Part 6

While the slow growth of the union in the South is no doubt a discouragement to labor organizations, it is a benefit to labor in the long run. It is also at the same time an advantage to capital that labor is being slowly organized. Looking to the future it is an advantage both to capital and labor that the growth of the labor organization does not go too far in advance of the education of the laboring classes and that the employer class may, if it has an eye to its own interest, organize in order successfully and intelligently to treat with organized labor when it has become a force to be dealt with in the South.

Experience proves that even the most thoroughly organized labor unions are not all-powerful when the employers stand together, and the paramount importance of organization among the employers has been repeatedly demonstrated. When this organization of the employers shall have been effected, inquiry into cause and effect, careful study of the labor problem, will quickly show the great advantage and profitableness of dealing fairly with labor. It will show that, if the employers are loyal to each other, and if they have an organization in which all of its members have confidence, they, whether dealing with organized or unorganized labor, are certain to obtain their approximate rights. The many labor tangles in which the country has at times been involved were due far more to the disorganized condition of the employer class than to the cohesiveness and power of the labor class. Whenever the labor class has become needlessly strong and where it practices tyranny and oppression, there the employer class will be found to have neglected its duty to itself.

Another result of the study of conditions will be that the employer class will decide to be fair in dealing with labor, because in the long run it will bring the largest dividends. This cannot be accomplished by dealing with unorganized labor, where the employers have the whole matter practically under their own control, and thinking only of immediate returns, will, consciously or unconsciously, take advantage of the worker. Dealing with organized labor is not only more satisfactory, but it is more profitable in its ultimate results.

The question of individual rights has had a large part in Southern labor troubles. It was a question of the employer’s right to manage his property for himself in his own way that defeated an almost universal strike of the Nashville Street Railway employes two or three years ago. The union was formed and made its demands. The management declined to recognize the union or to grant the demands, and successfully resisted the resulting strike. But the management, I am informed, gave careful examination to the facts thus brought to their attention and has voluntarily advanced wages and improved conditions to a point far beyond what was formulated in the union’s demands. There is no union of the street railway’s employes now at Nashville, and so long as the present intelligent and progressive policy is pursued there will be none and there will be none needed. Indeed, the only excuse for labor to organize is that the policy of the employer has too often been unintelligent, unprogressive and not in sympathy with the reasonable rights and needs of labor.

But the organization of labor and the advancement of wages will do more than any other one thing to lend confidence to those who are looking to the South as a field for investment. The Northern capitalist and investor cannot be made to believe that labor as good and efficient as Northern labor will remain unorganized and render its service for one-third or one-half of what the Northern workman receives. Nor does the Southern worker have the same incentive to the high efficiency reached by the Northern workman. One of the most serious mistakes made by many Southern communities in presenting to the Northern investor the advantages at the South is that they put emphasis on the fact that skilled and unskilled labor is “cheap.” Cheap labor that is at the same time efficient is an unknown thing in the North, and Northern men who are familiar with the labor question will not believe that it exists in the South. “If it were as efficient, it would be as well paid,” they say. The proffer of “cheap” labor has done much to retard the industrial development of the Southern states. It is now the universal cry among the employers of the North, particularly among those who oppose organized labor, that they are willing to pay and do pay the highest wages anywhere obtainable and that they are willing to afford and do afford to their employees the most favorable working conditions.

The question of child labor is one which must be determined by humane principles, and yet it is a question on which much fanaticism has been expended and much maudlin sentiment indulged. The child develops earlier in the South, where the average boy of fourteen is as mature as the average boy of sixteen in the North. It is a cause for gratification, a fact to the credit of the South, that recent child labor laws have removed from mills and mines and factories a vast army of child laborers who properly belonged in the nursery or at school. It was the South’s shame that they were ever permitted there under conditions once existing, and still existing to a degree.

But, while believing that the question of child labor should be closely studied and the interest of the child guarded, I know that this is not always accomplished in the case of boys by making it an offense punishable by fine and imprisonment to keep boys of thirteen and fourteen years at work, particularly since in certain classes of society they have no idea of continuing at school after they reach that age. Anything is better than idleness. It is a thousand to one better for a boy of twelve to be at work in mine, factory or mill than to be allowed to remain unemployed and unoccupied. If he is to be forced out of employment, then provision must be made to force him into school. The attention that has been drawn to child labor in the South comes about not so much by the efforts of philanthropists, not so much by the work of earnest students, as by that class of employers in New England who formerly employed children of tender years, but who were forced to desist as the result of legislation, and who for this reason, and not from any high motives, directed attention to child labor in the cotton mills of the South. I do not mean to justify what is injurious to the children, but in considering this whole question trade or competitive conditions cannot be wholly ignored. We know that the advocates of child labor laws are often selfishly influenced and that they aim to reduce the army of workers in the hope thereby to monopolize labor as far as possible. It is often for the same selfish reason that the hours of labor are restricted.

Much of the opposition to child labor has undoubtedly been removed by the course of mill owners in the South, such as the Eagle and Phœnix mills at Columbus, Ga., the Unity Cotton Mills at Lagrange, Ga., and mills in Guilford County, N. C., and Pelzer, S. C. In these the children are required to spend a certain portion of their time in schools ranging from kindergartens to industrial training schools, which are supported mainly,—and in many cases altogether,—by the cotton mills themselves. The press and pulpit unite in saying that in those mills many of the children have much better facilities for improvement than they had before their parents left the farms and brought them to the mills.

The South suffers from poorly paid labor, and continues to suffer despite the fact that conditions are such as make it possible for her to pay higher prices without injuriously affecting any of her industries. As the wealth of the world increases the individual wants more and greater conveniences, and more and more grows the demand for excellence rather than cheapness to be the chief consideration. The era of cheapness is on the decline; the product of mill and factory, of shop and lathe and hand, must be better to-day to be satisfying than at any time in the world’s history. While excellence is sought the more, cheapness is laughed at and passed by.

The Southern states are in an enviable position to-day. The South ought to produce nearly all it consumes, and those things it can economically produce for its own consumption it should certainly be able to sell in Mexican and South American markets in successful competition with the rest of the world. How successfully this can be done will depend upon the ability of the South to produce the best goods for the least money, and it can only do this provided its labor is the best. But its labor cannot be the best unless it is paid the highest wages and is afforded the most satisfactory conditions under which the workmen can perform their services, and under which they and their families can live.

When labor is once organized on business lines and is a fair competitor of unorganized labor, it will not only be the successful competitor but will furnish the best labor obtainable. Nowhere has organized labor under such conditions so fine an opportunity or so fair a chance as in the South. But as I said before, the South is the stronghold of individual rights. The workman must respect the individual rights of the employer and the employer in return will respect the individual rights of the workman.

It is not only skilled, law-abiding laborers that are necessary to the South’s industrial success, but it is first of all necessary that employers be enlightened and abreast of the times in order that they may see clearly what their rivals are doing and what the markets of the world require. And chiefly employers must be just, wise and humane in order that they may enjoy the confidence and respect of their men.

It is indisputable that wherever there are employers who are wise and humane, working in harmony with laborers who are skilled, frugal and law-abiding, the community where the combination is found has a sure guaranty of numerical growth and of substantial material prosperity. Growth in population is gratifying to most citizens, notably so when accompanied with industrial growth as well, but substantial and lasting prosperity has too often been sacrificed in the eager desire of one community to herald to the world a larger population than its rival possessed. Increased numbers and wealth—if they bring in their train an unnatural increase in vice and crime, as we too often find to be the case,—are infinitely worse than if there were no growth. Southerners sometimes lament that the South does not grow fast enough, yet that it makes haste slowly is the South’s good fortune, since the criminal classes have not increased with the population as at the North. The Southern people, conservative always, should be in nothing so conservative as in the determination that this shall still be true; that while it is increasing in population and wealth the South shall also accomplish the more difficult and important duty of diminishing the percentage of vice and crime.

TILDY BINFORD’S ADVERTISEMENT.

By Holland Wright.

The advertising agent had done his worst. He had subsidized the county paper, crowding out valuable editorials to make room for pictures of the yawning hippopotamus and the unconventional summer girl. Every barn within five miles was decorated with big red pictures and big black letters, all telling of the wonders exhibited by the Grand Combination of Railroad Circuses.

Hodges was but an advertising agent—a ruthless purveyor of publicity. Callous to æsthetic emotions, blind to the beauties of nature, his conscience was dead to the vandalism of highway advertising. Having bedaubed the smiling face of nature in the vicinity of Johnsonville, he was ready to advance on Jonesboro.

“Hello!” he said, stepping briskly into Elrod’s livery stable, “have you got a team that can snatch me into Jonesboro in four hours?”

“That’s just what we have,” said old Bill Elrod—“Truthful Bill,” the boys called him.

“Well, I mean exactly what I say,” said Hodges. “Exactly four hours. I know it’s a hard drive, and I’m willing to pay a dollar or two extra if you can do it.”

“That’s all right, stranger,” said Truthful. “You’ve come to the right place. I’ve got a pair of plugs that can put you there to the minute.”

“Well, hitch ’em up,” said Hodges. “I’ve got no time to spare.”

Old Elrod called to a stable boy to harness the grays, while he went out to get old Eli Wetherford to drive. He took Eli off into a corner of the blacksmith shop, to give him his instructions.

“See here, Eli, that lunatic of a bill-poster wants to be took to Jonesboro in four hours.”

“Well,” said Eli, “it’ll take ever’ minute of six hours to make the trip, but if he’s dead set on doin’ it in four, you’d better give him all kinds of encouragement. If he goes over to see Hopkins & Brown, they’ll agree to put him through in twenty minutes.”

“I’ll ’tend to that,” said Truthful. “I want you to drive him. If I send a boy, that feller will hustle him along fast enough to kill my horses, in spite of all I can do. Now I want you to take him and dash away with him like you was goin’ for a doctor. When you git to the first toll-gate, you can be talkin’ so fast he won’t think about the time o’ day no more till he hears the town clock strike in Jonesboro.”

“Jerusalem!” said Eli: “I ain’t no funnygraph, to be talkin’ a man blind for six hours on a stretch.”

“Oh, you’ll make it easy enough,” said Truthful. “I’ll put a pint of good liquor under the seat.”

“Well, now,” said Eli, persuasively, “if you could just make it a quart, so the stranger can take a nip now and then, it would encourage him powerful.”

“All right,” said Elrod. “I’ll put in a full quart of the best in town. And say, Eli, try to make up some yarn about advertisin’. The hotel clerk says this looney ain’t interested in nothin’ else.”

Thus it happened that when they passed the tollgate, old Eli, who is a bachelor, was telling Hodges of an imaginary wife, who kept him poor by reading advertisements and buying patent medicines.

“I do believe,” he said, “my old woman would have a fit any day if she should happen to read a double-column advertisement of a real good fit medicine.”

“What kind of advertisement does she seem to like best?” asked Hodges.

“Well, you see,” said Eli, “they ain’t a blessed thing the matter with her, so she likes advertisements that calls for ever’-day symptoms—You know some advertisements says if it makes you dizzy to stan’ on your head fifteen minutes, and if you feel warm in the summer time and cold in winter, you’ve got the very ailment that their bitters’ll cure. Ever’ time she sees a advertisement of that kind it costs old Eli a dollar,” and the indulgent husband of the extravagant hypochondriac solaced himself with a dose of his own favorite prescription.

When they were half way to Jonesboro, they met Hank Binford, and Eli thought it would add some personal interest to a romance he had in mind to make Hank its hero. True, the hero must have a wife and a comfortable fortune, while Hank had neither, but that was immaterial, as the listener was a stranger in a strange land.

“Notice that feller we jest passed? That’s Hank Binford. He’s one of our leadin’ citizens. Owns half the houses in town, and a fine four-hundred-acre farm in the river bottom. Well, sir, when he married, five years ago, he didn’t own two shirts, and he was drunk half of the time. It’s a strange thing, but one little four dollar advertisement changed him into a prosperous citizen, with money in the bank.”

“Must have been a pretty good ad. Tell me about it,” said Hodges, moistening his lips with a half pint of whiskey, and settling down comfortably to listen.

Eli took a long pull at the bottle, and began his story. Even with the bottle of inspiration at his elbow, he could not expect to invent his story quite as fast as he could talk, so he told it with due deliberation and great impressiveness.

“When Tildy Maclin married Hank Binford, her folks all said if she didn’t have no more sense than to tie to such a drinkin’, gamblin’ cuss, she would deserve all she got, and mighty apt to git all she deserved. Tildy said Hank would settle down and do all right, and the other Maclins all predicted, mighty confident, that he’d do all wrong. Well, sir, I never did perfess to be no prophet, so naturally of course I couldn’t foresee in advance just what Tildy would make out of Hank. It appeared to me he might turn out as well as Tildy expected, or full as bad as her folks hoped, and neither way, it needn’t surprise nobody that knows what a powerful sight of human nature there is in a average man.

“Well, Tildy she managed to keep Hank tolerable straight for about a year. He’d go for months without so much as takin’ a dram, and when he did start in for a spree she always managed to git him straight before he could manage to git plum heedless drunk, and it begun to look like she had him safe, and would finally land him in old Rehoboth church.

“But, as I was sayin’, you can’t most always tell for certain just what a man critter is goin’ to do, so I wasn’t overly surprised to hear, one day, that Hank had took advantage of Tildy’s visit to her Wilson County kin, and had filled up with red liquor, and was down to Ike Denman’s grocery playin’ poker with Eb Wetherford and Eli Scoggins and Devil Bill Anderson. That is to say, Hank thought he was playin’, though in reality he was only bein’ played; him bein’ plum drunk and the other boys tolerable sober. One or two of Hank’s friends had dropped in, kinder incidentally, and tried to steer him outside, but of course they didn’t have no luck. ’Long about sundown, next day, I saw Tildy drive up to her gate and ’light, and in about a pair of minutes Miss Sallie Kate Slemmons followed her in, lookin’ powerful pleased, and I didn’t feel no sort of uneasiness but what Tildy would hear the news.

“Well, early Saturday mornin’ I happened to be goin’ right by the grocery, and I thought I’d jest step in and pass the time o’ day with Ike, seein’ as I wasn’t in no particular rush. I found Ike all alone by hisself, and he invited me to have somethin’, and I excused myself at first, as men will, and after a while I inquired if the game was still on, and what was the prospects for Hank to lose out, and go home and see Tildy, and hear all about his Wilson County kin folks. Ike said he hadn’t kept the run of the game and didn’t know how Hank stood, but he seemed to imagine that Hank wasn’t in no swivet to swap news with Tildy.

“Ike said Bunk Wetherford had come in early Friday night and took Eb home, and for a while it looked like the game was broke up; but Eli had bantered one of the Edwards boys to take Eb’s place, and he went up and took a hand, and the game broke out in a fresh place, and at last accounts, looked like it might last till all the spots was wore off the cards. I told Ike I’d go up and advise Hank that Tildy had come home.

“‘All right,’ says he, ‘walk right up. I don’t git no takeout from the game, and I’m more’n willin’ to see it broke up any time. I don’t like to interfere myself, jest because it would look like the boys wasn’t welcome here, so I jest lets ’em do mostly as they like, so long as they pays for what they gits, and don’t break nothin’.’

“So I went up and looked on a while, and tried to ketch Hank’s eye, but I could see ’twas no use. He was feelin’ his licker, and talkin’ powerful smart, and losin’ good hard-earned money just as cheerful as if money growed on trees and he owned all the timber land. After a while Denman come up to the head of the stairs, a-grinnin’ all over his face, and motioned me to come to the door. I went over and he handed me a printed poster, about two foot square, and containin’ the followin’ advertisement in big, black type:

‘LOST, STRAYED OR STOLEN: ONE YOUNG MAN!

About 28 years old, 5 ft. 10 in. High, Weighs about 140 lbs., Tow Headed, Sandy Complected, Weak-eyed, and When Sober answers to the name of

HANK BINFORD!

$4 reward will be paid for his return in good order, Securely Tied.

Signed: TILDY BINFORD.’

“‘Gee Whilikins!’ says I; ‘where did you find it?’

“‘Didn’t find it,’ says he. ‘Jest picked it up. Old man _Weekly Clarion_ Johnson’s little boy, Bill, jest went sailin’ down the road with a armful of ’em, a-strowin’ ’em to the wind. The whole settlement’s full of ’em. They’re all over the floor downstairs, and all over the road, fur as you can see in both directions.’

“The boys at the table was so set on the game that they didn’t take no notice of me and Ike, till I steps over, while Hank was tryin’ to shuffle the cards, and lays the paper down right plum in the middle of the table.

“‘Take the blame thing away,’ says Hank, without readin’ a word.

“‘Read it,’ says I.

“‘Read nothin!’ says he. ‘This is no literary society. Take the blasted thing out of the way so I can deal the kyards.’

“‘I see your name on it,’ says I, ‘and I thought it might interest you.’

“Hank laid down the cards and glanced over the paper. * * First he looked kinder dazed. Then he picked the thing up and looked at it a long time. His face got mighty white, and I thought he was goin’ to faint, but he didn’t. He looked around at the boys; all of ’em a-grinnin’ and lookin’ tickled to death. I begins to have my suspicions about the meanin’ of that white look on his face, and I steps back and takes a stand nigh the door. It was mighty plain to me that Hank had misery to spare, and he meant to pass it around promiscuous. He come up with his chair, and before them grinnin’ idiots had time to back off from the table and climb out of their chairs, Hank had raised a knot on every head, and started ’round the circuit to repeat the dose. They closed in on him and mauled him and gouged him till you couldn’t tell who he was, only by the familiar cut of his clothes and the complexion of his hair and moustache. The only way we could know for certain it was Hank, was by takin’ a sort of inventory of them that could be identified. As none of the whole men was Hank, it stood to reason that this remnant must be him. It was also observed that the critter had a voice some like Hank’s, and used his favorite cuss words quite familiar like.

“Now, endurin’ of the row, Devil Bill Anderson had received a tremenjous big lump on his head, which he could not recall that he had done any overt act or said any word to justify any human man to hit him that vengeful lick, and he was by no means satisfied. The more he thought over the details and narrated the circumstances, the more rebellious he felt and the louder he talked; insomuch that it finally became necessary for Denman to assert hisself and preserve order in his own grocery; which he finally said, quite emphatic, that if anybody wanted to hurt anybody, they might try their hand on Ike Denman. Now there ain’t nobody in the settlement that will go out of the way to have a difficulty with Ike; so Devil Bill kinder cooled off, the best way he could, and everything got quiet, and Denman poured a big sluice of raw whiskey into Hank, and put him to sleep under the big tree at the back of the grocery.