WHO ARE THE HARDEST WORKERS?

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 6, Issue 1764, 18 August 1884, Page 2

WHO ARE THE HARDEST WORKERS?

: • We wonder what it is that imparts the curious quality of industry to any people. No animal except the beaver has it, and no man in the totally uncivilised land, therefore, presumably natural condition. The popular English view that it is in somo way inherent in race, that black men are very lazy, brown men lazy, yellow men rather lazy, and white'men lazyish, while Englishmen alone loves work for itself, is palpably untrue. Englishmen, to begin with, are not the most industrious of the white race. The Belgian peasantry, most of the French peasantry, and some of the Prussian peasantry beat them all hollow in the power of persistent, monotonous, long-continued application to disagreeable work. They take their meals at any time, and they labor, take them all round, three hours in the day longer than the average Englishmen, who, indeed, are rather furious workers possessed of a special energy than industrious men, The English can get quantities of work, and good work, done; but they will only work six days in seven—they try hard to get another day in each week and do get a half one, and they are savagely irritable about long hours which Continentals bear quite placidly. When they oan they fight for a day lasting from 10 to. 4, and when they cannot they will strike rather than bear two hours unusual work a-week. We greatly doubt if English laborers would toil for any wages for fifteen hours a day as the do; and are quite sure they would kill somebody, if forced to work fourteen hours in stifling dons, as the silk throwsters of North Italy are. Indeed, they shirk some trades because the work is too hard, and they have not only not a monopoly in their own bakeries and sugar refineries, but no fair share in either of them. The Germans'and Scotch do three parts of the work. _ The Englishman's idea of rising in life, indeed, is to be free of heavy work, and he shares the feelings of the Lowland Scotch, who as a great American employer of labor testified before a committee of the House of Commons, are, as labourers in the United States, of no use at all. They all become masters in two years. As to the yellow races who ought to be just lazier that Europeans, thoy heat them altogether. We suppose there are idolent Chinese, but the immense majority of that vaßt people have an unequalled power of work: care nothing about hours, and, so long as they are paid will go on with a dogged steady persistence in toil for sixteen hours a day, such as no European can rival. No English ship carpenter will work like a Chinese, no laundress will wash as many clothes, and a Chinese compositor would very soon be expelled for overtoil by an English "chapel" of the trade. The Chinese peasants and boatman work all day, and, in fact, but for untiring industry, the closely packed masses of China could not be sustained as they are by artificial irrigation. Of the brown races the Arabs generally prefer abstemiousness carried to a starving point to contiuons labor; but the most numerous brawn people, the Indian, labor unrelaxingly for seventyseven hours, a week. They are often lalled lazy by unobservant Europeans, because they enjoy the cool of the jvening, but they go to work before 4 n the morning and work until 3, and >nly eat once during sunlight, the jecond meal being taken after dark. L'hey take, too, no weekly holiday.