WHO ARE THE HARDEST WORKERS.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XVIII, Issue 1217, 27 January 1886, Page 5

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 uncivilized and therefore presumably natural condition. The popular English view that it is in some way inherent in rape, that black men are very lazy, brown men lazy, yellow men rather lazy, and white men lazyish, while the 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 and most of the French peasantry beat them all hollow in the power of persistent, monotonous, longcontinuedapphpation to disagreeable work. They labour, take them all round, three hours in the day longer than average Englishmen, who, indeed, are rather fierce workers, possessed of a special energy, rather than industrious men. , The English can get quantities of work

and good word done ; but they will only work six days in seven — they try hard to get another day in each week, and they do gefc a half one, and they are savagely irritable about long hours, which Continentals bear quite placidly. When they can, they fight for a day lasting from 10 to 4; and when they cannot they will strike rather than bear two unusual hours a week. We greatly doubt if English labourers would toil for any wages for 15 hours a day, as the Auvergnats do ; and are quite mire they would kill somebody if forced to work 14 hours in stifling dens, 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 aud susiar 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 is to be free of heavy work, and he shares th 9 feeling of the Lowland Scot, 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 nse at all. They all become masters in two years.

As to tho yellow races, who ought to be just lazier than Europeans, they beat them altogether. We suppose thiire are indolent Chintaa, but the immense majority of that vast 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 soon be expelled for over toil by an English "chapel," of the trade. The Chinese peasants and boatmen work all day, and every day, and, in fact, but for untiring industry, the closely packed masses in 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 continuous labor ; but the most numerous brown people, the ludian, labor unrelaxingly for seventy-seven hours a week. They are often called lazy by unobservant Europeans, because they enjoy the cool of the evening ; but they go to work before four in the morning, and work on till three, and only eat onco during sunlight, the second meal being taken after daik. They take, too, no weekly holiday. — " N.Z. Watchman."