1870. 



NEW ENGLAND FARJiCER. 



501 



CHEAP AND DEAR LABOR. 



We have been amused — to use a somewhat 

 non-committal expression — by reading the dis- 

 cussion that has been going on of late in the 

 agricultural and other papers printed at the 

 North and the South, at the East and the 

 West, on the labor question. We are old 

 enough to remember the cheap labor of New 

 England fifty years ago, and we are young 

 enough to have had some experience with the 

 dear labor of which there is just now so much 

 said. Our "young idea" was taught by the 

 winter schoolmaster at eight to twelve dollars 

 a month, and by the summer schoolmi.stress at 

 seventy- five cents a week. We recollect the 

 engagement of a young married man with a 

 neighboring farmer, for the alternate weeks of 

 one season, at eight dollars per month for the 

 time employed, payable in "neat stock in Oc- 

 tober or grain in January." We have ourself 

 done a man's work at sixty-two-and-a-half 

 cents a day. We have also witnessed, in the 

 southern portion of the country, the culmina- 

 tion of perhaps the most magnificent and best 

 contrived system of cheap labor known to 

 modern times ; and we have watched with 

 equal interest the steady growth at the North 

 of perhaps the most vigorous and perfect sys- 

 tem of dear labor that was ever employed in 

 shop or field. 



Which system is most in accordance with 

 the spirit of the times, with our "free and 

 equal" institutions, with personal and gen- 

 eral prosperity ? We can hardly credit the 

 testimony of our senses, that such a question 

 should still be considered an open one in New 

 England, and that the conductors of industrial 

 papers north of the Mason and Dixon line 

 should find themselves engaged in an argu- 

 ment in favor of cheap labor. We were no 

 better prepared to find southern men, before 

 the dust and smoke arising from the downfall 

 of slavery has cleared away, distinctly announc- 

 ing such principles as are stated in the follow- 

 ing article from the Sou(7i Land, an agricul- 

 tural paper published at New Orleans, and 

 edited bv D. Redmond, E.-q. We have taken 

 the liberty to indicate by italics a few sen- 

 tences which we regard as worthy of particular 

 attention, as the expressions of a Southern 

 man who has recently witnessed the destruc- 

 tion of the cheap labor, or "servanthood," to 

 which himself and his friends had been 6iccus- 

 tomed all their lives : — 



Disappearance of Servanthood. 



In the literature of grumbling, the institution 

 known in London and in some American cities as 

 "servant-galism," long since arrived at the dignity* 

 of a first-class nuisance; and one, withal, suscep- 

 tible of slight mitigation indeed for a few of its 

 victims, but for all of them a necessary and inter- 

 minable evil by reason of its inextricable associa- 

 tion with an indispensable element of good. But 

 of late years contributors to this department of 

 litf rature have had a fruitful and eloquent thpme 

 in a different asppct of the servant question. It is 

 the tendency of servanthood, in general, to disappear 

 — that is now the matter. 



Students of what m>iy be called the morphologi- 

 cal development of history, must, of course, have 

 observed that successive periods are distinguish- 

 able, not less as marks of a progressive transform- 

 ation in the actual conditions of society, than as 

 marks of a progressive transformation in the in- 

 tellectual and mural conditi:)ns of the masses of 

 men. "Under this inexorable law of orderly muta- 

 tion, tue vast structure of feudalism, — ma'-sivebut 

 airy, inar'istic but gloomily splendid, apparently 

 irregular but really systematic, — has been crum- 

 bling for centuries. Piece by piece it has been 

 disintegrating. A single part broken or displa'ed 

 became a logical protest against the repose of some 

 other p.irt, which in due time underwent the same 

 fate ; and this sequence once established was the 

 prophetic announcement of the final dissolution of 

 the whole fabric. 



Well, we are standing now very near to the ut- 

 ter accomplishment of this prophecy, amid the 

 debris of the feudal system ; a quaint and curious 

 jumble, absurd and yet venerable, grotesquely in- 

 congruous with the new births of time, and yet 

 not without its traces of poetry and romance ; the 

 fragments as it were of some magnificent dream 

 which has lost its spell, or of some cloud-castle 

 disarrayed by a conspiracy of sunlight and heat, 

 of wind and thunder. 



When villainage and next vassalage disappeared, 

 all fi rms of per!^onal dependence and loyally, and 

 of hereditary privileges and disabilities were 

 doomed. In the long procession of events which 

 this implied, servanthood, in the old menial sense, 

 was at length to be no more. For without caste 

 there can be no iervanthood in that sense, and the 

 same causes that have been sapping those two 

 props of the ancient hierarchical system of Eu- 

 rope, the divine right of princes and the infallibility 

 of theological dogma, have been also fatally at 

 work upon the principle of caste. The great 

 trouble with those who repine and fret at the diffi- 

 culties and perplexities of the servant question — a 

 trouble of which they are for the most part, per- 

 haps, wholly unconscious — is the evanescence of 

 the servant element; or, to speak more philoso- 

 phically, its transmutation into something no more 

 like what it was than a butterfly is like a caterpil- 

 lar, or a bull-frog is like a tadpole, or a mosquito 

 is like a wiggletail. They would do well to recog- 

 7iize this momentous fact at once ; to cease vainly 

 clutching at the past, but to look around iu the 

 present and forward into the future, with taculties 

 keen to discern and quick to grasp every substan- 

 tial compensation fur loss, every golden opportu- 

 nity for improvement. 



It is true that glowing hopes have been kindled 

 in many households, that the advent of the indus- 

 trious, docile, deferential, supple and practical 

 Chinese Mongolian, will furnish material for re- 

 establishing the old-time in«titution of servant- 

 hood. Buf, in our candid opinion, they are count- 

 ing the chickens that will never be hatched — that 

 were never in the shell perhaps. In the first place, 

 Chinese immigrants stick together in gangs for 

 purposes of co-operation and self-protection in a 

 strange land, among a strange people. It will be 



