Aug. 27.
AN acute observer of social conditions has pointed out that) tone of the chief causes of industrial unrest is the realization by the workers that the possession of capital puts an immense power into the hands of a very limited group of people. In feudal days the landless man was a serf, but his condition was infinitely better than that of the masterless man/ who had no caste and was legated to the ranks of the The casual worker of to-ds cubies the place of the handle: man in feudal times and the unemployed man is little better than the masterless man of the olden days:
The poverty-line in China being much more clearly drawn than it) is in Western lands the power of wealth is more sharply aecentuated and the contrast between affluence and its opposite more easily marked. To illustrate the argument that the possession -of wealth, or capital, means power we have but to glance at an extreme case. There are in Shanghai a multitude of little slave children. These mites had the misfortune to be born into homes where the struggle for existence was so keen that the addition of even one mouth to feed meant a diminution of the too scanty rations available for the other inmates. We may believe that parental love asserted itself though poverty not only came in at the door but had a permanent seat at the family table. When the little one had reached the marketable age of six or seven years it was not hard for those who cater for this evil trade and coin riches from misfortune to convince the hard-pressed paterfamilias that the lot of a slave girl in a home! where food was abundant _was infinitely preferable to a miserable existence in a hut where sans food, sans clothes, sans everything was the chronic condition of life. And so a bargain is: struck. The home ix enriched by_ the possession of a few rarely' seen dollars. The middleman—or woman—makes a handsome profit on the sale of the little chattel to] someone in need of a maidservant and the transfer from a hovel to a home is completed, It is not always an entirely bad bargain for the person chiefly concerned. Though the records of the Mixed. Court show that sometimes the! purchasers of these children are not humane enough to be entrusted with the absolute control of the life of a dog, much less of a human being, we would like to believe that, in many cases, the! little slave girl has a merciful mistress. But even so, her life, liberty and happiness are at the entire disposal of another. The possession of $20 odd has made a stranger the arbiter of her fate and the absence of even a moiety. of that sum has defrauded her of the rude shelter she called home.
In the best circumstances her life fs a hard one and in the worst it! were better had she never been born.
To turn to another and less harrowing example. There are the usfial labourers, ricsha pullers, dockers and the coolies We see at work on our roads.
They are not bought and sold like the little unfortunates referred to above. They are not compelled to work; they are free to take the job offered or—or what? Or go hungry is surely the only possible answer. A missionary Journal states that a worker upcountry was curious to know how. the wages paid by the contractor who was carrying out building] operations on the compound compared with the cost of living. He found that unskilled workers were paid an average wage of $3.90 per. month and the cost of living for them was $4.88. To put it in round figures, the men earned $4 per month and it cost $5 to live. 'The wages earned provided them with only four-fifths of the food needed to keep them comfortably alive. Figures taken from an upcountry station would not be applicable to a treaty port; but, if wages are higher here, the cost' of living is also proportionately' increased so that, relatively, the situation is much the same everywhere. Workers at home used to say that for them there was but a fortnight between the workshop and the workhouse. There is not even a workhouse for the Chinese worker and we dare not contemplate his fate when sickness or unemployment falls to his lot. These things, at least, partly explain the inefficiency and
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.