Year

1866

Text

Type

Publication

Contributors (1)

Subjects

Chronology Entries (1)

#	Year	Text	Linked Data
1	1866	Twain, Mark. Labor ; Coolies for California [ID D29368]. LABOR The principal labor used on the plantations is that of Kanaka men and women - six dollars to eight dollars a month and find them, or eight to ten dollars and let them find themselves. The contract with the laborer is in writing, and the law rigidly compels compliance with it; if the man shirks a day's work and absents himself, he has to work two days for it when his time is out. If he gets unmanageable and disobedient, he is condemned to work on the reef for a season, at twenty-five cents a day. If he is in debt to the planter for such purchases as clothing and provisions, however, when his time expires, the obligation is canceled - the planter has no recourse at law. The sugar product is rapidly augmenting every year, and day by day the Kanaka race is passing away. Cheap labor had to be procured by some means or other, and so the Government sends to China for Coolies and farms them out to the planters at $5 a month each for five years, the planter to feed them and furnish them with clothing. The Hawaiian agent fell into the hands of Chinese sharpers, who showed him some superb Coolie samples and then loaded his ships with the scurviest lot of pirates that ever went unhung. Some of them were cripples, some were lunatics, some afflicted with incurable diseases and nearly all were intractable, full of fight and animated by the spirit of the very devil. However, the planters managed to tone them down and now they like them very well. Their former trade of cutting throats on the China seas has made them uncommonly handy at cutting cane. They are steady, industrious workers when properly watched. If the Hawaiian agent had been possessed of a reasonable amount of business tact he could have got experienced rice and sugar cultivators - peaceable, obedient men and women - for the same salaries that must be paid to these villains, and done them a real service by giving them good homes and kind treatment in place of the wretchedness and brutality they experience in their native land. Some of the women are being educated as house servants, and I observe that they do not put on airs, and "sass" their masters and mistresses, and give daily notice to quit, and try to boss the whole concern, as the tribe do in California. COOLIES FOR CALIFORNIA You will have Coolie labor in California some day. It is already forcing its superior claims upon the attention of your great mining, manufacturing and public improvement corporations. You will not always go on paying $80 and $100 a month for labor which you can hire for $5. The sooner California adopts Coolie labor the better it will be for her. It cheapens no labor of men's hands save the hardest and most exhausting drudgery - drudgery which neither intelligence nor education are required to fit a man for - drudgery which all white men abhor and are glad to escape from. You may take note of the fact that to adopt Coolie labor could work small hardship to the men who now do the drudgery, for every ship-load of Coolies received there and put to work would so create labor - would permit men to open so many mines they cannot afford to work now, and begin so many improvements they dare not think of at present - that all the best class of the working population who might be emancipated from the pick and shovel by that ship-load would find easier and more profitable employment in superintending and overseeing the Coolies. It would be mote profitable, as you will readily admit, to the great mining companies of California and Nevada to pay 300 Chinamen an aggregate of $1,500 a month - or five times the amount, if you think it mote just - than to pay 300 white men $30, 000 a month. Especially when the white men would desert in a body every time a new mining region was discovered, but the Chinamen would have to stay until their contracts were worked out. People are always hatching fine schemes for inducing Eastern capital to the Pacific coast. Yonder in China are the capitalists you want - and under your own soil is a bank that will not dishonor their checks. The mine purchased for a song by Eastern capital would pour its stream of wealth past your door and empty it in New York. You would be little the richer for that. There are hundreds of men in California who are sitting on their quartz leads, watching them year after year, and hoping for the day when they will pay - and growing gray all the time - hoping for a cheapening of labor that will enable them to work the mine or warrant another man in buying it - who would soon be capitalists if Coolie labor were adopted. The Mission Woolen Mill Company take California wool and weave from it fabrics of all descriptions, which they challenge all America to surpass, and sell at prices which defy all foreign competition. The secret is in their cheap Chinese labor. With white labor substituted the mills would have to stop. The Pacific Railroad Company employ a few thousand Chinamen at about $30 a month, and have white men to oversee them. They pronounce it the cheapest, the best, and most quiet, peaceable and faithful labor they have tried. Some of the heaviest mining corporations in the State have it in contemplation to employ Chinese labor. Give this labor to California for a few years and she would have fifty mines opened where she has one now - a dozen factories in operation where there is one now - a thousand tons of farm produce raised where there are a hundred now - leagues of railroad where she has miles to-day, and a population commensurate with her high and advancing prosperity. With the Pacific Railroad creeping slowly but surely toward her over mountain and desert and preparing to link her with the East, and with the China mail steamers about to throw open to her the vast trade of our opulent coast line stretching from the Amoor river to the equator, what State in the Union has so splendid a future before her as California? Not one, perhaps. She should awake and be ready to join her home prosperity to these tides of commerce that are so soon to sweep toward her from the east and the west. To America it has been vouchsafed to materialize the vision, and realize the dream of centuries, of the enthusiasts of the old world. We have found the true Northwest Passage - we have found the true and only direct route to the bursting coffers of "Ormus and of Ind" - to the enchanted land whose mere drippings, in the ages that are gone, enriched and aggrandized ancient Venice, first, then Portugal, Holland, and in our own time, England - and each in succession they longed and sought for the fountain head of this vast Oriental wealth, and sought in vain. The path was hidden to them, but we have found it over the waves of the Pacific, and American enterprise will penetrate to the heart and center of its hoarded treasures, its imperial affluence. The gateway of this path is the Golden Gate of San Francisco; its depot, its distributing house, is California - her customers are the nations of the earth; her transportation wagons will be the freight cars of the Pacific Railroad, and they will take up these Indian treasures at San Francisco and flash them across the continent and the vessels of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company will deliver them in Europe fifteen days sooner than Europe could convey them thither by any route of her own she could devise. California has got the world where it must pay tribute to her. She is about to be appointed to preside over almost the exclusive trade of 450,000,000 people - the almost exclusive trade of the most opulent land on earth. It is the land where the fabled Aladdin's lamp lies buried - and she is the new Aladdin who shall seize it from its obscurity and summon the geni and command him to crown her with power and greatness, and bring to her feet the hoarded treasures of the earth! I may have wandered away from my original subject a little, but it is no matter - I keep thinking about the new subject, and I must have wandered into it eventually anyhow.	Person: Twain, Mark