LABOUR IN AMERICA.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 398, 26 November 1880, Page 19

LABOUR IN AMERICA.

(From Messrs. Bead and Poll's Beport.) The labourer in America is thus described :—: — "Ihe farm labourer can hardly be said to exist as a distinct class in the United Btates, unless it be among the coloured people in the middle and southern States. These appear to be settled, domesticated, and contented to stick to one industry. Id many respects agriculture suits them. They are fond of animals, and the attachment appears to be reciprocated. At a large sale of shorthorns in Kansas City, a negro in charge of a bull expressed to us a hope that he might not be separated from him by the purchaser, and that to whatever place the fortunes of the auction took the bull he might be allowed to migrate. But with the whites employed in the cultivation of arable land, the case is wholly different. In the large farms of the West the bothy system is carried out, and building* are put up in which in Eummei men mess and sleep, In winter they are off to the towns and cities, and it is seldom the same faces are seen two years running on the farm. Mounted overseers or foremen are also engaged for the season at better pay, and these men, long wittcd and keen-eyed, leave very little on trust to the ordinary hand. It should be remarked that though wages may appear high, the hours of labour from spring to autumn are long, and winter is a period of almost complete cessation fi om work for man and beast on the American farm. The horses and mule 3 then lay on flesh against the lengthened days when the soil will be released from the grip of winter, and the men either take to drinking or school, or, probably, go ' lumbering.' All seem well dressed and well fed, and very ready with the implements under their care or direction. There is no need for the exercise of muscular strength and endurance, for which our labourers were once so famous. Machinery does all the hard work. Ricks are small, and hay lofts are filled to their further end by machinery, the ploughs and cultivators are fitted with seats, and reapers with metal arms cut, gather, 6ind, and deliver the wheat, oats, and barley. As much cannot be said of labour on the smaller farms ; there the owner, to all the mentt.l cares of ownership, adds the physical stress of manual labour of the severest description. No other class of men toil so unceasingly, enduring the life of savages for a while, in order to conquer the backwood or civilise the prairie. The man, sedate and serious, is attempting almost single-handed, to perform the work of two, if not more, English labourers. It is true he is not cultivating, but only cropping the soil, and, as far as he is able, leaves to machinery and animal power some of the drudgery that falls to the lot of the European field hand. His children are • full of health, turbulence, and energy,' and their school education is carried on beyond the period which closes it with us ; but the wife, though ready to meet the ills of life without fearing and without braving them, betrays in her appearance the terrible trial through which the family are passing, and «he, at all events, seems conscious of the fact that her lot is not lightened by the independence which is held to accompany the possession of the soil by the cultivator.

Some malicious person has imposed on The Christian at Work a passage pretended to be taken from a book of Father Curci's to this effect :— " The New Testament is a book of all others the least studied and least read among us. So much so that the bulk of the laity even of those who believe they have been instructed, and profess religion — is not aware tliat such a book exists in the world ; and the greater part of the clergy themselves ecarcely know more of it than what they are compelled to read in the Breviary and the Missal." Father Curci has had vicissitudes, and he is not usually quoted as an authority on Catholic matters where there are so many others of greater weight and authority. Father Curci, however, has never been accused of dense ignorance or of malicious misrepresentation ; and, if he had made the above assertion it would be safe to say that he was guilty of either malice or ignorance.— CatJiolic Revieiv.