Multiple Deposit Creation
...seful calling whereby an honest living would be well-nigh assured. That child might be the heir of vast wealth, or even of a kingdom; but that did not excuse him from learning how to earn his livelihood like a peasant. The Saracens and Moors, who bore the faith of Mohammed on their victorious lances to the very heart alike of Europe, Asia, and Africa, so trained their sons to practise and honor industry; unlike the Turks and Arabs, who, since the decay of the empires of Saladin and Haroun al Raschid, have inherited the possessions, put not the genius of the earlier champions and disseminators of their faith. Greek and Roman civilization had previously rotted away, under the baneful influences of that contempt for and avoidance of labor which Slavery never fails to engender. Not till the diversification of industry, through the silent growth and diffusion of manufactures, had undermined and destroyed serfdom in Europe, was it possible [begin page 17] to emancipate that continent from medieval ignorance and barbarism. Not while the world still waits for a more systematic, thorough enforcement of the principle that every child should in youth be trained to skill and efficiency in some department of useful, productive industry, can we hope to banish able-bodied Pauperism, with its attendant train of hideous vices and sufferings, from the civilized world. So long as children shall be allowed to grow up in idleness must our country, with most other countries, be overrun with beggars, thieves, and miserable wrecks of manhood as well as of womanhood. Every child should be trained to dexterity in some useful branch of productive industry, not in order that he shall certainly follow that pursuit, but that he may at all events be able to do so in case he shall fail ill the more intellectual or artificial calling which he may prefer to it. Let him seek to be a doctor, lawyer, preacher, poet, if he will; but let him not stake his all on success in that pursuit, but have a second line to fall back upon if driven from his first. Let him be so reared and trained that he may enter, if he will, upon some intellectual calling in the sustaining consciousness that he need not debase himself, nor do violence to his convictions, in order to achieve success therein, since he can live and thrive in another (if you choose, humbler) vocation, if driven from that of his choice. This buttress to integrity, this assurance of self-respect, is to be found in a universal training to efficiency in Productive Labor. The world is full of misdirection and waste; but all the calamities and losses endured by mankind through frost, drought, blight, hail, fires, earthquakes, inundations, are as nothing to those habitually suffered by them through human idleness and inefficiency, mainly caused (or excused) by lack of industrial training. It is quite within the truth to estimate that one tenth of our people, [begin page 18] in the average, are habitually idle because (as they say) they can find no employment. They look for work where it cannot be had. They seem to be, or they are, unable to do such as abundantly confronts and solicits them. Suppose these to average but one million able-bodied persons, and that their work is worth but one dollar each per day; our loss by involuntary idleness cannot be less than $300,000,000 per annum. I judge that it is actually $500,000,000. Many who stand waiting to be hired could earn from two to five dollars per day had they been properly trained to work. "There is plenty of room higher up," said Daniel Webster, in response to an inquiry as to the prospects of a young man just entering upon the practice of law; and there is never a dearth of employment for men or women of signal capacity or skill. In this city, ten thousand women are always doing needlework for less than fifty cents per day, finding themselves; yet twice their number of capable, skilful seamstresses could find steady employment and good living in wealthy families at not less than one dollar per day over and above board and lodging. He who is a good blacksmith, a fair millwright, a tolerable wagon-maker, and can chop timber, make fence, and manage a small farm if required, is always sure of work and fair recompense; while he or she who can keep books or teach music fairly, but knows how to do nothing else, is in constant danger of falling into involuntary idleness and consequent beggary. It is a broad, general truth that no boy was ever yet inured to daily, systematic, productive labor in field or shop throughout the latter half of his minority, who did not prove a useful man, and was not able to find work whenever he wished it. Yet to the ample and constant employment of a whole community one prerequisite is indispensable, - that a variety of pursuits shall have been created or natural- [begin page 19] ized therein. A people who have but a single source of profit are uniformly poor, not because that vocation is necessarily ill-chosen, but because no single calling can employ and reward the varied capacities of male and female, young and old, robust and feeble. Thus a lumbering or fishing region with us is apt to have a large proportion of needy inhabitants; and the same is true of a region exclusively devoted to cotton-growing or gold-mining. A diversity of pursuits is indispensable to general activity and enduring prosperity. Sixty or seventy years ago, what was then the District, and is now the State, of Maine was a proverb in New England for the poverty of its people, mainly because they were so largely engaged in timber-cutting. The great grain-growing, wheat-exporting districts of the Russian empire have a poor and rude people for a like reason. Thus the industry of Massachusetts is immensely more productive per head than that of North Carolina, or even that of Indiana, as it will cease to be whenever manufactures shall have been diffused over our whole country, as they must and will be. In Massachusetts, half the women and nearly half the children add by their daily labor to the aggregate of realized wealth; in North Carolina and in Indiana, little wealth is produced save by the labor of men, including boys of fifteen or upward. When this disparity shall have ceased, its consequence will also disappear. And, though Man is first impelled to labor by the spur of material want, the movement outlasts the impulse in which it originated. The miser toils, and schemes, and saves, with an eye single to his own profit or aggrandizement; but commodious public halls, grand hotels, breezy parks, vast libraries, noble colleges, are often endowed in his will or founded on his wealth. Whatever the past has bequeathed for our instruction, [begin page 20] civilization, refinement, or comfort, was created for us by the saving, thrifty, provident minority of vanished generations, many of whom were despised and reviled though life as absorbed in selfishness and regardless of other than personal ends. How many of those who flippantly disparaged and contemned him while he lived have rendered to mankind such signal, abiding service as Stephen Girard or John Jacob Astor? He who is emphatically a worker has rarely time or taste for crime or vice. Nature is so profoundly imbued with integrity, - so implacably hostile to unreality and sham, - so inflexible in her resolve to give so much for so much, and to yield no more to whatever enticement or wheedling, - that the worker, as worker, is well-nigh constrained to uprightness. The farmer or gardener may be tempted to cheat as a trafficker, - to sell honey that is half molasses, or milk that he has made sky-blue with water, - yet even he knows better than to hope or seek to defraud Nature of so much as a farthing; for he feels that she will not allow it. Every thousand bushels of grain, wherever produced, cost just so much exertion of mind and muscle, and will be commanded by no less. Stupidity, seeking to dispense with the brain-work, may make them far too costly in muscular effort; but Nature fixes her price for them, and will accept no dime short of it. Work, wherever done, bears constant, emphatic testimony to the value, the necessity, of integrity and truth. Carlyle states this more broadly, hence more impressively, thus:- “It has been written, ‘An endless significance lies in Work: a man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away; fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal the man himself first ceases to be jungle, and foul, unwholesome desert thereby. Consider how, even [begin page 21] in the meanest sort of labor, the whole soul of man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these, like hell-dogs, beleaguering the soul of the poor day-worker, as of every man; but he bends with free valor against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow of Labor in him, - is it not as purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made bright, blessed flame?’ "Show me a people energetically busy, heaving, struggling, all shoulders at the wheel, their hearts pulsing, every muscle swelling with man's energy and will; I show you a people of whom great good is already predicable; - to whom all manner of good is yet certain, if their energy endure. By very working, they will learn; they have, Antæus-Iike, their feet on Mother Fact; how can they but learn?" Our own great Channing had, some years earlier, set forth the same general truth, - that of the beneficence of Labor as a groundwork of human education and discipline, - in terms somewhat less vigorous, but no less explicit and positive, than those of the British essayist. He says:- " I do not expect a series of improvements by which the laborer is to be released from his daily work. Still more, I have no desire to dismiss him from his workshop and farm, - to take the spade and axe from his hand, and to make his life a long holiday. I have faith in labor; and I see the goodness of God in placing us in a world where labor alone can: keep us alive. I would not change, If I could, our own subjection to physical laws, our exposure to hunger and cold, and the necessity of constant conflicts with the material world. I would not, If I could, so temper the elements that they should infuse into us only grateful sensations, - that they should make vegetation so exuberant as to anticipate every [begin page 22] want, and the minerals so ductile as to offer no resistance to our strength and skill. Such a world would make a contemptible race. Man owes his growth, his energy, chiefly to the striving of the will, - that conflict with difficulty which we call Effort. Easy, pleasant work does not make robust minds; does not give men a consciousness of their Powers; does not train them to endurance, to perseverance, to steady force of will, - that force without which all other acquisitions avail nothing. Manual labor is a school in which men are placed to get energy of purpose and character, - a vastly more important endowment than all the learning of all other schools. They are placed, indeed, under hard masters:- physical sufferings and wants, the power of fearful elements, and the vicissitudes of all human things; but these stern teachers do a work which no compassionate, indulgent friend could do for us; and true wisdom will bless Providence for their sharp ministry. I have great faith in hard work. The material world does much for the mind by its beauty and order; but it does much more for our minds by the pain it inflicts, - by its obstinate resistance, which nothing but patient toil can overcome, - by its vast forces, which nothing but unremitting skill and effort can turn to our use, by its perils, which demand continual vigilance, and by its tendency to decay. I believe that difficulties are more important to the human mind than what we call assistances. Work we all must, if we mean to bring out and perfect our nature. Even if we do not work with the hands, we must undergo equivalent toil in some other direction. No business or study which does not present obstacles, tasking to the full the intellect and the will, is worthy of a man. In science, he who does not grapple with hard questions, who does not concentrate his whole intellect on vigorous attention, who does not aim to penetrate what at first repels him, will never attain to mental force." Ross Browne, summing up his observations, made during a recent tour of the Holy Land, remarks that he saw in all that country but one man doing anything: he was falling off the roof of a house. Need it be explained [begin page 23] that Palestine is under the sway of a race and rule that reject the idea of Protection to Home Industry, holding it condemned by the precepts of that Koran which is their Bible? Labor is amazingly cheap there, - cheap as in the day when each of the laborers in the vineyard received a penny for his day's wages, whether he had worked twelve hours or but one, - yet barely a few of the very rudest manufactures are still prosecuted, and these are palpably feeble and declining,- with the great body of the people impoverished, wretched, despairing. Well may they be so under a government which (as a recent writer from Constantinople reports) charges an excise duty of twelve per cent. on ship-timber cut from Turkish forests, and an impost of but eight per cent. on like timber imported from a foreign land. No plundering the masses here for the profit of "monopolists" and "cotton-lords": yet the wild Bedouin of the desert levies at will on the wretched tiller of the soil; the local tax-collector seizes most of what remains; and the hapless cultivator is driven in the spring to the usurer, of whom he borrows, at twenty-five to fifty per cent., the means of re-seeding his unfertilized fields, and thus beginning anew his dreary, hopeless round of famished toil and vexatious care. The Hon. Robert Dale Owen, who spent several years at Naples as Minister of the United States, declares the lazzaroni of that great city unjustly stigmatized as inveterate, wilful idlers; he having found them always accepting with alacrity any job that was offered them and that they knew how to do. They were habitually idle, simply because they could get no work. Let us suppose that the new kingdom of Italy were ruled by some great genius like Czar Peter or Napoleon I.; can you believe that he would not find or make some way of setting these idle hundreds of thousands at work? that [begin page 24] he would be withheld from attempting it by some college pedant or blear-eyed book-worm, who should magisterially admonish him that governments have properly nothing to do with industry or commerce, - that the extent of their legitimate function is to keep men from breaking each other's heads or picking each other's pockets, - that they transcend their sphere whenever they meddle with production, and seek to make two blades of grass flourish where but one has hitherto been grown? Who does not see that to set those thousands at work - to make them busy, useful, thrifty, - to proffer them ample, remunerative, diversified employment - is to elevate them morally as well as physically, to increase the wealth and strength of the kingdom or state; nay, more, - to elevate the standard of human nature and increase the sum of human well-being? But the Turks are slaveholders; and Slavery does not concern itself; unless inimically, with the elevation of labor or of the laboring class. The fundamental ideas on which Protection is based war implacably on the enslavement of man. Hence, Henry Clay, though a slaveholder, was never in sympathy with the Slavery Propaganda, and never enjoyed its confidence, because he was a Protectionist, and it was felt instinctively that he could not be heartily devoted at once to Slavery and to Protection. Hence, John C. Calhoun, though a Protectionist while in the House, - as he showed in framing and advocating the tariff of 1816, - became an extreme, intense Free-Trader from the hour in which he presented himself to the country as the foremost champion of Slavery, not as an evil to be born, but a good to be cherished, perpetuated, extended. "Instinct is a great matter"; and the Southern aristocracy of the last age could riot help regarding every cotton-factory erected within their domain as a nursery and citadel of Abolition. [begin page 25] No matter though only whites were employed in it, - no matter though each of these were surcharged with pride of caste and Negro-hate, they felt that there was an inevitable antagonism between a diversified, intelligent industry and their darling institution, and that the outbreak of open war between them was merely a question of time. The South of 1815-60 had every element of manufacturing prosperity but that of intelligent labor: she could not have this and Slavery together; and her ruling caste, regarding Slavery as the paramount good, naturally frowned upon and froze out manufactures. An instinct profounder than any logic impelled them to this: a like instinct impelled the Congress of 1860-61, so soon as the slaveholders had deserted their seats to inaugurate the war of Secession, to frame and enact a Protective Tariff. I insist, then, that the consideration of cheapness, though important, is not all-important; that “the life is more than meat"; that, in laying the foundations of a national policy, we are to consider not alone by what course we may obtain our supply of sheetings, flannels, or iron, at the lowest cash price, but how we shall most surely and fully develop and employ the entire industrial capacity of our people. Even if it were as true as it is false, that we might make more money by devoting the entire energies of our people to the growing of corn or cotton than by a broadly diversified industry, it would still be a grave, a fatal blunder to do this; because it could not fall to doom the masses into relative ignorance and barbarism, - to obstruct their intellectual as well as industrial development, and stunt their growth in civilization and all the amenities of life. Infinite are the uses of Labor; but its highest and noblest fruition is MAN! [begin page 26] II. Commerce- Exchanges. Ours is pre-eminently an age of Traffic. The rapid and vast extension of commerce since the century distinguished by the invention of printing and the discovery of America; the applications of steam to facilitate and speed the creation of material wealth through manufactures and its diffusion through transportation and trade; the consequent sudden and vast increase of whatever ministers to the sustenance, comfort, or enjoyment of the human race, - have combined to give to Traffic a recent growth and development far transcending the wildest dreams of antiquity. The commerce of Thebes or of Tyre, of Carthage or of Alexandria in her palmy days, was trivial in volume when compared with that whereof London or New York is now the focus. And the gigantic enterprises now in progress or in contemplation, whereby this continent, having already been traversed by one line of railroad through the heart of our country, is soon to be belted with at least two more, paralleled by similar lines of communication, by rail or by water, across the Isthmus of Darien, that of Tehuantepec, and the intervening plateaus of Nicaragua and Costa Rica, with the no longer problematical ship-canal across the Isthmus of Suez, to say nothing of kindred undertakings in other parts of the world, presage a still further and vaster augmentation of the volume and momentum of international, trans-oceanic and trans-continental commerce. In the conception of its votaries, traffic is yet in its infancy, and is on the verge of a [begin page 27] development rapid and vast far beyond even its recent advances. Very naturally, the popular apprehension is dazzled by the prospect, as it was, two or three centuries since, by the newly expanded possibilities of maritime adventure and discovery. The imagination of boyhood is intoxicated by vision of wealth to be suddenly acquired, of ease to be readily secured, through addiction to some form of Traffic. Our ambitious, aspiring youth, unless educated for professions, forsake, almost en masse, their rural homes in quest of mercantile training and a mercantile career. The ignorant, friendless, penniless Negro, just let loose from hereditary bondage, drops his detested hoe in the half-tilled cotton-field, and hies to the nearest city, in the sanguine hope that he may there live lazily and luxuriously upon the profits of huckstering, oyster-peddling, rum-selling, or some other form of petty traffic, or at least as the servitor or menial of one of the more favored votaries of some loftier guild of commerce. The moderate but certain gains of patient, creative industry, and especially of rural industry, seem petty and despicable when compared with the great prizes sometimes drawn in the lottery of Trade. These prizes are paraded, noted, discussed, envied; they fill the public eye and command admiring regard; while the far more numerous blanks are unobserved, unregarded, or soon forgotten. of every hundred who embark in traffic, it was long since ascertained that a large majority fail, while scarcely one in twenty secures and retains a competence; but the one challenges attention and fixes regard, while the nineteen are quickly hidden from view by the waters of oblivion. The passion for gambling, in whatever form, seems as fascinating to the civilized as the savage breast; and no exposure of its perils and horrors suffices to eradicate or fully master it. Individuals repel or vanquish [begin page 28] it; the masses are ever eager to expose themselves to immolation on its gory altars. And, while all Commerce is thus attractive, that which traverses oceans and interweaves the transactions of continents naturally proffers the largest prizes and the most resistless attractions. Prices are charged and profits realized on the products of another continent which would be preposterous and unattainable were producer and consumer acquainted with and living in proximity to each other. The greatest fortune ever acquired by an American in Europe was mainly realized in a few years by negotiating in England the bonds of several of our railroad companies, and converting the proceeds into the rails and chairs required in building or renovating the roads of those companies. The colossal fortune of the Rothschilds had a basis not dissimilar to this. Our most eminent and successful New York merchant was not in youth trained to commerce, and did not contemplate a mercantile career; but, after devoting two or three of the later years of his minority to teaching in this city, he returned to Europe to receive the modest patrimony bequeathed him by the last to die of his progenitors. Having obtained it, and being on the point of embarking to return to this, the country of his choice, a friend suggested that he might largely increase his little fortune by investing it at Belfast in a fabric of that busy city known as Lace Insertions; and he, though utterly unacquainted with merchandise, followed the advice; selling the goods, on his arrival in New York, for as many dollars as they had cost him shillings (sterling), and thus probably trebling his patrimony in the course of two or three months. The revelation thus made to him of what might be acquired through commerce changed and fixed his destiny; and half a century of persistent, extensive, and constantly [begin page 29] expanding importation and sale of European fabrics, has placed him among the foremost in wealth and rank of our merchant princes. His has been a most successful, brilliant, and honored career; and yet I cannot doubt that he would have been far more useful to his country and to mankind had he consecrated his great abilities and tireless, measureless energy to the naturalization on our own soil of the useful arts and processes, along with the artificers and workmen, whose products he has so largely and so profitably imported from the Old World. As this avowal brings me into open, direct collision with the more widely accredited teachers of Political Economy, I pause here to intrench and reconnoitre. In my conception, the chief end of a true Political Economy is the conversion of idlers and useless exchangers or traffickers into habitual, effective producers of wealth. If a community whereof one-half live by vocations which add nothing to its aggregate of useful products can be so organized, so transformed, that the proportion of its non-producers shall be reduced one-fourth, its wealth, comfort, intelligence, refinement, can hardly fail (other things being equal) to be essentially increased by the change; if the proportion of non-producers could thus be reduced to one-eighth, the resulting benefit would be doubled. And one of the chief waste-gates of human effort is that afforded by the consumption of time and energies in the transportation across oceans and continents of staples or fabrics which might as easily - that is, with little or no more labor- have been produced in the region where they are required and consumed. Understand, once for all, that I do not propose a contravention of the laws of Nature, nor of any of them. If my countrymen can only grow coffee or allspice, caoutchouc or cocoa, in hot-houses, at many times the cost (in labor) of its production in tropical regions, then [begin page 30] I would nowise encourage its growth among us at all. The free trade badinage about protecting the growth of pineapples in Minnesota, or of arrow-root in Maine, extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, &c., &c., is simple buffoonery in evasion of the true issue. I quite comprehend that even international and trans-oceanic commerce has a beneficent function, -that of diffusing among the inhabitants of all zones and countries those natural products of each to which the soil or climate of another is ungenial, so that all may enjoy, in a measure, the blessings divinely bestowed upon each. And, so far from wishing to obstruct or impede such diffusion, I acquiesce most reluctantly in the imposition or retention of any duty or tax whatever on those products of other climes which cannot, because of natural impediments, be successfully grown or rivalled on our own soil. Show me that Nature has interposed a serious barrier to the growth or production of any staple in my country, and I will strenuously insist that no duty be imposed on transportation of that product unless for revenue, and that this shall be removed so soon as the treasury can spare its proceeds. Now let me show, without reference to existing interests, wherein and why I would apply the principle of Protection:- Tea is grown almost wholly in China, Japan, India; and, wherever grown at all, in latitudes and climates whereof parallels are found in our own country. And we have already ascertained by experiment that the tea-plant germinates, flourishes, and matures, in upper South Carolina and in East Tennessee. It should have been tested long since at a hundred different po...