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nniL A. ate Jourma . JLJLC Vol. I. No. 15. y A Weekly Mirror of North Carolina Life RALEIGH, N. C, FRIDAY, MAY 16, 1913. (H ) ) ooo,oo oo-&ooo ( WHAT PROTECTION WILL DO FOR ANY COUNTRY When Charles Dickens was in America away back in the forties, when manufacturing was getting a start in New England under the low tariff duties, one of the things that pleased him most in this country was what he found in the manufacturing village of Lowell. His American Notes contains a most appreciative chapter on the fine and wholesome condi tions which he found there among the workers who were fresh, vigorous, healthy people from the surrounding hills. Their reading rooms, their wholesome working conditions, their recre ations and their entertainments, and the whole situation were described and shown to be far superior to anything dreamed of in England at that time. Behold those conditions now! When the great strike was on last January a year ago, a correspondent of the Outlook (a paper believing in protection) went to Lawrence while the Congressional ivestigation was going on and published a series of articles in The Outlook. From those articles the following deadly parallel of conditions produced by high protection is taken. Contrast it with what Charles Dickens saw in 1842; elsewhere in this issue. The Owners The stock is closely held by about six hundred stockholders. A few stockholders who are still living bouglit into the company at a time when the stock was very low as low as $75 a share- and have seen their property rise in value more than fifty-fold, until to-day the same shares are worth $3,800. . . . . . . Among them are some of the finest people in New England. Many live in Boston, and are among the most cultured and delightful people in the world. Among them are representatives of some of the strong old families of Massachuset s, such names as Lowell, Lawrence, Lyman, Cool idge, Amory, Ayer. It can almost be said that the aristocracy of Boston is based upon the profits of the textile mills of New England. Many of them are interested in "all good works." I know as a fact that there are no people in the country who have contributed more liberally to the educa tion and uplift to Southern negroes, to missions in Hawaii, and to many other good causes than these men of Boston. But about conditions in the dark alleys of Lawrance, where their own money comes from apparently they know very little, nor do they want to know. Here, indeed, is an astonishing fact, which I feel like having printed in large letters : Not a single large stockholder in the Lawrence mills lives in Lawrence. Not one. ... A textile working town is not a pleasant place to live in dirty wooden buildings, dirty streets, unlovely looking people, cheap goods in the store windows, no good society. So the owners live in Boston and elsewhere. Not only this, but there is only one of the important mill managers who lives in Lawrence. The others live in the beautiful, peaceful town of Andover or elsewhere out of the city. Not inly this, but many of the well-to-do citizens of the town, the merchants, the bankers, even some of the mill foremen and overseers, have moved out of the city of Lawrence and are resi dents and voters in Andover or Methuen or else where. Drive out from Lawrence in almost any direction and you will see the ine homes of these people crowning all the hills. And you will find the very people who have deserted Lawr nee, where all their property interests are located, ex coriating the corrupt political conditions of the city ! The Workers. As I went among the tenements of Lawrence I was struck by he extraordinary absence of old men and old women. Very few of them indeed are brought from Europe. The mills want only strength and health, and when they have milked the cream of youth from humanity the remainder goes to the scrap heap. . . . No man can support a family on $300 or $400 a year, even though he lives in the meanest way. The result was that the wife also had to go into the mills, followed by one child after another as fast as they arrived at the legal age. This meant living in dark tenements. It meant taking in lodgers to the point of indecent crowding. Some of the tenements of Lawrence are the worst I ever saw. ... I did not find any cases of actual and immediate starvation, such as were reported in certain newspapers, but it is an undoubted fact that there is an appalling amount of underfeeding. I asked the ages of many young people I met and they looked (and they were) stunted, not fully de veloped. . . . Thousands also in the city, which frequently suffers from overproduction of cloth, go under clad. In the crowds of strikers in the streets on those bitter March m rnings the number I saw without overcoats and evidently too thinly clad was ever great. And in their homes, wherever I went, the tendency was to crowd into the kitchen and save coal by keeping only one room warm. The result of all this is a high death rate, especially 1rom diseases resulting from exposure and poor sanitary conditions like pneumonia. Abo, the young children die at an appalling rate (169 per 1,000); 1 thought of the 154 pauper burials in Lawrence in 1910 a higher rate in pro portion to the population than that of New York City and among p- ople where pauper burial is a lasting disgrace to the family that survives. Amc icon workmen with American standards have disappeared from the textile industry, and even the solid English and Scotch workers are now flying before the immigrants from Southern Eu rope, who can, or will attempt to, exist on lower wages. The result of this condition has been that Lawrence has for years been governed by saloon keepers, dive owners, and petty grafters. Price : $1 a Year. IF 'SI I ra en 13 J to rasen n? en P3 en
The State Journal (Raleigh, N.C.)
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May 16, 1913, edition 1
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