Yorkville enquirer. [volume] (Yorkville, S.C.) 1855-2006, 1912-04-30

ASIA'S GREATEST lesson FOR SOUTH
By Clarence HI. Poe, Editor of the Progress
sive Farmer North Carolina.-A Paper
Read at the Fourteenth Conference
for Education in the South,
at Jacksonville, Florida,
April 21st, 1912
April 21st, 1912



The highest wages are paid in the
philippines where the ordinary labor
er gets from twenty to fifty cents.
In India, an Englishman who had
lived in an interior jungle village, five
days by bullock cart from q railway
told me that twenty years ago labor
ers were paid two rupees GA cents) g
month, boarding themselves, or four
rupees ($1.2S) a year and grain. The
wages have now advanced, however
to five rupees ($1.6O) a month where
the man boards himself; and for day
labor the wages are now five annas
(ten cents) instead of two annas (four
cents) twenty years ago. In Madura a
we'll educated Hindu with whom was
talking rang the familiar changes on
the increasing cost of living" and
pointed out the fact that in the past
four or five years the cost Of unskilled
labor had increased from eight to
twelve cents a day. "And in some
towns" he declared, looking at the
same time as If he feared should not
believe his story, they are asking as
much as eight annas (16 cents) a
day." In Bombay was told that COO
lies average sixteen to twenty cents a
day: spinners in jute factories S1.16
week, weavers, $1.62. In a great cot
ton factory I visited in Madras, en-
ploying about 1000 natives Gall males)
the average wages for eleven and elev-
en- and a half hours work is 1884 to
S4.S5 a month. In Ahmedabad, an
other cotton manufacturing center,
found about the same scale in force
Miners get sixteen to twenty-eight
cents a day. Servants average from
$500 to 1884 a month.
For farm work Director Of Agricul-
ture Couchman, Of the Madras Presi-
dency, gave me the following as the
usual scale of wages: Men, six to
eight cents a day; women, four to six
cents; children, three to five, the la
borers boarding themselves
Moreover, there is savage struggle
for employment, even at these low
figures; men work longer hours than
in America, and their tasks are often
heart -sickening in their heaviness.
tasks such as an American laborer
would regard as inhuman.
Take, for example, the poor fellow
who pulls the jinriksha. He is doing
work that horses and mules do at
home, and for wages such as our
southern negroes would refuse for
ordinary labor More than this. In
most cases he is selling you not only
his time, but his life-blood. Run he
must with his human burden, and fas-
ter than Americans would care to run
without a burden; and the constant
strain overtaxes his heart and shortens
his days. More than this, he must go
in all kinds of weather. and having
become thoroughly heated, must shiv-
er in the winter wind or driving rain
during waits. The exposure and over
taxing Of the heart are alike ruinous,
The riksha mans life, 1 was told In
Japan, is several years shorter than
that of the average man.
| And yet so many men are driven by
the general poverty into the riksha
business that hardly found city In
all the east in which 1t Is not over
crowded. In Feking on one occasion
almost thought my life endangered
by the mob of riksha men who jostled
tugged and fought for the privilege
of earning the 10 to 20 cents fare my
patronage involved; in Hong Kong
two runners, wild-eyed with the keen
ness of the savage struggle for exist
ence, menaced the smaller, younger
man ] had hired as If they would take
me by force from his vehicle to their
own-and this for climb so steep
that soon got out and walked rather
than feel myself guilty Of mans in
humanity to man" by making a fell
low being pull me up the sheer in
cline. Fiercer yet was the competi-
tion in Hankow where not even the
brutal clubbing Of the policeman was
enough to keep the men in order. In
wintry Newchwang 1 think it hurt me
almost as much as it did my riksha
man to see him wading through mud
and foulness such as I should not wish
my horse to go through at home
Though If he had not waded / should
have had to. and he was the more
used to it,
Where Men Do the Work of Beasts.
mention the hard life of the orien-
tai laborer who pulls the jinriksha
because II is typical. The business
would not be crowded If it were not
that the men find life in other lines nc
better.
Consider the thousands of Chinese
and Japanese who do the work not OF
carriage horses, but of draft horses
From the time you land in Yokahama
your heart is made sick by the sight
of half-naked human beings harnessed
like oxen to heavily-laden carts and
drays Bent, tense and perspiring like
L SLAVES at lllc otl, liiSS Nio"
heavy burdens through the streets
One or two men wearily pull an i'm
mense telegraph pole balanced on
two wheeled truck. Eight or ten mer
are harnessed together dragging some
merchants heavy freight. Four to
dozen other men carry some heav!
building-stone or piece of machinery
by running bamboo supports from the
shoulders of the men behind to the
shoulders of the men in front; you car
see the constant, tortuous play of th'
muscles around each mans rigid back
bone, while the strained, monotonous
lhalf-weird chorus "Hy-ah! Hul-lah
Hee-ah. Hey" measures their tread
land shifts the strain from man t
man, step by step. with the precision
of clock work. ON the rivers in Chi
Ina. too. one sees boats run by human
tread mill power: a harder task thai
that of Sisyphus is that of the mel
who sweat all day long at the wheel
forever climbing and never advancing
Heavy Burdens For Women ant
Children.