of mechanical labor is now actually less in the settled and healthy sections of the West than in New England; the ave- rage of wages in all employments and positions is certainly not more than 10 per cent. higher. The day laborer in Boston gets $1-here 75 cents-farm hands here, $8 to $16 per month: there $15 to $25. But this money, thus paid, is the measure of two values-first, of wa- ges; and second, of what it purchases for the laborer. In this view labor is cheaper here than in any country where the bread fruit and plantain do not grow. He who labors for pay looks at the result of re- ceipts and expenditures of the year, or of life. He can live here equally well at one third less than in New England and at one half of what he could in England. He can therefore work here from 33 to 50 per cent. less than in the two great manufacturing countries of the world. If we give the same wages, the laborer can lay up from 33 to 50 per cent.
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more here than in those countries, and if he buys land with his earnings. he gets ten, or fifty, or one hundred times as many acres here as he could get there.
All this, says the objector, is very plain, but we have not enough ar- tisans here for the new employment, and if you call them from abroad, will they come? The answer is in the fact that whenever and where- ever we have furnished profitable and certain employment in the West, the call for labor has been promptly supplied. The operatives in cot- ton mills have not come, because we have built no mills for them- capital has not come from New England for investment in cotton mills, because it has yielded so large an interest at home; and it has not come from England, because of the distance and the absence of direct communication between the two points and the ignorance on the part of the English manufacturer of our advantages.
We are to look first for superintendents and overseers among our best men. As we can afford to pay very high prices, it is not doubted that the men can be had, and we cannot admit that the Anglo-Saxon here has not as much enterprise and intellect as in the East or in England. The salary of a superintendent of a Lowell corporation ranges from $2,000 to $6,000 per annum, and this commands the highest grade of talent in New England. It takes the lawyer from his practice and the judge from the bench. The average salaries of the Governors of the New England States is $1,208 per annum, and of Judges of the Su- preme Courts is $1,415 per annum. $2,000 here is equal to $3,000 there. Will not this price command the same talent here? If not, we have the surplus fund of savings in transportation so to increase the amount until we can draw the Lowell superintendent from the Lowell mill.
For ordinary operatives we have three sources of supply:
First-domestic. In the opinion of some fifty manufacturers of whom I have sought information, there will not be the slightest difficul- ty in obtaining male operatives at home, and at as low a rate of wages as that paid in New England, and as little difficulty in obtaining fe- males, if the proper system is adopted. One of the oldest and most successful manufacturers in the interior of Kentucky says that he has no difficulty in obtaining any number desired for his cotton mill, and could increase this number to a great extent. At Cincinnati the supply is greater than the demand, and at the largest cotton mill there, applica- tions for employment are only received on Monday morning. In Lou- isville, our clothing merchants, printers, bookbinders, paper makers, &c. hire as cheaply as in Boston; and those who have the best means of forming an opinion on the subject, and without an exception, say that the supply of such labor will be greater than the demand.
It may be necessary to state to those who have never seen or read the details of a cotton mill, that it does not require as long an apprentice- ship at the spindle or power loom as in most employments; from thirty to sixty days is long enough to give both theory and practice. The average period of residence of the female operatives at the New Eng- land manufacturing towns is only about four years, yet there is more
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and better work actually done in the same time by these operatives than is obtained from any operatives in the same employment in the world.
The next source of supply is from the East, and particularly from New England.
Twenty years ago I came from the center of the cotton manufactur- ing district of New England, and since have had every means of know- ing the feelings of every class of persons there engaged in manufactur- ing; and I say with knowledge and with confidence that, were I to go there now and advertise in the newspapers, or even put placards on the guide posts at the road crossings, that I was authorized by responsible corporations, who had made and would conduct cotton mills on the Lowell system, to contract for the immediate employment of male and female operatives for those mills. and at the same wages paid at Lowell, and that the place of employment was at an healthy position on the free bank of La Belle Rivière, for every hundred desired there would be a thousand applications.
The father would come because he could exchange his few paternal acres for broad fields in the West; the son would come to a country offering greater freedom of action and a wider scope to his ambitious plans; and the daughter would come from the novelty of change, and because, of the female sex in New England-the supply is greater than the demand.
The next source of supply is from Europe, and particularly from the manufacturing districts of England. To show that I do not merely re- ly on conjecture and general reasoning, I bring the facts from the best English authority known.
In 1840, a select committee, of which Mr. Hume was chairman, was raised in the House of Commons, to take into consideration the general condition of the manufacturing interests of Great Britain and the policy of modifying its system of import duties. A mass of testimony was given to this committee by the officers of the most important boards of trade, and chambers of commerce, and by the leading manufacturers. Although neither the committee nor the witnesses stated, in direct terms. that the manufacturing prosperity of England was on the wane, and that she could not, besides paying the cost of transportation, compete with the cheap food and natural advantages of many other countries (the United States for instance) which had been her best customers; it is quite appa- rent that such were their impressions, and that they were only deterred from stating the truth boldly by the fear of giving encouragement to competition abroad. Let the reader judge from the following extracts.
"Your committee gather from the evidence that has been laid before them, that while the prosperity of our own manufactures is not to be traced to ben- efits derived from the exclusion of foreign rival manufactures, so neither is the competition of continental manufactures to be traced to a protective system. They are told that the most vigorous and successful of the manufactures ou the continent have grown. not out of peculiar favor shown to them by legisla- tion, but from those natural and spontaneous advantages which are associated with labor and capital in certain localities, and which cannot be transferred elsewhere at the mandate of the legislature, or at the will of the manufacturer. Your commit-
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tee see reason to believe, that the most prosperous fabrics are those which flourish without the aid of special favors."
That is, when these fabrics are made where the "natural and spon - taneous advantages" exist ; where (as in this valley) God has given all the "special favors" that the manufacturer needs.
"With reference to the influence of the protective system upon wages, and on the condition of the laborer, your committee have to observe that, as the pressure of foreign competition is heaviest on those articles in the production of which the rate of wages is lowest, so it is obvious, in a country exporting as much as England does, that other advantages may more than compensate for an apparent advantage in the money price of labor. The countries in which the rate of wages is lowest, are not always those which manufacture most successfully."
For illustration: When cotton is at 8 cents per lb. in New Orleans, the difference between its cost to the Louisville and the Manchaster manufacturer, for a mill of 10,000 spindles, would be about $25,960 per annum. At our rate of wages about $25,600 would be paid yearly for labor in the mill. We therefore can pay the laborer double price, and be on an equality, if we had no other advantage.
Impost duties were higher in England than in France, yet the Spit- alfields' weaver had to yield to the weaver of Lyons, because food was cheaper at Lyons than at Spitalfields .*
Egypt grows cotton, and the Pacha of Egypt undertook to manufac- ture it largely; he selected the best cotton and paid his own price for it; he imported the best machinery and the most skillful managers; he gathered the strongest and most active of his Fellahs and Arabs, and brought down
*It would seem that no country can largely manufacture for export when it has to import food
The full and short time of the Lancaster cotton mills is measured on a sli- ding scale that has almost precisely corresponded with that at the Liverpool custom house.
The Middlesex (Massachusetts) mills are now closing, chiefly because the supply of food in Massachusetts is far less than the demand. The operative is ready to remove from positions where beef is 15 cents per pound, to where it can be had at 5 cents per pound.
The chief material that is combined in cotton cloth, bar iron. &c., &c., is food. The locus in quo of the manufacturer is where, other things being equal, the ma- erials required in and about the fabric can be brought together at the least cost.
The truth of this proposition seems obvious: yet there are many people on he Ohio river who mantain that, inasmuch as we have imported our black walnut furniture, we should continue to send our walnut logs 3,000 miles round he capes of Florida and have them made into breakfast tables, and in a sea- board work-shop, for our own use-and there are many statesmen who contend hat it is good economy to send our cotton and corn to Manchester and Glasgow, ind take our pay in sheetings and shirtings, when it requires five times the la- por to transport the corn, the cotton, and the cloth, than to make the cloth. We consume more coal in ge ting our staples and goods to and from a foreign mar- tet than is required to move the machinery where the goods are made. The arriers eat more food than the mill operatives.
We should and must manufacture at home because our labor is so costly, nd because so much labor is required in the transportation of our heavy sta- les to our present markets.
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slaves from Dongola and Sennaar, fixed their wages at thirty paras (less than 4 cents) a day, and compelled them to labor under the bastinado ; but, even in the rudest fabrics, he could not compete at home with the English and Swiss manufacturer; because his laborers were ignorant: because compulsion could not beget ambition to excel; and because re- wards (had they been offered) which could not be safely invested, and which could be taken away by the same hand that gave, were not in- ducements sufficiently strong to make the indolent active, or to fit the unintelligent for employments which require mental energy and mechan- ical care.
"And your committee are persuaded that the best service that could be ren- dered to the industrions classes of the community, would be to extend the field of labor, and of demand for labor, by an extension of our commerce.
"Your committee further recommend, that, as speedily as possible, the whole system of differential duties and of all restrictions should be reconsidered, and that a change be therein effected in such a manner that existing interests may suffer as little as possible in the transition to a more liberal and equitable state of things * * the simplifications they recommend would vastly facilitate the transactions of commerce," &c., &c.
That is, to rely as their fathers did, and before their manufacturing age, on "the wooden walls of old England." Nature seems to have made the coasts, harbors, and estuaries of Great Britain for a peculiarly maritime people. Here is her natural strength. Her energies were partially turned aside from this interest, for half a century, by the in- ventions of Arkwright, Newcomen, Watt, and others, and from the pos- session of the cheapest fuel then known, by which these inventions could be turned to profit. But it is evident that Mr. Hume and his committee think more of the fisheries and the carrying trade than of cotton cloth as the sources of future support and profit to England.
Evidence .- Extracts from the evidence of Mr. McGregor, one of the secreta- ries of the Board of Trade; Dr. Bowring; Mr. Huine, of the Board of Cus- toms and Board of Trade; and J. Benj. Smith, President of the Board of Commerce of Manchester, and others:
"The German grazier now exchanges Ins cattle and his beef for fabrics with the home manufacturer, and the corn dealer and miller provide bread for the manufacturer, and take and use his goods in return; they produce, in most in- stances, as cheaply as we do, notwithstanding our skill and cheap coal, because they have abundance to maintain life within themselves. The artisan, in the cotton manufacture, can support himself with equal comfort in Germany at half, and in Westphalia, Bavaria, and Austria, at less than half. of what it costs the English artisan."
The Germans and Bavarians come yearly to the West, in thousands, attracted by our cheap lands and cheap living-and we have far cheaper coal than can be found in England.
"The workman of England has to pay, in one way or another, more than half his wages in taxation. A workman in Saxony, who is almost entirely free from tax, can live as well upon 5s. a week as an English artisan can live upon 9s. a week."
Yet one of the inducements that the West holds out, and which brings the Saxon emigrant, is light taxes.
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"The state of Swiss manufactures is now such that their cotton goods come into competition with ours, and meet us with very great advantages, in our Eastern markets: and they are sent to the United States and the Brazils in very large quantities, although the cost of carriage on the cotton must cost them donble what the Lancaster and Lancastershire manufacturer pays."
Light taxes and cheap living explain the success of the Swiss manu- facturer.
"Of late years there is a tendency for capital and labor to quit this and settle in other countries; in so much so, that all the cotton factories in the neighbor- hood of Vienna, in consequence of the cheapness of provisions, are in a very fair and prosperous condition; but the directors and foremen of these manufacto- ries are chiefly Englishmen or Scotchmen, from the cotton manufactories of Manchester and Glasgow. We find in France, that the principal foreman at Rouen and in the cotton factories are from Lancaster; you find it in Belgium, in Holland, and in the neighborhood of Liege; yon find British capital going into France, Belgium, and Germany, to a very great amount; and this very British capital employed there producing manufactures which meet ns in the markets of the Mediterranean, the United States, Porto Rico, Cuba, South America, and the East Indies."
"Agents are constantly employed in the manufacturing districts, Birming- ham, Nottingham, Leeds, Manchester, and Glasgow, in selecting the ablest workmen to go to foreign countries.
"We now cannot export to Switzerland Nos. of yarn under 110; the same process is going on in other countries."
"In Lancaster the wages have not increased with the price of provisions; wages never increase with the price of provisions, they always decline with a rise in the price of provisions, because a high price of food always diminishes the demand for labor, and the rate of wages is determined by the demand for labor."
In England the cotton weaver can do nothing but weave cotton; and his children are taught only to weave cotton. As the manufacturing operative, for several generations, was better paid than the agriculturist, this class has increased so as to outstrip the demand; the producers of food are now fewer than the consumers; the ratio of increase in both is the same, and, in consequence, the price of food must increase and the means of buying food must decrease.
Here, and under our system, the demand for any particular labor regulates the supply. The four years labor in the mill, instead of inca- pacitating the operative for other employments, has a very decided ten- dency to insure him success in other employments. In England the cotton spinner never expects to be a freeholder or to marry a freeholder; here the proceeds of labor in the mill are generally intended for the pur- chase of land and the necessaries in and about the house of the land owner.
The English rule will continue to obtain there, and, with the modifi- cations suggested, is true here.
"The lower price of provisions induce many people not engaged in manu- factures to settle abroad. There are four or five millions (twenty to thirty mil- lions of dollars) annually drawn from the incomes of England spent in France alone, and a great amount in Italy; the city of Naples is almost entirely sup- ported by English expenditure."
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Much of this money doubtless goes to support the vices of Paris, but still an enormous amount is paid out by those who seek cheap food abroad.
Now if the nobleman, with a rent roll of thousands, goes to Italy to save some hundreds, what shall prevent the Manchester weaver from coming here (if he can get the means to remove) where he can have "a chicken in the pot" every day instead of only on Christmas and other church festivals; and here, with more and better food, he would do more and better work, and would soon catch the spirit of our own people and fit himself for independence on a farn.
Here are the facts which show us what of labor and capital we may expect from abroad whenever we choose to take the proper means to obtain it. That but little of English capital and of this kind of labor has hitherto come to this valley is not to be wondered at. I need not quote authorities to show how profoundly ignorant the English generally have been of the West. How few of them who have thought of Ken. tucky but in connection with the long rifle, and would not rather have trusted themselves to the crese of the Malay pirate than to the terrible Bowie-knife of Arkansas or Mississippi. Until the last year, when they were so liberally supplied with the corn of Indiana and Illinois, how few of them had ever heard of these States. Within the last twelve months, the lower and middle classes of Europe have acquired more knowledge of us and of our country than they ever had before. The immense quantities of breadstuff's and all kinds of provisions which we threw on them, on an unexpected demand, astonished them as much as the fall of manna did the Israelites; while the triumphs of our volun- teers in Mexico gave them the highest opinion of cur population. The contributions we sent them so freely, removed many of their prejudices and disposed them to think kindly of us. The bravery and success of our troops won their admiration. They see that our volunteers can fight as well before stone walls as behind cotton bales. A few years since they would have preferred employment among the French, "their natu- ral enemies," and incurred the necessity of learning a language their class has always despised, to accepting employment here; now thousands of them would gladly come to the land where bread is so cheap and men are so brave.
There is but little of English capital and artisan labor in New Eng. land, but the reason is obvious: it will be remembered that, until the last ten years, England could profitably employ both at home, and since New England had nearly enough of both; and, besides, the Englishman and the Scotsmen, when they do go abroad, prefer to go where they can lead and not where they would be obliged to follow. Here, the posi- tion which their capital and skill would take, would not only gratify their pride but command the desired profits. Our ships built at and tak- ing their departure from Western ports, and laden with Western pro- duets, will soon be well known at "Lloyd's," and every year will in- crease the variety and reputation of the products we ship to Liverpool and Glasgow.
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The statistics of emigration are even now showing the results of the causes here enumerated.
The efforts of this committee and of the advocates of free trade, and the clamors of the people for the removal of restrictions on imports of food, have vastly changed the policy of England. The taxes on the manufacturer are now lighter and food is cheaper; but, while the church and poor rates are imposed and taxes are actually collected to pay inter- est on their national debt, it is preposterous to contend that Englishmmen can compete with our cheaper food and cheaper power and nominal taxes, when employed in manufacturing our peculiar staples.
The third requisite is:
Reputation or good will, and a condition of society and laws adapi- cd to a manufacturing district.
In other countries the "good will" of a position is often of more value than the capital invested, and reputation of a particular article has fre- quently outlived for years its intrinsic worth. But, in this country. where so many changes are constantly occurring, that "good will" is rarely set down as part of one's assets, and reputation seldom passes a single generation, and neither has as much influence in fixing the price of cotton goods, bar iron, or common jeans, as of Rodgers' knives or Collins' axes. Whatever of either our Western manufacturer deserves and desires to have, can be obtained by the appropriation of a small part of his savings for the use of your advertising columns.
It is admitted that no manufactory can succeed except under the pro- tection of good laws, well administered, and with the influence of a controlling class of society favorable to such pursuits.
There are two kinds of manufacturing employments, and cach re- quires a different position.
Of the population of London, Paris, and New York, perhaps a large majority are really manufacturers, for the jeweler, engraver. shoemaker, milliner, &c., &c., are really as much manufacturers as the weavers of cotton. This class requires and obtains a support from the classes of society who mainly distribute unproductive capital, and congregate in large commercial or fashionable cities. Many also can only find en- ployment of really productive capital in such cities where there is an endless division and subdivision of labor, and where sales are made to order; such, for instance, as the optician, the mathematical instrument maker, &c. These classes need be under no particular discipline. They can choose their own hours for, and places of labor, and, as they work generally for money, they require no special protection from law.
Quite otherwise is it with what we usually term the manufacturing class, those who carry on, or work in large establishments which re- quire heavy capital, both fixed and active, and where the labor of cach operative in each establishment is dependent on, and is in immediate combination with the labor of others.
In all such establishments it is generally the fractions of savings in each department that produce dividends or profits. To make these sav. ings, the human machinery in the mill should run as smoothly and with almost as little interruption as the iron.
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It is mainly to the perfect organization and esprit de corps of the overseers and operatives in their manufacturing towns that the New Eng- land manufacturer owes his remarkable success. This cannot be had in places where other interests preponderate.
Manual labor, to be profitable, must be respectable, and even fash- ionable. The overseer of a cotton, or any other mill is not contented unless his rank in society is as high as that of his neighbor in any other employment. The factory girl works cheerfully and steadily where all her associates have the same hours of labor-the same amusements-the same objects of thought-who live in the same manner, and under the same general rules. Here the necessary restraints are not irksome, be- cause they bear on all alike. To those who have ever been at Lowell and seen the practical workings of a perfectly organized manufacturing society, I refer for the correctness of these positions.
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