TABLE 114,

AVERAGE YEARLY EARNINGS OF COTTON-MILL OPERATIVES, BY SEX AND AGE IN THE PRINCIPAL STATES, 1904.1

As can be seen from the preceding table the average earnings of adult men in South Carolina are only slightly above the average earnings of children in Massachusetts; the highest average earnings of adult men in the Southern mills are much below the average earnings of women employed in the Northern mills. This is a reversal of the usual relation between men's and women's wages. It is this competition of the cheap American labor of the Southern mills that keeps down the wages of the Southern and Eastern European, Armenian, and Syrian immigrants employed in the cotton mills of the North.

1 Census of Manufactures, 1905, vol. i., Table 5, p. 188.

gested quarters, and because they were underfed and poorly clad. There has accordingly been little disposition among people usually friendly to labor to waste sympathy upon men and women who were "willing" to deny themselves the barest necessities of life for the mere privilege of working in the mills. "The lesson from Lawrence" is to these good people that the solution of the labor problem is in keeping out the foreign laborer. As usual in all arguments inspired by this theory, no regard is paid to historical perspective.

The American operative was not "forced to leave the woolen-goods manufacturing industry" by the coming of the recent immigrants, because he had left it long before. According to the census of 1880, there were among the 10,395 operatives of the cotton and woolen mills of Lawrence only 4111 native Americans, i. e., only 40 per cent, including persons of native and of foreign parentage. The majority were immigrants from Ireland, Great Britain, and Canada, with a sprinkling of Germans (4 per cent). The immigrants from all other countries numbered I per cent of all operatives. Thus, if the prevalence of immigrants among the operatives be the result of the "forcing out" of native Americans, it is clear that they were forced out by English-speaking immigrants.

Even as recently as 1900 the immigrants from Italy, Russia, Poland, and Austria-Hungary and their Americanborn children, employed in the woolen and worsted mills of Lawrence, numbered only 721 persons of both sexes, i. e., 10 per cent of all operatives, whereas the total number of native Americans of native parentage did not exceed 374, i. e., 5.2 per cent of the total force. If it be true that all but this little remnant of American operatives had been "forced out" of the mills, is there any reason to attribute their ousting to the pressure of the 10 per cent made up of "recent immigrants" rather than to that of the 85 per cent

2

2

Population, X. Census, Table XXXVI., p. 882.

Occupations at the XII. Census Table 43.

representing the English-speaking immigrants and their native-born children? Suppose the 10 per cent contingent of recent immigrants forced out as many Americans, there were still 90 per cent of the places in the mills to be filled, and the contest for these places was between native Americans of native parentage and English-speaking immigrants and their children. Detailed figures are given in Table 115.

TABLE 115.

DISTRIBUTION OF THE OPERATIVES OF BOTH SEXES IN THE WOOLEN AND WORSTED MILLS OF LAWRENCE, MASSACHUSETTS, BY PARENT

It is only since the federal census of 1900 that the immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and Syria have become a conspicuous element among the woolen-mill operatives of Lawrence. The report of the Immigration Commission contains figures which "are practically a census of the local establishments" for 1909. According to those figures. 35.5 per cent of the operatives were immigrants 1 Occupations at the XII. Census, Table 43.

from Southern and Eastern Europe and Turkey. But the proportion of native Americans of native parentage was 6.9 per cent, as against 5.2 per cent in 1900. Since the advent of the "new immigrants" the number of native Americans of native parentage employed in the woolen and worsted mills of Lawrence has more than doubled. The proof of this fact is given in Table 116 next following:

TABLE 116.

NUMBER OF NATIVE AMERICANS OF NATIVE PARENTAGE EMPLOYED IN THE WOOLEN AND WORSTED MILLS OF LAWRENCE, 1900 AND 1909.*

The only inference justified by the figures of the Immigration Commission is that the same economic conditions which have brought the recent immigrants to the Lawrence woolen mills have also induced increasing numbers of native Americans of native stock to accept employment in the same mills. In 1909, the average number of wage-earners in the worsted mills was 20,668, as against an average number of 12,216 employed in 1904.3 These figures are

I

Occupations at the XII. Census, Table 43. Report of the Immigration Commission, vol. 10, Table 81, p. 742. The same figures are duplicated in Table 85, p. 752.

2 As some of these operatives may have been employed in woolen and worsted mills, their total number is included in this comparative table. The percentage of increase is thereby reduced below the actual figure. 3 XIII. Census Bulletin on Manufactures in Massachusetts, Table I, pp. 34-45.