The Manitowoc pilot. [volume] (Manitowoc, Wis.) 1859-1932, 1884-07-10
Race and Work.

the curious quality of industry to any
people. No animal except the beaver
has it and no man in the totally unciv-
ilized and therefore presumably natu-
raj condition. The popular English
view that it is somehow inherent in
race, that black men are very lazy,
brown men lazy, yellow men rather lazy,
and white men lavish. while the En-
glishman alone loves work for itself, is
palpably untrue. Englishmen. TO be-
gin with are not the most industrious
of the white race. The Belgian peas
| and some of the Prussian peasantry,
| beat them all hollow in the power of
persistent. monotonous, long continued
application to disagreeable work. They
labor, take them all around, three
hours in the day longer than the average
Englishmen, who, indeed, are rather
fierce workers. possessed of special
energy, than Industrious men.
The English can get quantities of
work, and good work, done; but they
will only work six days in seven, they
Try hard to get another day in each
week, and do get half of one, and they
are savagely irritable about long hours
which continentals bear quite placidly.
When they can they fight for day last
ing from 10 to 4; and when they cannot
they will strike rather than bear two
unusual hours q week. We greatly
doubt if English laborers would toll for
any wages for fifteen hours a day, as
the Auvergnats do, and are quite sure
they would kill somebody if forced to
work fourteen hours in sitting dens, as
the silk throwers of northern Italy are.
Indeed, they shirk some trades because
the work is too hard, and they have
not only not got monopoly in their
own bakeries and sugar refineries but
no fair share in either of them. The
Englishman's idea of rising in life, in
deed, is to be free of heavy work, and
he shares the feeling of the Lowland
Scotch, who, as great American en-
ployer of labor testified before a COM
mittee of the House of Commons, are,
as laborers IN the United States, of no
use at all. They all become masters in
two ye;.rs.
As to the yellow races, which ought
70 be just laZier than Europeans, they
beat them altogether. We suppose
there are indolent Chinese, but the i'm
mense majority of that vast people
have an unequalled power for work;
care nothing about hours, and, as long
as they are paid, will 90 on with dog
ged, steady persistence in toll for six
teen hours day, such as no European
can rival. No English ship carpenter
will work like n Chinese, no laundries
will wash as many clothes, and Chi
nese compositor would very soon be ex-
PEELED for overtoil by an English
"chaper of the trade. The Chinese
peasants and boatmen work all day
and every day; and, in fact, but for un-
firing industry, the closely packed
masses of China could not be sustained
as they are by artificial irrigation. OF
the brown races the Arabs generally
prefer abstemiousness carried to a star
alton point to continuous labor; but the
most numerous brown people, the In
dians, labor unrelaXingly seventy-seven
hours week. They are often called
lazy by unobservant Europeans, be-
cause they enjoy the cool of the even
ing; but they go to work before in the
morning and work on till 3, and only
eat once during the sulight, the second
meal being taken after dark.
They take, too, no weekly holiday.
The result, in fact, proves their indus
try. They keep up system of agri-
culture, singularly toilsome, because it
involves irrigation, raise often three
crops, and always two in the year, and
have covered India with grand cities
which they built for themselves. AS
they feel their climate, though less than
Europeans do, their labor is severe, and
we should say deliberately, after the
observation of years, that their indus
trial fault was, when laboring for
themselves, DISPOSITION to do too
much on insufficient food. They wear
themselves out too early. They know
this themselves. and have tendency
to refuse overtime and reject pay for it
which is often annoying. OF course,
the savage, brown race will not work
continually, but neither will the savage
white ones, the mean whites of the
Southern States; but they both will
make incredible exertions by fits and
starts, as, for example, in hunting and
rowing very long distances.
The black races are the most varied
in this respect to industry, but even
among them the readiness to toll hard
is far from wanting. The slave-own-
ers always thought their negroes lazy,
but then their wages were stolen, and
no man works we'll without pay, or for
pay which is insecure. The pure
negroes of the Soudan who enter Brit
ish steamers as stokers work at their
cruel labor as Englishmen will not,
and the Times of last week tell US that
the negroes are the best laborers on
the Panama Canal. They even got
jealous of the excavatinr machines,
offered to beat the obnoxious inani-
mates, and when permitted beat them.
doing the work as well and more
quickly. In the Southern States when
regularly paid, negroes work harder
than they did as slaves, and in the West
Indies, when working for themselves,
they riase all the food they require
and maintain their own aged and sick.
The Austrian blacks, it is true, will
not work continuously, but that is be-
cause they are black, savages having
apparently the inability to work which
animals display. We work horses,
cattle and asses continuously, not to
say cruelty; but, left TO himself, no
animal but a beaver voluntarily works
He will exert himself when hungry 10
hunt for many hours together under
most painful circumStances-thus for
instance, being known to swim ex-
traordinary distances; but, the food
once obtained, the wild animal hates
even to move till tormented by hunger
again. Savages, too. have slaves in
the shape of wives, and, having 10
scruples, they make them do all the
work as cynically as do some classes
of the French bourgeoise. London
Spectator.