A Century of Social Betterment

A CITIZEN of the United States who wore a badge of mourning in memory of Washington, and took part in the contested presidential election of 1800, lived at a time when our country nowhere touched the Gulf of Mexico and nowhere crossed the Mississippi River ; at a time when there were but fifteen States in the Union, and when no one of them had a population of a million souls or could boast of a city of fifty thousand inhabitants.

The twenty years which had elapsed since Cornwallis laid down his arms at Yorktown, and especially the ten years which followed the day when the States came under the New Roof and made the Constitution the supreme law of the land, were periods of such amazing progress that the people of the United States in 1800, compared with what they were in 1780, were a new nation. Yet as we of to-day look back to them, their condition of life seems so crude that it is hard to realize that they are separated from us by a hundred, not a thousand years, and that there are numbers of men still with us who saw the light while Jefferson was serving his first term as President. It is hard to realize that the great-grandfathers of many of us were men who never in the whole course of their lives struck a match, or used a postage-stamp, or heard a steam-whistle, or saw a pane of glass six feet square or a building ten stories high. What passed for thriving cities at the opening of the present century were collections of a few thousand houses without any pretensions to architectural beauty, ranged along narrow streets, none of which were sewered and few of which were paved and lighted. The government was of the simplest kind. The mayor still held a court. The watchman, with his rattle and lantern, still went his rounds at night. The citizen was still required to serve on the watch, and to keep in his house, hard by the front door, a number of leather buckets, with which, at the clanging of the court-house or the market bell, he must hurry to some burning building. Water for putting out fires, indeed for household use, was drawn from private wells or supplied by the town pumps, for there were but two cities in the Union blessed with water-works. It was still an offense to smoke on the street, or to carry live coals from a neighbor’s house (a common practice in the days when matches were not), or to be out after ten at night.

Lack of good and abundant water, lack of proper drainage, and ignorance of the simplest principles of sanitation spread diseases of the most dreadful sort. Smallpox was common among the poor. Year after year New York and Philadelphia and Baltimore were visited by yellow fever, which sometimes raged with the violence of a plague.

Few of the appliances which promote health, which increase comfort, which save time and labor, were in use ; not even in the houses of the rich was there a furnace, or an open grate for burning coal, or a bath-room, or a gas-jet. The warming-pan, the foot-stove, and the huge four-post bedstead with its curtains to be drawn when the night was cold were still essentials. That boy was fortunate who did not have to break the ice in his water-pail morning after morning, in winter. No city had reached such dimensions as to make a horse-car or an omnibus necessary. Time was of little value, and no pains were taken to save it in the household or in the affairs of the business world. That magnificent display of inventive genius which is the admiration of the world had scarcely begun.

Few of the modern methods of extending business, of seeking customers, of making the public aware of what a merchant had for sale, existed even in a rude state. There were no commercial travelers, no means of widespread advertising. When the century opened, there were two hundred newspapers in the United States, but only seventeen were dailies. No great weeklies, no magazines with a circulation covering the whole country, had then been dreamed of. But it mattered little, for the field a merchant could cover in his business was limited by the immense cost of transportation. As late as 1810, to move freight from New York to Lewiston on the Niagara River, almost entirely by a water-route, cost forty dollars a ton, with tolls extra. To haul a ton of goods from Philadelphia to Pittsburg cost one hundred and twenty-five dollars. To carry a bushel of salt two hundred miles by land cost two dollars and a half. The charge for transporting a barrel of flour three hundred and fifty miles was five dollars; the same charge was made on a hundred pounds of sugar carted three hundred miles.

Not only was the field of business enterprise thus restricted, but the transaction of business within that field was slow and difficult. The merchant kept his own books, — or, as he would have said, his own accounts, — wrote all his letters with a quill, and, when they were written, let the ink dry or sprinkled it with sand. There were then no envelopes, no postage-stamps, no letter-boxes in the streets, no hourly collections of the mail. The letter written, the paper was carefully folded, sealed with wax or a wafer, addressed, and carried to the post-office, where postage was prepaid at rates which would now seem extortionate. To send a letter which was a single sheet of paper, large or small, from Boston to New York or Philadelphia, cost eighteen and a half cents, and to Washington twentyfive cents. To Carry a letter from Philadelphia, then the capital of the United States, to Boston, and bring back an answer by return mail, would have consumed from twelve to eighteen days, according to the season of the year and the weather.

What was true of the merchant was true of men in every walk of life. Their opportunities were few ; their labor was ill paid : their comforts were far inferior to what is now within the reach of the poorest.

In the Sunday issues of the great metropolitan journals — a Sunday issue was a thing unheard of ninety years ago — are thousands of advertisements of employers seeking help. Many of the advertisers are conducting trades, professions, occupations, absolutely unknown in 1800, and to these might easily be added many more. The great corporations, the mills and factories, the railroads, the steamboat, express, and telegraph companies, that give employment to millions of human beings are the creations of our day. A specialist of any sort — a patent lawyer, a corporation lawyer, an oculist, a physician devoting himself to the cure of diseases of children, a nurse trained to tend the sick—was unheard of. Very little preparation was needed for any profession. The knowledge gained in the course of a few months passed in the office of a judge or a physician was sufficient to entitle any man to practice law or medicine. Many sects required no preparation whatever for the ministry, and the ministry, medicine, and law were the only recognized professions.

What we call the “ workingman,” the “ mechanic,” had no existence as classes. Labor was performed in the South almost exclusively by slaves, and in the North very largely by men and women who for the time being were no better than slaves. Throughout the free States were thousands of Irishmen, Scotchmen, Englishmen, Germans, who, in return for transportation from the Old World to the New, had bound themselves by indenture to serve the captain of the ship that brought them over. The time was three, five, even seven years, and the conditions were that the servant should have meat, drink, apparel, washing, lodging, and sometimes six weeks’ schooling every year, and at the end of the term of service two complete suits of clothes. In every case one of these “ freedom suits ” was new.

The moment a cargo of such “ indented servants,” “ redemptioners,” “ bondservants,” reached port, the public would be informed by a notice in the newspapers, and whoever wanted men or women for any sort of labor, skilled or unskilled, would hasten to the ship and buy them from the captain. When the redemptioner had served his time, and began as a freeman to work for hire, the wages paid him were such as would now be thought shamefully low. Soldiers in the army received three dollars a month. Farm-hands in New England were given four dollars a month and found their own clothes. Unskilled laborers toiled twelve hours per day for fifty cents. Workmen on the turnpikes then branching out in every direction were housed in rude sheds, fed coarse food, and given four dollars per month from November to May, and six dollars from May to November. When the road from the Genesee River to Buffalo was under construction, in 1812, though the region through which it went was the frontier, men were hired in plenty for twelve dollars per month in cash, and their board, lodging, and a daily allowance of whiskey.

Out of wages so scanty the most thrifty could save nothing. But woe betide him if work was slack, or he fell sick and ran in debt. Then he became no better than a criminal, and, if the creditor wished, could be made to share a criminal’s dingy and filthy prison. In nothing is the contrast between those days and ours more striking than in the absence of a broad humanitarian spirit, a generous sympathy for the unfortunate and hard-pressed. In all our land there was not a reformatory, nor an asylum for the blind, for the deaf and dumb, or for lunatics.

Yet it would be a great mistake to suppose that the men of 1800 had made no advance. The barbarous criminal codes of their fathers had been greatly civilized. The pillory, the lash, the stocks, the branding-iron, and the shears were fast falling into disuse. The death penalty was much restricted. Nevertheless, the state of the almshouses and the prisons was a disgrace to the humanity of our ancestors. So late as 1804 we find the paupers in the Baltimore almshouse appealing to the public for rags with which to dress their sores. So late as 1809 the Humane Society of New York drew a picture of the condition of the Bridewell which almost surpasses belief ; but, unhappily, the condition there was no anomaly, and reports of a dozen jails in as many States show it to have been the common lot of all.

The questions which most concern us, in the study of any people at any time, are not only, What were they ? but, What were they doing ? How were their faces set ? Were they looking backward with tender regret to the past ? Were they looking forward with resolute hopes to the future ? Were they standing still ? Were they merely marking time, or were they really on the march? On the march our ancestors most certainly were. The pace was slow, but as time passed it quickened, and when the middle of the century was reached the rate of advance was portentously rapid.

The long embargo and the war for commercial independence ended our industrial subjection to Great Britain. Manufactures, rude and primitive, it is true, sprang into existence, and a hundred new fields of industry were opened to our citizens. Tens of thousands of men, held on the seaboard for twenty years by the extraordinary development given to neutral trade and commerce by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, were deprived of a livelihood, were turned adrift by the peace of 1815, and, bidding farewell to the East, hurried westward to build up a new empire in the valley of the Mississippi. Up the Mohawk and along the great northern lakes, across Pennsylvania to Pittsburg and down the Ohio, up the Potomac and over the portage to the Ohio, through the mountain passes of southwestern Virginia and around the mountains into the cotton-lands of Alabama and Mississippi, poured an army of pioneers, clearing the lands, marking out the streets of future cities, and building up new commonwealths. In the short space of five years, five new States, all beyond the Alleghanies, came into the Union.

And what was the social condition of the great mass of men in the West ? Their homes were log-cabins, with puncheon floors, with windows in which greased paper was more often seen than glass, with furniture made by the occupant, with doors that swung on leather hinges and had a latch-string instead of a knob. The household utensils were of the simplest kind. Brooms and brushes were made of corn-husks. Corn was shelled by rubbing the ears up and down a piece of old tin punched full of holes ; it was carried on horseback to the mill, or pounded in a wooden mortar, or ground in a hand-mill. Cooking-stoves were unknown. Chickens to be roasted were hung by leather strings before the open fire. Bread was baked in a Dutch oven on the hearth, or in an “ out oven ” out of doors.

In the East, meantime, new forces had come into play. The steamboat was on lake and river. The canal had joined great waterways. A network of turnpikes and passable roads covered the country. These civilizers had so abridged distance that in 1825 the frontier and the seaboard almost touched. Boston was but two days from New York, New York but fifteen hours from Philadelphia, and Philadelphia but fifteen from Baltimore.

Freight could then be moved from New York to Pittsburg by way of the Erie Canal for six dollars a hundred pounds, and from New York to Detroit for four dollars and fifty cents. These rates revolutionized business. The field a merchant or a manufacturer could cover by his enterprise seemed boundless. The whole West, as well as the East, became his market, and transportation companies for the handling of freight began to make their appearance, in order to enable him to reach that market.

Simple as these things appear, they changed the whole course of life. New industries, new trades, new occupations, sprang up on every hand. Time became a commodity, and the demand for time-saving and labor-saving machinery and devices gave the first impetus to that inventive genius which has done so much for the betterment not only of our own people, but of the world. Not a year went by but some great discovery, some great invention, added to the stock of human comfort. In 1825 the tinderbox gave way to a rude form of match. In 1826 axes and edged tools were first manufactured in the United States. The first lithograph was made in 1827. The wood-planing machine, the manufacture of paper from straw, and the introduction of the locomotive date from 1828. The arts were enriched by the discovery of the means of galvanizing iron and the invention of the brick-making machine in 1829. The first omnibus in our country was used in New York city in 1830. Dr. Guthrie gave chloroform to medicine in 1831. Street railways were introduced in 1832, and the first public trial of a reaping - machine was made in 1833. But the list is too long to be called over. Seven years more, and Colt had invented his revolver, a line of steamships were crossing the Atlantic in fifteen days, Ericsson had tested and applied his screw propeller, and Goodyear had found out how to turn india-rubber from a soft and sticky gum to an article of boundless application in the arts, the sciences, and the affairs of daily life. The railroad was fast spreading its network over the country, and the beginning of the express company of our time was made by Harnden and Adams. When the middle of the century was reached, the farmer was planting his grain with a drill and cutting it with the horse-reaper, the sewing-machine was finding its way into every household, telegraph-poles were rising on all the important highways, daguerreotypes were coming into fashion, and pain had been conquered by the discovery of anæsthetics.

The second quarter of the century was remarkable for the earnest efforts made by men and by associations of men to better the condition of their fellows. Robert Owen preaching communism and founding his communities in the Western States in the twenties; Brisbane, the disciple of Fourier, dotting the free States with his phalanxes in the early forties; the American Bible Society sending the word of God into a million homes; the great temperance crusade rescuing six hundred thousand drunkards, and leading the way to prohibition, to high license, to local option ; the outburst of humanitarianism which reformed the penal codes, which abolished imprisonment for debt, which turned the jails from brothels and seminaries of crime to reformatories, and covered the land with homes, asylums, lodginghouses, houses of correction, penitentiaries, and institutions for the reform of juvenile delinquents; the abolition societies battling nobly in the cause of the slave ; Sylvester Graham advocating his reformed diet of bran bread and water; Mrs. Bloomer struggling for dress reform, and illustrating it with the garment that still bears her name, — these are but a few of the innumerable manifestations of the efforts for social betterment.

Many of these attempts were visionary and futile ; but the gain to mankind from such as were useful was enormous. Life was less brutal and more humane. Every labor-saving device that did by machinery what had before been done by hand raised some portion of the great mass of toilers, and made each of them less of the drudge and more of the man. The laboring man was especially benefited. Though his wages had increased but little, they were more easily earned and brought richer returns. He no longer toiled from sunrise to sunset, but counted ten hours a working-day. He was no longer subject to imprisonment for a paltry debt. His wages were paid, not once a month, but once a week. Better means of transportation, cheaper methods of manufacture, enabled him to eat better food and wear better clothes than ever before. New industries, new trades, new occupations, new needs in the business world, afforded to his son and his daughter a hundred opportunities for a livelihood that were unknown in his youth, while the free-school system enabled them to fit themselves to use such opportunities without cost to him. It was then, and it is still, the common belief that every piece of machinery with which one man can do the work of six men makes the lot of the workingman so much the harder. Happily this is far from being the case. It is machinery which has led to the expansion of labor. The railroad, the sewing-machine, and the telegraph were very primitive affairs in 1850, yet they were violently and bitterly opposed. From the day wherein it became apparent that the locomotive could climb a hill and go safely round a curve, and that a new means of rapid locomotion had really been introduced, the most dismal pictures were drawn of its effect on certain branches of industry. The breeders of horses, the drivers of stagecoaches, the keepers of wayside inns and taverns, the proprietors of stage companies, the owners of stock of the turnpike companies, were all to be ruined! To the amazement of the croakers, none of their predictions came true. Stage drivers became conductors or ticket-agents. The transportation companies for the movement of freight became the great feeders of the railroads, and thronged the turnpikes, more congested than ever with farmers carrying grain, lumber, and produce to the nearest station. The demand for track-layers, for engineers, for firemen, for civil engineers, for mechanics, opened new fields of labor to thousands of men who must otherwise have crowded the ranks of older industries. The manufacture of rails, of cars, of locomotives, laid the foundation of branches of labor hitherto unknown, and expanded others already in existence. Wire-makers, glass-makers, and manufacturers of chemicals very quickly felt the benefit of the introduction of the telegraph, while a great army of young men found steady employment in new occupations as operators and messengers.

When Howe was striving to introduce the sewing-machine, the prediction was made that the day of the sewing-girl was over. In truth, her day was just dawning. But it is needless to cite instances. What was the lot of the humblest laborer was the lot of all. The condition of every man was bettered.

With the growth of cities had come untold comforts and conveniences. The dark and unpaved street, the town pump, the night-watch, were becoming things of the past. Gas and plumbing were in general use. Wayfarers were no longer huddled together at the hotels and inns, and forced to sleep six in a room and two in a bed. The home of the average man was better furnished and warmed, and was supplied with comforts and luxuries such as his grandfather could not have had at any price. He was a better educated, broader minded, more generally well informed man than his father had been. If he were a lawyer, the vast mass of legislation made necessary by the expansion of commercial enterprises, the rise of banks and corporations, the appearance of the railroad, the telegraph, the express company, and the protection of the interests involved, not only brought to him more business and more money, but exacted from him an amount of study and intelligence not required from the lawyer of 1800.

The latter half of the century, and more particularly the last quarter, has been preëminently a period remarkable for the advancement of science and the application of the principles of science to the betterment of mankind. Were we to take out of our life to-day all the mechanical devices that were not known in 1850, the whole social fabric would fall to pieces. Were we to strip ourselves of the thousand conveniences of daily life introduced in half a century, we should be utterly at a loss how to supply our wants, how to transact the most common affairs. Were we to take from the industrial world every means of livelihood that has sprung up since 1850,millions of our fellow-citizens would be driven to starvation. The telephone, the telegraph, the typewriter, the sewing-machine, the department stores in the cities, have revolutionized the condition of woman. Thirty years ago the business world was closed to her ; she might be a teacher, or a seamstress, or a mill-hand, or go out to service ; she could not be a clerk or a secretary. Today she is everywhere : at the bar, at the sick-bed as physician and trained nurse, in ten thousand offices and behind ten thousand counters ; schools have been established for her especial benefit, colleges are open to her, and in three States she has been made the political equal of her brother, has received the right to vote for candidates for any office and to hold any office under the State.

The manual training school and the technical school have destroyed the old apprentice system. The boy who spent seven years of his life acquiring an imperfect knowledge of the merely mechanical part of a trade, giving his labor in return for bad instruction, food, and castoff clothing, exists only in history. In the manual training school he is now freely taught not only the very best way to use his tools, but the reason why a particular way is the best, and at the end of two years he is a far better equipped and more intelligent mechanic than the old apprentice at the end of seven.

Cheap transportation, cold storage, and the immense development of the canning industry have placed on the table of every man an endless variety of food without regard to the season of the year. The salmon of Oregon, the fruits of California and Florida, the vegetables of the West, are to-day within the reach of the poorest laborer. The machinery for ploughing, planting, reaping, harvesting, has made possible the enormous grainfields of the West, and these, aided by the railroad and the flour-mills of the Northwest, provide the beggar in the street with a quality of bread which fifty years ago could not have been had by anybody. The machine-made shoe, the machine - made undergarment, readymade clothing cut with a die and sewed on a machine, the application of the marvelous invention of Goodyear to wearing apparel, have rendered it possible for men and women of all sorts to be cleaner, healthier, more neatly dressed, and better protected against the weather than were their grandfathers.

Could some Well-to-do tradesman of 1800 come back to the great city where, when it was a little town, he kept a shop, over which he lived and in the rear of which he very possibly made the chairs, the shoes, the harness, the copper kettles, he offered for sale, — could such a man come back and enter the homes of some of his descendants, he would see little with which he was familiar. He would find them, in all probability, living in a style surpassing in magnificence that of the royal governor or the merchant prince at whose approach he had, as a boy, seen his father hurry to the shop door to make an obeisance or stand bareheaded while the great man went by. He would see about him on every hand comforts and appliances he would not understand. The furnace that warmed the house, the gas that lighted it, the electric bell that summoned the servants, the bath-room with its hot and cold water, would astonish him. In the library he would probably see more books than in 1800 were in any public library in the land. On the library table, with steel pens, rubber bands, the blotter, and a host of articles he could not name, would lie a morning newspaper not six hours old, containing news not twelve hours old from every part of Europe. He would hear with astonishment that there are in New York city more daily morning and evening newspapers than there were daily papers in the whole United States in 1800, and that each one of these provides its readers with an allowance of information regarding affairs all over the face of the world more full and exact than in his day was to be had regarding his own town. The contents of the illustrated magazines, the literary magazines, the periodicals secular and religious; the postage-stamps on the letters, the photographs about the room, the telephone in the corner, the messenger call, would reveal to him a social condition which we neither appreciate nor fully understand.

But it is not only in material comfort that the condition of man has been bettered. Diseases once the scourge and terror of the world have been wellnigh extirpated. A pock-marked face is now as rare as a century ago it was common. We no longer stand in dread of an annual visitation of yellow fever. We have learned how to control cholera.

We have abolished slavery, we have beaten down polygamy in Utah, we have driven the prize-fight from the Territories and the lottery even from Louisiana. In a spirit of broad humanity we have extended protection to helpless children and to dumb brutes. Never was the hand of fellowship so cordially extended to the fallen, never were such serious efforts made to bring back the wayward and to turn the erring from the wrong path to the right. We have added to the glory of God by conceding to his creatures the right to worship him in such manner as they please.

John Bach McMaster.