Page:The Atlantic Monthly vol. 69.djvu/735

1892.] so essential to the progress of industry. The negro must teach himself to become a capitalist. There are two stages to this: first that of hoarding, second that of profitable investment. The first stage of thrift may be stimulated by adopting the postal savings device. If it be true, as is plausibly asserted, that the so-called poor white of the South is less thrifty than the negro, such adoption by our government of the postal savings institution would be a blessing to both races. "We know, indeed, that the poor white in the North is chiefly in need of the thrift that has a habit of hoarding; that is, the habit of saving something from its weekly pittance, no matter how small.

The introduction of manufacturing industries throughout the South is favorable to the rise of the poor white from his poverty. In the early days of cotton manufacture in New England, the unthrifty white people, who hitherto had lived in cottages or hovels near the large farms, removed to the villages that were springing up near water privileges. They learned how to "work in the mill," all the members of the family, from the oldest to the youngest, and the aggregate wages was wealth compared with what they had known before. In fact, they earned more than the well-to-do farmers in whose service they had formerly labored. The children now earned more wages than the parents had earned before. The work on the farm was varied and intermittent, depending upon the season. Ploughing, planting, weeding, haying, harvesting, threshing, marketing, wood-cutting, etc., are regulated by the farmer's calendar. There are rainy days, when the day laborer loses his hire; and, besides these, there are intervals between the season of one species of work and that of the next, in which no employment is offered him by the farm proprietor. If he had thrift, he would find work of some kind for himself at home; he would save money and own his house. But thrift he does not possess. Hence what he earns in the days of the working season is prodigally expended while it lasts, and the days of idleness after harvest are days of want in the household. The children are educated in the same habits of unthrift.

The rise of manufactures and the removal of the ill-to-do families from the farm to the mill put an end to the periodic alternation of want and plenty in the house. Plenty now prevails, but does not generate thrift: for there is less occasion for it. The week's wages may be expended as fast as earned, thanks to the demoralizing institution of credit at the grocery kept by the proprietors of the mill. But, notwithstanding this drawback, there is more self-respect on the part of the children, who now have the consciousness that they earn their living. Manufactures and commerce bring about urban life as contrasted with rural life. The village grows into the city; the railroad carries the daily newspaper from the metropolis to the suburbs and to all towns on its line, and thus extends urban life indefinitely.

The difference between these two orders of life, the urban and rural, is quite important, and its discussion affords us an insight into a process going on rapidly throughout the South. The old régime of the large farm, with its cordon of dependent families, rendered possible a sort of patriarchal constitution. The farm proprietor, in the North as well as in the South, wielded great power over the unthrifty families of day laborers