The American workingman, above all others on the face of the earth, needs to take this warning to heart, for one result of competition has been the subdivision of most varieties of mechanical labor to a degree which requires twenty or thirty men sometimes to complete a bit of work which once was done by a single individual. Undoubtedly work can be done cheaper in this way, and both capital and labor have some obligations to fulfil toward the consumer, but the less a man is a “full-handed workman,” which means that he can do all branches of the business in which he is engaged, the more necessary it is for him to be prepared to do something else in case of emergency.
To illustrate: there was a time, almost within the memory of the present generation, when miniature painting was the most profitable division of art work in the United States. A fine miniature would bring more money than an oil painting. Suddenly the process of daguerreotyping was discovered. Then came the ambrotype and photograph, and other cheap methods of making accurate likenesses, and as a consequence miniature paintings became less and less in demand, and the few members of the profession who still survive have none at all of the work at which they once were famous. Some of them took to drawing on wood, others went into oil portraits, some devoted themselves to water-colors, and others went into mechanical businesses where a good and accurate eye for color and proportion commanded good pay. But if the miniature painters, whose misfortunes were greater than those of any class of common laborers now complaining to the public, had insisted that the public owed them a living and they were going to have it, and that Congress should make laws enabling them to get a living out of their business, they would have been laughed to scorn. The miniature painters had no more brains than mechanics. What is fair for one is fair for another.
One of the first things that the young laboring man does is to take a wife. A wife is a desirable object of possession. So is a horse, a yacht or a handsome house, but the man who would load himself with either while he sees no means of supporting it except by weekly earnings which might be stopped at short notice by any one of a dozen accidents to life or business, would be regarded as a fool. Some people would call him a scoundrel. Yet when financially pushed a man can sell a horse or yacht, and get at least part of the value while getting rid of responsibility. He cannot sell a wife, though, even if he is willing. That sort of business has become illegal. Even if it had not, the probabilities are that a wife, taken by a fellow who is so reckless as to marry before he is able to properly care for so precious and complicated a bit of property as a woman, would not be in salable condition.