It may be imagined how large in proportion to its inhabitants will be a town which spreads itself in this way. There are great houses left untenanted, and great gaps left unfilled. But if the place be successful, if it promise success, it will be seen at once that there is life all through it. Omnibuses, or street cars working on rails, run hither and thither. The shops that have been opened are well filled. The great hotels are thronged. The quays are crowded with vessels, and a general feeling of progress pervades the place.
It is easy to perceive whether or no an American town is going ahead. The days of my visit to Milwaukee were days of civil war and national trouble, but in spite of civil war and national trouble Milwaukee looked healthy.
I have said that there was but little poverty--little to be seen of real want in these thriving towns--but that they who labored in them had nevertheless their own hardships. This is so. I would not have any man believe that he can take himself to the Western States of America--to those States of which I am now speaking--Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, or Illinois, and there by industry escape the ills to which flesh is heir. The laboring Irish in these towns eat meat seven days a week, but I have met many a laboring Irishman among them who has wished himself back in his old cabin. Industry is a good thing, and there is no bread so sweet as that which is eaten in the sweat of a man's brow; but labor carried to excess wearies the mind as well as body, and the sweat that is ever running makes the bread bitter. There is, Ithink, no task-master over free labor so exacting as an American.
He knows nothing of hours, and seems to have that idea of a man which a lady always has of a horse. He thinks that he will go forever. I wish those masons in London who strike for nine hours'
work with ten hours' pay could be driven to the labor market of Western America for a spell. And moreover, which astonished me, Ihave seen men driven and hurried, as it were forced forward at their work, in a manner which, to an English workman, would be intolerable. This surprised me much, as it was at variance with our--or perhaps I should say with my--preconceived ideas as to American freedom. I had fancied that an American citizen would not submit to be driven; that the spirit of the country, if not the spirit of the individual, would have made it impossible. I thought that the shoe would have pinched quite on the other foot. But Ifound that such driving did exist, and American masters in the West with whom I had an opportunity of discussing the subject all admitted it. "Those men'll never half move unless they're driven,"a foreman said to me once as we stood together over some twenty men who were at their work. "They kinder look for it, and don't well know how to get along when they miss it." It was not his business at this moment to drive--nor was he driving. He was standing at some little distance from the scene with me, and speculating on the sight before him. I thought the men were working at their best;but their movements did not satisfy his practiced eye, and he saw at a glance that there was no one immediately over them.
But there is worse even than this. Wages in these regions are what we should call high. An agricultural laborer will earn perhaps fifteen dollars a month and his board, and a town laborer will earn a dollar a day. A dollar may be taken as representing four shillings, though it is in fact more. Food in these parts is much cheaper than in England, and therefore the wages must be considered as very good. In making, however, a just calculation it must be borne in mind that clothing is dearer than in England, and that much more of it is necessary. The wages nevertheless are high, and will enable the laborer to save money, if only he can get them paid. The complaint that wages are held back, and not even ultimately paid, is very common. There is no fixed rule for satisfying all such claims once a week, and thus debts to laborers are contracted, and when contracted are ignored. With us there is a feeling that it is pitiful, mean almost beyond expression, to wrong a laborer of his hire. We have men who go in debt to tradesmen perhaps without a thought of paying them; but when we speak of such a one who has descended into the lowest mire of insolvency, we say that he has not paid his washerwoman. Out there in the West the washerwoman is as fair game as the tailor, the domestic servant as the wine merchant. If a man be honest he will not willingly take either goods or labor without payment; and it may be hard to prove that he who takes the latter is more dishonest than he who takes the former; but with us there is a prejudice in favor of one's washerwoman by which the Western mind is not weakened. "They certainly have to be smart to get it," a gentleman said to me whom I had taxed on the subject. "You see, on the frontier a man is bound to be smart. If he aint smart, he'd better go back East, perhaps as far as Europe; he'll do there." I had got my answer, and my friend had turned the question; but the fact was admitted by him, as it had been by many others.
Why this should be so is a question to answer which thoroughly would require a volume in itself. As to the driving, why should men submit to it, seeing that labor is abundant, and that in all newly-settled countries the laborer is the true hero of the age?