Are there any other classes whom we do not want? Yes; we cannot afford to have the contract laborer. The native labor organizations have talked a good deal of nonsense about the foreigner, but not on this one subject. The importation on contract of men to do a certain amount of work for a smaller sum than American citizens would accept, and to carry back almost all their earnings to be spent in another country, is a very successful way of making a nation poor. If we were to send all of our money to Europe for the purchase of supplies and Europe were to buy nothing of us in return, it would soon be
[Illustration: PERSPECTIVE VIEW LOOKING SOUTH, SHOWING END OF WORLD’S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION.]
impossible to raise enough coin to buy a postage stamp. Yet contract labor is a transaction of exactly the same nature, and it is increasing at a rate that may be estimated from the known ability and willingness of large employers to have work done as cheaply as possible, regardless of the consequences to every one but themselves.
When, however, statesmen or politicians, or demagogues or well-meaning labor agitators or leaders, insist that skilled labor should be kept out of the country, it is to the interest of the community to firmly, persistently and indignantly oppose any such proposition. Lack of skilled labor is the curse of the country. Because a man is employed on work which requires skill and experience is no sign that he is fully competent to do it. The tramps who bind the farmer’s wheat, the cast-aways and chance laborers who build some houses in the West, the riff-raff who are gathered together occasionally to work a mine, or sail a ship, or do the work of a plantation or a farm for a short season, are the most costly labor that could be employed, and a great deal of work supposed to be done by experts in the United States is almost as expensive. So long as we don’t allow young men to learn trades--and that seems to be the rule at present--we must have men who have learned trades somewhere else. Plenty of Americans can be found in New York city at half an hour’s notice who complain with real patriotic feeling that, while they would like all their own employés to be Americans, they cannot find a large number or even a respectable majority of natives who are sufficiently skilled to do the work for which they are called upon. The consumption of pianofortes, for instance, in the United States, is twenty times as great, according to statistics of trade, as in any other country of equal population in the world. But in going through a piano factory one might very quickly imagine himself in a foreign country. It is not that the manufacturers are all foreigners, for they are not, or that they prefer foreign labor, or that foreign piano-makers work cheaper than those of native birth, but simply because we have scarcely any of native birth, although this variety of manufacturing industry has been active in this country for nearly two generations.