14 G. S. CALLENDER 



in contact with cheap, unoccupied land, where every one can 

 easily become an independent proprietor, it is almost impossi- 

 ble to create such a class. The social attractions of land 

 ownership outweigh those of high wages. Every one has 

 heard of the difficulty which was encountered in this country 

 during colonial times and the early part of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury in securing laborers to work for hire. Franklin tells us 

 that even the Scotch-Irish immigrants to Pennsylvania, who 

 had been trained as artisans at home, would not continue more 

 than a few years in that capacity; the early textile manufac- 

 tures in New England had to depend chiefly upon female 

 laborers, whose average period of service was less than five 

 years ; while the greatest difficulty was experienced by all the 

 states in securing common laborers to construct the early 

 canals. The creation of a wage-earning class in the north was 

 in fact very slow and very difficult before the flood of immi- 

 grants came in, and the chief economic advantage of immigra- 

 tion to this country consisted not so much in the fact that 

 the immigrants represented an actual addition to our labor- 

 ing population as that they supplied material out of which we 

 could easily create a wage-earning class at the time when we 

 needed to organize labor in order to construct our railroads 

 and develop manufactures. In the south, where even agri- 

 culture required the organization of labor in order to be con- 

 ducted most efficiently, the difficulty or impossibility of in- 

 ducing the whites to become wage earners while they were in 

 contact with cheap land is undoubtedly the chief reason why 

 the cotton industry in this country was developed by slave 

 instead of by free labor. 



This difficulty of inducing men in a new country to give 

 up the position of an independent proprietor and become a 

 dependent wage earner does not prevent the development of 

 small manufactures, which are necessary for the immediate 

 and pressing wants of the community, and require no great 

 organization of workmen for their production. If the com- 

 munity for any reason is unable to secure these by trade, the 

 manufacture of them will usually arise, as it did to some ex- 

 tent in the northern colonies in the eighteenth century. But 

 the development of manufactures is not likely to go much be- 



