Labor vs. Investment.
There is an almost universal commentation that farming does not pay. So much is this wail in evidence that we try to fool ourselves into believing that farming is the only industry that does not pay, but here is a testimonial from a prominent manufacturing industry that shows that it is not all dividends in other industries. Listen, brethren of the soil, while I speak my piece as I have learned it from the Lowell Courier-Citizen:
“Manchester, N.H., October 28. — the Amoskeag mills here were operated last year at a loss of $1,550,663.43, Treasurer F. C. Dumaine told the stockholders at the annual meeting today.”
There is no doubt that New England manufacturing for the last five years or more have had closer figuring to come out covering expenses than the farming industry, and unless there is an easing up of the pressure of labor leaders for more wages and less hours, and a let up in the ever increasing rate of taxation, our New England manufacturing industries will either be in their financial cemetery or transacting business under the more favorable conditions of the south. To use a slang phrase, you can put this in your pipe Mr. Labor Leader and Mr. Tax rate and smoke it, and it will contribute more towards your physical and financial health than any cut plug patent brand Connecticut valley tobacco.
Personally I am for easement in the taxing of our New England manufacturing industries as much as we can. We cannot expect to silence the tongues of labor leaders — it would be impossible to have a business emergency threatening enough to silence it or an emergency brake strong enough to stop from waging unbusiness nonsense. I am aware that the easement of taxes of manufacturers is not popular. I am for the old-time New England business common sense, regardless of popularity. Labor in the Amoskeag mills (and for that matter all other mills) have received more returnable cash in proportion to the cash invested than the stockholder. Labor invests not one cent of cash—they invest their physical existence and so do the stockholders, and so far this investment is equal, but the advantage in investment comes when the stockholders erect mills, equip them with machines, pay taxes, insurance and repairs, and load themselves with the vicissitudes of the business. In the face of this picture it looks as if the employee was the stockholder and the employer the slave.
Those who think that they can figure out a different picture can have the use of my barn doors to figure on until I get ready to paint them, which is liable to be sooner than some. If the barn doors are not large enough to figure out your case, as I do not think they are, I will enlarge them to include the entire south side of the barn, 58×20 feet.
For all this picture that I have figured out my sympathies always have been and always will be world without end with the honest, temperate poor. But let us use a teaspoonful of every-day business common sense in our sympathies and not slop over to the extent that we believe the earth and all that is on it belongs to labor regardless of their investments.
Taxes.
Last week, under “Migrating southward,” reference was made to the high taxes of the mills of Lowell as $160,000. This might be construed by some as the total tax on all the Lowell mills. No, not quite such easy tax sledding as that. As we recall it, quoting from memory, one of the Lowell mills pays a tax this year of $165,000. The mill corporations in Lowell have been cutting down their taxable property by selling corporation boarding houses and land with a view to economizing so that they may live and be driven south, and we can only recall the Merrimack mill as still maintaining corporation boarding houses. But the more the mills have economized the higher goes the taxes and are still kiting skywards. Here is a sample of debt paying recently proclaimed at a public welfare meeting. The city of Lowell, which is in
debt several million dollars, is borrowing more money and contracting more debts faster than it is paying off old debts. Is it any surprise that mill property and other property is squinting southward, notwithstanding that labor leaders shout “It’s all a phantom to cut down wages.” Give us a kindergarten class of youthful, giggling girls to do the financial management of some of our cities. There is a possibility that it would be an improvement and no possibility that it could be worse.
