“How vast and bottomless is the abyss of meanness, cruelty, and crime sometimes concealed under fair-seeming phrases.... Ostensibly the demand for cheap labor is made in the interest of improvement and general civilization. It tells of increased wealth and of marvelous transformations of the old and the worthless into the new and valuable. It speaks of splendid cities built, and flourishing towns multiplied; of rich mines developed, of amply cultivated fields at home; in a word, it speaks of national prosperity.
Alas! however, this is but the outside of the cup and the platter--the beautiful marble without, with its dead men's bones within. Cheap Labor, is a phrase that has no cheering music for the masses. Those who demand it, and seek to acquire it, have but little sympathy with common humanity. It is the cry of the few against the many.
It means not cheap labor, but dear labor. Not abundant labor, but scarce labor; not more work, but more workmen. It means that condition of things in which the laborers shall be so largely in excess of the work needed to be done, that the capitalist shall be able to command all the laborers he wants, at prices only enough to keep the laborer above the point of starvation.
A moment's thought will show that cheap labor in the mouths of those who seek it, means not cheap labor, but the opposite.
The former slave owners of the South want cheap labor; they want it from Germany and from Ireland; they want it from China and Japan; they want it from anywhere in the world, but from Africa. They want to be independent of their former slaves, and bring their noses to the grindstone. The African slave trade with all its train of horrors, was instituted and carried on to supply the landholding inhabitants of this country with cheap labor; and the same lust for gain, which originated that infernal traffic, discloses itself in the modern cry for cheap labor and the fair-seeming schemes for supplying the demand. So rapidly does one evil succeed another.
Last week we took occasion to say a word of the 'Coolie Trade' now prosecuted in the interest of cheap labor, and as kindred in character and results to the African slave trade of other days. Our reading shows the points of resemblance between the two schemes to be more striking than they at that time appeared, and the coolie trade but little behind its predecessor in every species of baseness and cruelty.
The trade of the slave-trader across the sea was a track of blood. The slaves were literally stowed between decks, without regard to health, comfort, or decency. The great thought of captains, owners, consignees, and others, was to make the most money they could in the shortest possible time.
Human nature is the same now as then. The rights of a Coolie in California, in Peru, in Jamaica, in Trinidad, are scarcely more guarded than were those of the Negro slaves brought to our shores a century ago. The sufferings of these people are almost as heart-rending as any that attended the African slave trade.”
Excerpted from Frederick Douglass, Cheap Labor, The National Era, August 17, 1871.
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