Read Ebook: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 11 Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen by Hubbard Elbert

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For the young men and women it was an alluring life. The old way gave them no time to themselves--there was the cow to milk, the pigs and poultry to care for, or the garden making insistent demands. Now they worked at certain hours for certain wages, and rested. Tenements took the place of cottages, and the "public," with its smiling barkeep, was always right at the corner.

Hargreaves, Arkwright, Watt and Eli Whitney had worked a revolution more far-reaching than did Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre and Marat.

Here creeps in an item interesting to our friends who revel in syntax and prosody. Any machine or apparatus for lifting has been called a "jack" since the days of Shakespeare. The jack was the bearer of bundles, a lifter, a puller, a worker. Any coarse bit of mechanism was called a jack, and is yet. In most factories there are testing-jacks, gearing-jacks, lifting-jacks. Falstaff tells of a jack-of-all-trades. The jack was anything strong, patient and serviceable.

When Hargreaves, the Lancashire carpenter, invented his spinning-machine, a village wit called it a "jenny." The machine was fine, delicate, subtle, and as spinning was a woman's business anyway, the new machine was parsed in the feminine gender.

Soon the new invention took on a heavier and stronger form, and its persistency suggested to some other merry bucolic a new variation and it was called a "mule." The word stuck, and the mule-spinner is with us wherever cotton is spun.

The discovery that coal was valuable for fuel followed the invention of the steam-engine.

When things are needed we dig down and find them, or reach up and secure them. You could not run a steamship, except along a river with well-wooded banks, any more than you could run an automobile with coal.

The dealing in coal, or "coals" as our English cousins still use the word, began in Eighteen Hundred Nineteen. That was the year the first steamship, the "Savannah," crossed the ocean. She ran from Savannah to London. Her time was twenty-five days. She burned four hundred fifty tons of coal, or about two-thirds of her entire carrying capacity. Robert Fulton had been running his steamer "Clermont" on the Hudson in Eighteen Hundred Seven, but there were wooding-stations every twenty miles.

It was argued in the House of Commons that no steamship could ever cross the Atlantic with steam, alone, as a propelling power. And even as it was being mathematically proved, the whistle of the "Savannah" drowned the voice of the orator.

But the "Savannah" also carried sail, and so the doubters still held the floor. An iron boat with no sails that could cross the Atlantic in five days was a miracle that no optimist had foreseen--much less, dared prophesy.

The new conditions almost threatened to depopulate the rural districts. Farmers forsook the soil. The uncertainty of a crop was replaced with the certainty of a given wage. Children could tend the spinning-jennies as well as men. There was a demand for child labor. Any poor man with a big family counted himself rich. Many a man who could not find a job at a man's wage quit work and was supported by his wife and children. To rear a family became a paying enterprise.

Various mill-owners adopted children or took them under the apprentice system, agreeing to teach them the trade. Girls and boys from orphan asylums and workhouses were secured and held as practical slaves. They were herded in sheep-sheds, where they slept on straw and were fed in troughs. They were worked in two shifts, night and day, so the straw was never really cold. They worked twelve hours, slept eight, and one hour was allowed for meals. Their clothing was not removed except on Saturday. Any alteration in the business life of a people is fraught with great danger.

Recklessness, greed and brutality at such a time are rife.

Almost all workingmen of forty or over were out of work. Naturally, employers hired only the young, the active, the athletic. These made more money than they were used to making, so they spent it lavishly and foolishly. It was a prosperous time, yet, strangely enough, prosperity brought starvation to thousands. Family life in many instances was destroyed, and thus were built those long rows of houses, all alike, with no mark of individuality--no yard, no flowers, no gardens--that still in places mar the landscape in factory towns.

Pretty girls went to the towns to work in the mills, and thus lost home ties. Later they drifted to London. Drunkenness increased.

In Seventeen Hundred Ninety-six, there was formed the Manchester Board of Health. Its intent was to guard the interests of factory-workers. Its desire was to insure light, ventilation and sanitary conveniences for the workers. Beyond this it did not seek to go.

The mill superintendents lifted a howl. They talked about interference, and depriving the poor people of the right to labor. They declared it was all a private matter between themselves and the workers--a matter of contract.

Robert Owen, it seems, was the first factory superintendent to invite inspection of his plant. He worked with the Board of Health, not against it. He refused to employ children under ten years of age, and although there was a tax on windows, he supplied plenty of light and also fresh air. So great was the ignorance of the workers that they regarded the Factory Laws as an infringement on their rights. The greed and foolish fears of the mill-owners prompted them to put out the good old argument that a man's children were his own, and that for the State to dictate to him where they should work, when and how, was a species of tyranny. Work was good for children! Let them run the streets? Never!

It is a curious thing to note that when Senator Albert J. Beveridge endeavored to have a Federal Bill passed at Washington, in Nineteen Hundred Seven, the arguments he had to meet and answer were those which Robert Owen and Sir Robert Peel were obliged to answer in Seventeen Hundred Ninety-five.

When a man who worked a hundred orphans fourteen hours a day, boys and girls of from six to twelve, was accused of cruelty, he defended himself by saying, "If I doesn't work 'em all the time 'cept when they sleep and eat, they will learn to play, and then never work." This argument was repeated by many fond parents as conclusive.

The stress of the times--having many machines in one building, all run by one motor power, the necessity of buying raw material in quantities, the expense of finding a market--all these combined to force the invention of a very curious economic expediency. It was called a Joint Stock Company. From a man and his wife and his children making things at home, we get two or three men going into partnership and hiring a few of their neighbors at day wages.

Then we get the system of "shareholding," with hundreds or thousands of people as partners in a manufacturing enterprise which they never visit.

The people who owned the shares were the ones who owned the tools. Very naturally, they wanted and expected dividends for the use of the tools. That was all they wanted--dividends. The manager of the mill held his position only through his ability to make the venture bring returns. The people who owned the shares or the tools, never saw the people who used the tools. A great gulf lay between them. For the wrongs and injustices visited upon the workers no one person was to blame. The fault was shifted. Everybody justified himself. And then came the saying, "Corporations have no souls."

Robert Owen was manager of a mill, yet he saw the misery, the ignorance and the mental indifference that resulted from the factory system. He, too, must produce dividends, but the desire of his heart was also to mitigate the lot of the workers.

Books were written by good men picturing the evils of the factory system. Comparisons were made between the old and the new, in which the hideousness of the new was etched in biting phrase. Some tried to turn the dial backward and revive the cottage industries, as did Ruskin a little later. "A Dream of John Ball" was anticipated, and many sighed for "the good old times."

But among the many philosophers and philanthropists who wrestled with the problem, Robert Owen seems to have stood alone in the belief that success lay in going on, and not in turning back. He set himself to making the new condition tolerable and prophesied a day when out of the smoke and din of strife would emerge a condition that would make for health, happiness and prosperity such as this tired old world never has seen. Robert Owen was England's first Socialist.

Very naturally he was called a dreamer. Some called him an infidel and the enemy of society.

Very many now call him a seer and a prophet.

In Robert Owen's day cotton yarn was packaged and sold in five-pound bundles. These packages were made up in hanks of a given number of yards. One hundred twenty counts to a package was fixed upon as "par," or "standard count." If the thread was very fine, of course more hanks were required to make up the five pounds. The price ranged up or down, below or above the one-hundred-twenty mark. That is, if a package contained two hundred forty hanks, its value was just double what it would have been if merely standard.

Robert Owen knew fabrics before he began to spin.

First, he was a salesman. Second, he made the things he could sell.

The one supremely difficult thing in business is salesmanship. Goods can be manufactured on formula, but it takes a man to sell. He who can sell is a success--others may be.

The only men who succeed in dictating the policy of the house are those in the Sales Department--that is, those who are on the side of income, not of expense.

The man with a "secret process" of manufacture always imparts his secret, sooner or later; but the salesman does not impart his secret, because he can't. It is not transferable. It is a matter of personality. Not only does the salesman have to know his goods, but he must know the buyer--he must know humanity.

And humanity was the raw stock in which Robert Owen dealt. Robert Owen never tried to increase his sales by decreasing his price. His product was always higher than standard. "Anybody can cut prices," he said, "but it takes brains to make a better article." He focused on fineness.

And soon buyers were coming to him. A finer article meant a finer trade. And now, on each package of yarn that Owen sent out, he placed a label that read thus, "This package was made under the supervision of Robert Owen." Thus his name gradually became a synonym for quality.

Among other curious ideas held by Owen was that to make finer goods you must have a finer quality of workman. To produce this finer type of person now became his dream.

Mr. Drinkwater smiled at the idea and emphasized "dividends."

Now Mr. Drinkwater had a son-in-law who looked in on things once a month, signed his voucher and went away fox-hunting. He thought he was helping run the mill. This man grew jealous of the young manager and suggested that Drinkwater increase the boy's pay and buy off the percentage clause in the contract, so as to keep the youngster from getting megalocephalia.

Drinkwater asked Owen what he would take for the contract, and Owen handed it to him and said, "Nothing." It gave him a chance to get out into a larger field. Drinkwater never thought of the value of that little Robert Owen label. No wise employer should ever allow a thing like that.

Owen had won both name and fame among the merchants, and he now engaged with several mills to superintend their output and sell their goods with his label on each package. In other words, he was a Manufacturers' Broker. From a five-hundred-pound-a-year man he had grown to be worth two thousand pounds a year.

No mill owned him. He was free--he was making money. The dream of human betterment was still in his heart.

On one of his trips to Glasgow to sell goods, he met a daughter of David Dale, a mill-owner who was in active competition with him. Dale made a fine yarn, too.

The girl had heard of Owen: they met as enemies--a very good way to begin an acquaintance. It was Nature's old, old game of stamen, pistil and pollen, that fertilizes the world of business, betterment and beauty. They quarreled.

"You are the man who puts your name on the package?"

"Yes."

"And yet you own no mill!"

"Never mind. You certainly are proud of your name."

"I am--wouldn't you be?"

"Not of yours."

Then they stared at each other in defiance. To relieve the tension, Mr. Owen proposed a stroll. They took a walk through the park and discovered that they both were interested in Social Reform. David Dale owned the mills at New Lanark--a most picturesque site. He was trying to carry on a big business, so as to make money and help the workers. He was doing neither, because his investment in the plant had consumed too much of his working capital.

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