Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 November 1892 — Every Man His Own Protection. [ARTICLE]

Every Man His Own Protection.

There live* in New York an Irishman who sometimes goes over to his native isle, and who learns a thing or two at each visit. Upon one of these visits he found that one workingman in the region where the visitor found himself wits paid considerable more per week than tils fellows got. “Why do they pay you more than these other men get?” lie asked the laborer. "Because I’m worth more,” was the answer. ‘‘l’ve been to America and learned how to work." Any one who knows American working men and workingmen abroad can understand this. We are the nerviest, cleverest, hardiest people on earth. It is not boasting to say this; it is simple truth. Not only is this true, but it is also true that Intelligent foreigners coming to America soon catch our ways and learn how to do almost the work of two days in one. A man who lias studied the Italians says that when these men first come to America they are slow and awkwnrd, but they presently learn how to work and develop into excellent workmen. This is as true of skilled as of unskilled workmen. The Italian mechanic is accustomed to lighter tools than we use in America, and he finds himself at a disadvantage until he learns the ways of our people, but if lie has the stuff in him he gets to doing an American Instead of an Italian day’s work. A contractor who had built railroads all over the world said that the cost per mile was no more in Illinois at $1.85 per day for labor than in British India at nine cents a day for labor. The talk about foreign pauper labor and the danger of its competition is a humbug. We need not fear it, because it is pauper labor. The laborer to be feared is the fellow who can do a bigger day’s work than the American laborer, and he has yet to be born. In British India a man who is not more than fairly well off will have a dozen servants in his bouse, each at ridiculously low wages, but they will not do the work of two wide awake women with American training, and their wages, taken altogether, amount to more than you’d pay to three such women. Where American workmen are paid more than foreign workingmen it is because they are worth more and not because of protection. If you hire ten skilled workingmen of American birth or training to do a piece of work and pay them $3.50 per day, the cost of doing that work will be thirty-five dollars a day. If you hire three times as many unskilled, Untrained, inefficient men at one-third the wages, you’ll pay the same amount in the aggregate and get no more work done. But are there no foreign workingmen as skillful and efficient as American workingmen? In a few trades there are foreigners who can do things that our people cannot do, or can do but poorly, and those men are often as well paid as American workingmen. In other trades there are skilled foreigners whose hours are shorter than those of workingmen in America, or who use less labor saving machinery, and therefore get less work done. As a rule, however, the day’s labor of an American is worth more than the day’s labor of a foreigner who has not learned our ways, and for that reason the wages of the American are higher. The best protection of American labor lies in the energy, skill, intelligence and persistency of the American laborer. “Every man his own protection” is a good cry. i