INDUSTRY AS MATTER OF RACE.
WE wonder what it is that imparts the curious quality of Industry to any people ? No animal except a beaver has it, and no man in the totally uncivilised and, therefore, presumably natural condition. The popular English view that it is in some way inherent in race, that black men are very lazy, brown men lazy, yellow men rather lazy, and white men lazy- ish, while the Englishman alone loves work for itself, is palpably untrue. Englishmen, to begin with, are not the most industrious of the white race. The Belgian peasantry, most of the French peasantry, and some of the Prussian peasantry beat them hollow in the power of persistent, monotonous, long. continued application to disagreeable work. They labour, take them all round, -three hours in the day longer than average Englishmen, who, indeed, are rather fierce workers, possessed of a special energy, than industrious men. The English can get quantities of work, and good work, done; but they will only work six days in seven, they try hard to get another day in each week, and do get a half-one, and they are savagely irritable about long hours, which Continentals bear quite placidly. When they can, they fight for a day lasting from ten to four ; and when they cannot, they will strike rather than bear two unusual hours a week. We greatly doubt if English labourers would toil for any wages for fifteen hours a day, as the Auvergnats do ; and are quite sure they would kill somebody, if forced to work four- teen hours in stifling dens, as the silk throwsters of North Italy are. Indeed, they shirk some trades because the work is too hard, and have not only not a monopoly in their own bakeries and sugar refineries, but no fair share in either of them. The Germans and Scotch do three parts of that work. The English- man's idea of rising in life, indeed, is to be free of heavy work, and he shares the feeling of the Lowland Scotch, who, as a great American employer of labour testified before a Committee of the House of Commons, are, as labourers in the United States, of no use at all. They all become masters in two years. As to the Yellow Races, who ought to be just lazier than Euro- peans, they beat them altogether. We suppose there are in- dolent Chinese, but the immense majority of that vast people have an unequalled power of work, care nothing about hours, and so long as they are paid, will go on with a dogged, steady persistence in toil for sixteen hours a day, such as no European can rival. No English ship-carpenter will work like a Chinese, no laundress will wash as many clothes, and a Chinese com- positor would very soon be expelled for over-toil by an English " chapel " of the trade. The Chinese peasants and boatmen work all day, and every day ; and, in fact, but for untiring industry, the closely packed masses of China could not be sus- tained as they are by artificial irrigation. Of the Brown Races, the Arabs generally prefer abstemiousness carried to a starving point to continuous labour ; but the most numerous brown people, the Indian, labour unrelaxingly for seventy-seven hours a week. They are often called lazy by unobservant Europeans, because they enjoy the cool of the evening ; but they go to work before four in the morning and work on till three, and only eat once during sunlight, the second meal being taken after dark. They take, too, no weekly holiday. The result, in fact, proves their industry. They keep up a system of agriculture singularly toilsome, because it involves irrigation, raise often three crops and always two in the year, and have covered India with grand cities which they built for themselves. As they feel their climate, though less than Europeans do, their labour is severe, and we should say deliberately, after the observation of years, that their industrial fault was, when labouring for themselves, a disposition to do too much on insufficient food. They wear themselves out too early. They know this themselves, and have a tendency to refuse overtime and reject pay for it which is often most annoying. Of course, the savage brown races will not work continuously, but neither will the savage white ones, e.g., the mean whites of the Southern States ; but then both will make incredible exertions by fits and starts, as, for example, in hunting, or rowing very long distances. The Black Races are the most varied in respect to industry, but even among them the readiness to toil hard is far from wanting. The slave-owners always thought their negroes lazy, but then their wages were stolen, and no man works well without pay, or for pay which is insecure. The
pure negroes of the Soudan who enter British steamers as stokers, work at their cruel labour as Englishmen will not, and the Times of this week tells us that negroes are the best labourers on the Panama Canal. They even got jealous of the excavating machines, offered to beat the obnoxious inanimates, and when permitted beat them, doing the work as well and more quickly. In the Southern States, when regularly paid, negroes work harder than they did as slaves ; and in the West Indies, when working for themselves, they raise all the food they require, and maintain their own aged and sick. The Australian blacks, it is true, will not work continuously ; but that is because they are savages, not because they are blacks, savages having apparently the inability to work which animals display. We work horses, cattle, and asses continuously, not to say cruelly ; but left to himself, no animal but a beaver voluntarily works. He will exert himself when hungry to hunt for many hours together under most painful circumstances,—tigers, for instance, being known to swim extraordinary distances ; but the food once ob. tamed, the wild animal hates even to move till tormented by hunger again. Savages, too, have slaves, in the shape of wives ; and having no scruples, they make them do all the work, as cynically as do some classes of the French bourgeoisie.
It would seem as if Race had very little to do with the quality of industry—though indolence may be hereditary, like any other vice—and we must look for the causes in a different direction. One is, we think, physical, and two others moral. We have never heard any reasonable explanation of the Chinese appetite for work, except that they could not live if they did not toil ; and that, consequently, the overcrowding of centuries had eaten out those indisposed or unable to toil hard. The children, too, are forced into work till it becomes a habit ; and a Chinese artisan fairly well off will work far into the night, as an Englishman will often read, just because the hours are less tiresome if they are so employed than if they are not. The Belgians, too, are very thickly packed, and are most industrious ; and though Irishmen, under the same circumitances, are assumed to be lazy, that is, we are convinced, a libel. They work cruelly hard out of their own country, and in it, when secured against higher rents, with amazing perseverance, though they like irregular work best, and resent the habitual English demand for " finish." The chief causes of difference are, however, moral. It is probable that the desire to accumulate, which differs so exceedingly in individuals and families, differs also in Races, some being hoarders, and, therefore, persistent workmen, where others will do only what is needful for the time. We sus- pect this is one great difference perpetually operating against the negro. The negro cannot rid himself of a certain careless- ness of the future, which is partly want of foresight and partly pure courage ; and, therefore, lounges, while the Chinaman or coolie from the Nerbudda, being a prey to anxiety, wants to hoard, and, therefore, works on continuously. We do not find that Englishmen who have enough work so very hard ; while some very industrious Southerners, like the Tuscans, the moment they have saved a secure maintenance give themselves up deliberately to idleness, and are happy in it, as Englishmen seldom are. The main cause, however, of the different repute of the races for industry is undoubtedly a difference in their conscientiousness. All races above the savages will work con- tinuously and steadily to acquire things indispensable, but very few will work hard merely because they promised. Even Englishmen and Americans will not ; and among both, the foreman or the " boss " is a necessary institution, while with the yellow, brown, and black races he is absolutely indis- pensable. The latter, indeed, even if supervised, will hardly for wages work the agreed stint—which the English- man, if supervised, will do—but prefers the hundred excuses and indulges in the thousand negligences which make Englishmen denounce him as incurably lazy. He is not lazy so much as good-humouredly tricky. The Englishman wants to be idle nearly as much as the Negro does—not quite, for the Eng- lishman's inner self was built up in a climate in which sitting still is not a luxury—but he cannot, if he is idle, be quite so contented with himself. Most other men, including all black men, see no harm in idleness, and no duty in work, provided only that things indispensable are obtained without begging. They have not equal fidelity to the work, and will do it knavishly if that will pay, or will not do it at all if it is not indispensably required. That is a defect of a moral quality, but it is not laziness pure. The best test is piece-work, and we should say—and we have seen all of them at work—that, granted strict supervision and piece-work, the Chinaman was far away the most industrious worker in the world; that the well-fed negro comes next, provided he is allowed holi- days,—if not, he grows morose, like an overworked child ; that the average Englishman comes third, provided he is allowed to make up for short hours by extra energy ; that the Continental European comes next, working long hours rather perfunctorily ; and that the brown man is last, with the exception of the savage, dreading overtime too much. He will not work to earn more than he thinks he wants, plus a modicum of hoarding, and is not tempted at all by overtime allowances. We should say, too, that while the yellow man already works up to his full power, and the black man can be induced to do the same—though not quite as con- tinuonsly—the Englishman is approaching to the brown man in a deliberate desire to limit his own industry. He considers more leisure better worth his while than more pay, and is trying to secure it,—a decision to which the brown man came two thousand years ago.
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