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employment. As in Scriptural times, so now, the stranger may witness Riviera grain trodden out by oxen or horses on the stone pavement or esplanade in front of all the large barns.

Like the wheat supply, that of wine is only half sufficient for this population. The lack is not so serious, however, since France makes it good without calling on foreign countries. It may not be realized that her wine-culture means between four and five million acres devoted to the growth of the vine. While the Var and Vaucluse parts of Provence have many a

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delicious oil. The berry is not so large as the Spanish, but is more delicate in flavor. The Greeks are said to have brought the olive-culture here, when they began building Agathopolis (Agay) and Antipolis (Antibes). There is nothing more restful than an olive orchard. Mediterranean sunlight sifts in and settles serenely there. Seen through olive branches, Mentone, Eze, Cagnes, take on new picturesqueness. Out of the rich red soil underneath the trees are springing violets and narcissus and giroflés. In the near neighborhood there are white

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good vineyard, the eastern and rockier departments of the Basses-Alpes and the Alpes-Maritimes have few. Some of the peasant inhabitants buy a great store of grapes in the autumn, each family making its own wine for the year. The phylloxera has played havoc here, as everywhere. To counteract this pest a potass manure is used, also sulphate of carbon. Our own Catawba grape is more of a proof against the enemy than any native varieties, and hence has been extensively introduced.

What the Riviera can produce, however, and export too, is the olive and its

and pink clouds: the almond and peach trees are in blossom. Beyond and above the cultivable flower-belt a still more venerable quiet reigns among the now terraced olives.

Only the wild sweet alyssum and daisies flower there, their whiteness rather ghostlike because of a row of funereallooking cypresses, green-black against the orchard's gray-green. Still above and beyond, the olives themselves are checked by lack of shelter; instead, the Diaz-like cork-oaks and the white heather and the rose cystus are seen there.

The peasant, armed with his pruninghook, is already attacking his trees. The

harvest is over. It has lasted from the end of October to the first of February, and has given constant employment to men, women, and children, to young and old. One often notes hardy nonagenarians gathering the precious purple berries, alongside wee children engaged in the same task, neither seeming fit for any kind of labor. The olives are heaped in some cool spot and then put into bags and baskets which are sent to the mill. An ordinary tree will yield, say, thirty pounds of fruit and produce half as much oil. Like the Egyptian with his palm, so the Provençal uses every part of his olive. The oil-mill, with its horsehair presses (an unsavory place, it must be admitted), shows this. In addition to the value of the wood, fruit, and oil, out of the crushed stones a fuel is made, while the refuse is used later as manure for the trees. So the process goes on, year after year, olive to olive returning.

If there is thus a tradition of Greece, the still-worked potteries of Vallauris, the amphitheaters of Fréjus and Cimiez, the bridge of Clausonne, the monument at Turbie, and the traces of the Via Julia and the Via Aurelia right through Provence, remind of Rome. The peasants whose farms bordered those famous highways tilled the soil just as these modern peasants do, and hence Virgil becomes the most appropriate of reading matter as we stroll along Riviera roads. Here one lives the Georgics and the Bucolics. Their old pastoral scenes are here faithfully reproduced. If there is any one dis tinguishing mark of your Provençal peas ant, it is his reverence for tradition.

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has a robust, honest satisfaction in doing just as his fathers did, and in letting the over-fed, over-conscious, over-civilized crowd at Nice and Cannes go its decadent way. The crops are the same as of yore, the tools the same-the plow and pruning-hook of the Bible are realized here. Like a Roman in his toga, so a touch of cold will bring out paterfamilias in his long striped cloak of homespun stuff. You may see its counterpart in Palestine to-day. But, whatever we may think about the women, the men are far from having the majestic carriage of the Arabs.

If olives and roads and potteries bring back classic times, palms and aloes and terraced gardens speak of the Moorish

civilization which once flourished here. Out of steep hill and mountain-side those clever economists and landscape-gardeners quadrupled the production of the plain. Moorish manners still live in the danse moresque, which you may sometime see of a pleasant Sunday in a mountain village, but the more popular farandole comes from a yet earlier period.

The great golden drops against glossy foliage are so many evidences that this is an orange country. The fruit is far from rivaling our Florida or California product, but it is delightfully toothsome all the same. While it sells well, the blossoms sell better. The perfume-factories of Grasse use annually nearly six million pounds of flowers, mostly orange-blossoms, but also roses, violets, verbenas, jasmine, jonquils, cassia, and tuberoses. The benefit to employed as well as to employers may be noted in the fact that the savings bank is the finest building in the place, and that there is no grinding poverty at Grasse. The Grassois are famous for their candied fruits, their almond and olive oil, their soaps, and, above all, for their perfumery. Half a million dollars' worth of their products goes to the United States alone. In the factories, as in the supplying flower-fields (the latter covering over sixty thousand acres), men and women have an equal chance at employment.

Most of the roses used in the perfumeries are like our damask variety. They are picked at dawn and stored, all dewdamp, in cellars. How satisfactory to the sight the rose-fields and terraces are, perchance against a hazy olive background, perchance in the foreground some picturesque wayside shrine, at which the girls will kneel before beginning their labors! The roses go well with another stretch of green-gray in front—a fringe of African aloes marking the roadside. Beyond, it may be, there stand sentinels of tall eucalyptus, or, better yet, solemn, dark-green parasol-pines. The nearer landscape is, likely enough, yellow with mimosa, and the further and higher yellow with furze. The scent of thyme and rosemary is borne down upon us. Still beyond, the porphyry hills are glowing every hour with sunset hues, yet in the distance there is always a moonlight effect from the snowy summits of the Maritime Alps.

AMERICA'S WORKING PEOPLE

BY CHARLES B. SPAHR

Triumphant democracy

VII.

The Iron Centers

The first part of my visit to the iron district about Pittsburg might easily be turned into a chapter of "Triumphant Democracy." Indeed, there is no chapter in Mr. Carnegie's book that records industrial triumphs equal to those in his own mills. On the mechanical side they were far more impressive than the machinery exhibits at the Chicago Exposition, and there was absolutely nothing at Chicago that compared with them in depicting the superiority of American to European methods of production. Nor was this superiority merely spectacular. In talk ing with the managers I found that the fear of European competition was a thing of the past. They were all, so far as I know, protectionists; but their protectionism had none of the insistent quality that was to have been expected in the old citadel of that creed. It was almost like the bimetallism of Colorado bankers. They believed that it was for the good of the country, but they had no need of it in their own industry. A large part of their product they were selling abroad, and their president told me that they could sell the whole of it—or about threefifths of the entire steel product of Pennsylvania-in foreign markets, if they cared to do so. The English price of rails was $22 a ton. The cost of transporting rails to England was over $5 a ton; yet they were able to overleap this barrier and sell their steel in the London market. Instead of needing a tariff to protect them against English competition, they were able to pay the twenty-five per cent. tariff which the railroad and shipping charges imposed in order to enter into competition with the English on their own ground.

Protection needless

Such triumphs for American industry are not, indeed, peculiar to the Carnegie works. When I had visited the iron-works in the South, I had found that they, too, were making heavy shipments abroad; and a week later, when talking with an extremely accurate as well as fair-minded official of the Illinois Steel Company, I learned that the great competitor of the Carnegie Company was able to pay the freight charges. from Illinois to Belgium and still undersell the Belgians. The statement of the case made by the Illinois official was peculiarly compact. In the Belgian works, he told me, the average wages are less than 75 cents a day. In the Illinois works the average wages are in the neighborhood of $1.75 a day. Yet the product of the Illinois works could be sold in Belgium for less than the product of Belgian works. I did not have the opportunity to visit the Illinois works, or I would probably have seen paralleled the sights that impressed me so much at Homestead and Braddock. But at the Pennsylvania works it did not require an acute observer to see the reason for these triumphs of American methods and American men. Everything seemed to be done by machinery. In the Southern iron-works great numbers of negroes were employed with wheelbarrows to carry heavy loads of fuel or ore or metal from one place to another; but in the Carnegie works there was a great network of overhead tracks, on which nearly everything could be shifted in any direction by steam. And the steam itself was often generated in boilers heated by the gas that came from the coke and ore used in making the steel. As you looked about the great buildings, that which was memorable was the human soli

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tude in which these activities were carried Works covering acres, and costing in the neighborhood of a million dollars, would have hardly a hundred men scattered about them. Unfortunately, I had never seen European iron-works, so that an exact comparison was impossible. But when I thought of the swarming of men in every European industry I had seen, and even when I thought of the relative swarming in the iron-works in the South, I felt sure that where there was only one employee for something like ten thousand dollars of capital in these Carnegie works, there would be nearly ten in most parts of Europe. The contrast was mainly due, of course, to the fact that the dearness of labor about Pittsburg forced the introduction of costly machinery to economize it. But this machinery would not have proved an economy had not this dear labor been highly skilled and able to bear heavy responsibility during the long hours. The light-eating, heavy-drinking, apathetic labor of Continental Europe could not have been intrusted with this strenuous work. My escort explained to me, indeed, that nearly all the work was simple, but he recognized that in many of the positions a moment's inattention or the slightest error in judgment would cost the works incomparably more than the man's wages. In its nervous intensity the work was hard, and where it was hardest, in the sense of involving the greatest responsibility, the men in charge were almost uniformly American-or at least English-speaking. The irresponsible work was largely in the hands of the Huns and Poles, and of the negroes, who, like them, had been kept down by centuries of oppression. The superiority of American. workmen, therefore, as well as the superiority of American methods, was at the basis of this triumph of American industry.

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Restored feudalism

promise, and who was paid according to the profits of the works under him. Each of these heads of departments was also given an interest in the company, and thus a quality of work was secured which mere salaries would not bring. No one connected with the management except Mr. Carnegie himself, said President Schwab, of the Steel Company, had ever invested a dollar. The company was really a partnership rather than a corporation, and not one of the partners held his position by reason of inheritance or wealth. Only three of the thirty-three heads of departments were even graduates of technical schools or colleges, and one of the superintendents had been a common machinist only a few years ago. The whole organization recalled Napoleon's definition of a republic when he said that the French Revolution meant "a career open to talent of every sort." All that I saw of the management of the company carried out this idea. I was surprised, indeed, at the number of young men who had forged their way to the top. But talent has as little regard for the lines of age as for those of caste. Ability to do the work was evidently the prime requisite, and while the men at the heads of the departments had too much social finish to permit the supposition that many of them had risen from the ranks of workmen, it was evident that their weekly luncheon together was planned for its business suggestiveness and not for social diversion. A similar impression was made by the superintendents about the works. In fact, during the two days that I was under the escort of the men in charge, I received but one unfavorable impression. This came from the spirit in which the workmen did their work. They were cheerless almost to the point of sullenness. When the men looked at us it was rarely with the look of pride in their work or contentment with their wages or cordial feeling toward those over them; yet the work was full of responsibility, the wages high, and the managers were singularly efficient. The sullen attitude, indeed, was absolutely intangible, and when my escort said that he had not observed it, there was absolutely nothing that I could cite as evidence. When, however, I left the circle of those who could explain the works, and took my lodgings in the

town of Homestead, where the workmen would explain themselves, I found that the impression I had gained was the only one that had been possible. I had entered an entirely different industrial realm. The atmosphere was at times heavy with disappointment and hopelessness. Some of the men seemed afraid to talk. Even the Catholic priest-to whose class I am accustomed to go for fair statements of the relations of men to their employers-was unwilling to make any statement. The one thing he did say was something he supposed self-evident-namely, that the men's earnings were much lower than before the great strike. The absence of freedom resembled that of the small mining villages in the eastern part of the State. It was in sharp contrast with the independence of the old trade-union. towns in Massachusetts, and of the new factory towns in the South where the relations between employers and employed are still cordial. If all that I saw while with the managers of the Carnegie works might be described under the title of Triumphant Democracy," nearly all that I saw while with the men might be described under the title of "Feudalism Restored."

One of the first men whom I found to talk with was the famous Hugh O'Donnel Hugh O'Donnell, who was the spokesman of the strikers at the time of the Homestead riots and during the long strike that followed. He was not living in Homestead, but had merely returned from the East for a visit of a day or two with his mother. He told me that the Carnegie managers had made it impossible for him to get work from any steel company in the country. That he could not get such work was obvious, for since the strike he had been making his living much of the time as a reporter, though he was an expert roller-and rollers, the managers assured me, still received nearly $200 a month for their critical work of exploding the "scale" that forms about the steel and measuring with absolute accuracy the beams, rails, etc., that are made. The leader of the great labor war of seven years ago was still a man considerably under forty.

His face was handsome and his speech unusually ready. He did not, however, impress one with the reserve power of a born

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leader. He knew little about present conditions at Homestead, except the belief of his friends and sympathizers that a low and dishonorable class of people had come to take the strikers' places. this point I learned from unbiased people that he greatly exaggerated the extent of the change, though from his standpoint, of course-as from that of Mr. Carnegie a few years before-all workmen were dishonorable who had broken the commandment, "Thou shalt not take thy neighbor's job." What O'Donnell knew most about was the history of the great strike, and I naturally went over with him the claims of the management respecting it. These were, in brief, that the strike had been fought, not to reduce wages, but to effect "a sensible classification," and that the trade-union had not only resisted such a classification, but had demanded the right to appoint the foremen. As to the first of these claims, O'Donnell, without hesitation, admitted that there was a good deal of truth in it. The union, he said, made a mistake in resisting a new classification. It was inevitable, because of the changing methods of production. Under the old system the roller was practically an independent contractor, receiving so much for every ton, and often receiving exorbitant pay when better machinery increased the output. Under the new system he was reduced to a mere wage-earner under a general superintendent for a whole division. The new classification, therefore, was largely a dethronement of the rollers, but, as is always the case, the best-paid were also the best organized, and most ready to strike for their claims. They led in the strike, and the men receiving lower pay followed, until both were disastrously defeated, and the last vestige of trades-unionism in the Carnegie works was destroyed. The defeat, said O'Donnell, was practically inevitable, because other iron centers were already disorganized. The union might have given in, but the uncompromising attitude of the management, which was thoroughly hostile to their union, practically forced the strike upon them. As to the unreasonableness of the old classification, what Mr. O'Donnell said was in a marked degree a confirmation of what the managers had told me. As to the other important point, however-the charge that

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