III (5)

So few arguments in favour of the theory of the concentration of industries can be drawn from the industrial census of the United States, that the lamented Mr. Edward Atkinson finds in it a tendency to individualism, a result at which he arrived by supplementing the results of the census by the industrial census of the State of Massachusetts. This is the State which contains the greatest number of industrial establishments owned by limited companies. It also contains a much larger proportion of textile establishments than the other States; they are 438 in number, and employ on an average 322 persons. But the total of 250 classes of industry in Massachusetts comprises 29,180 establishments, each of them employing on an average 17 persons, including women and children.

In the State of Pennsylvania, which includes the Baldwin locomotive works with an average number of 18,000 workmen, and Pittsburg with its blast furnaces and steel works, the average is 14.06; in the State of New York the average is only 10.79, and we have seen that for the whole of the United States it is 10.50 for workmen and 11 for workmen and clerks combined.

And yet the emigrants, ordinary workmen who arrive at the rate of a million per annum, present the great industries with a supply of labour ready to hand; and, in fact, Mr. Atkinson pointed out that in a cotton mill in Massachusetts, with which he was familiar, the 2,000 operatives of either sex belonged to sixteen different nationalities. But had they taken away work from the American workman? By no means, for the daughters of the agricultural labourers who had previously been employed in the cotton mills select occupations of a higher order, and leave the mills to the new-comers. They have risen to a higher sphere in the scale of occupations.

Possibly some of the displaced workmen have opened a workshop on their own account, for what is it that nearly all the large establishments supply? They supply manufactured products which have to pass through a workshop before they reach the consumer. The tanner works, not for the public, but for the shoemaker and the saddler; the cloth manufacturer works for the tailor and the upholsterer. The element of individual labour, which requires men and women with an awakened spirit, an observant and accurate eye, and a skilful hand, will not cease to grow in proportion as the tastes of the consumer become refined and his purchasing power increases.

We may therefore conclude that:—

Despite these gaps, which tend to underrate the apparent importance of the smaller industries, these industries are distributed among a number of establishments which is sufficiently considerable to cause the whole of the establishments, large and small, taken together, to employ an average of only eleven wage-earners, including both clerks and workmen.