Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/26

20 of races. The native American, with the English and Scandinavian immigrants, being at the head of the industrial scale; the Irish and the Southern Germans at the bottom: but it is a beneficent aristocracy, under which the lower races are being constantly trained by a necessary tutelage to the level of the higher.

The native American, generally speaking, is unwilling, from independence of feeling, as well as on account of the high remuneration of industry, to become a domestic servant; and that part is usually filled by the Irish. The consequence is a difficulty in getting good servants, which to most people from Europe seems a fatal defect in the structure of American society. The evil, however, if it be one, extends to our own colonies. This scarcity of servants leads to more self-help, more contrivances for supplying the place of servants’ hands in houses, the total absence of large establishments, a great reduction of the number of persons out of the whole population whose labour is expended in waiting on the rich. Whether it may not lead to some more radical changes in the whole system of domestic servitude, and whether these changes will be beneficial to society or otherwise, remains yet to be seen.

The rate of wages which has been noticed as in part the cause of the scarcity of domestic servants, gives rise generally to a multitude of inventions for replacing manual labour by machinery. And this again tends to raise the condition of the labouring man. From being himself a machine, or, in the expressive phrase, a hand, he becomes the skilled manager of a machine. As these American inventions find their way to Europe, the same effect will, in some measure, be produced here. Skilled labour will be required by agriculture in place of unskilled, and the condition of our labourers will be raised.