NEWS AND LABOUR

A big New England factory, not long ago, wanted to get nearer its raw material and moved to Georgia.

All the machine considerations, better water-power, cheaper labour, smaller freight bills, and new markets had argued for moving to Georgia.

Long rows of new mills were built and thousands of negroes were moved in and thousands of shanties were put up, and the men and the women stood between the wheels.  And the wheels turned.

There was not a thing that had not been thought of except the men and women that stood between the wheels.

The men and women that stood between the wheels were, for the most part, strong and hearty persons and they never looked anxious or abused and did as they were told.

And when Saturday night came, crowds of them with their black faces, of the men and of the women, of the boys and girls, might have been seen filing out of the works with their week’s wages.

Monday morning a few of them dribbled back.  There were enough who would come to run three mills.  All the others in the long row of mills were silent.  Tuesday morning, Number Four started up, Wednesday, Number Five.  By Thursday noon they were all going.

The same thing happened the week after, and the week after, and the week after that.

The management tried everything they could think of with their people, scolding, discharging, making their work harder, making their work easier, paying them less, paying them more, two Baptist ministers and even a little Roman Catholic Church.

As long as the negroes saw enough to eat for three days, they would not work.

It began to look as if the mills would have to move back to Massachusetts, where people looked anxious and where people felt poor, got up at 5 A.M.  Mondays and worked.

Suddenly one day, the son of one of the owners, a very new-looking young man who had never seen a business college, and who had run through Harvard almost without looking at a book, and who really did not seem to know or to care anything about anything—­except folks—­appeared on the scene with orders from his father that he be set to work.

The manager could not imagine what to do with him at first, but finally, being a boy who made people like him more than they ought to, he found himself placed in charge of the Company Store.  The company owned the village, and the Company Store, which had been treated as a mere necessity in the lonely village, had been located, or rather dumped, at the time, into a building with rows of little house-windows in it, a kind of extra storehouse on the premises.

The first thing the young man did was to stove four holes in the building, all along the front and around the corners on the two sides, and put in four big plate-glass windows.  The store was mysteriously closed up in front for a few days to do this, and no one could see what was happening, and the negroes slunk around into a back room to buy their meal and molasses.  And finally one morning, one Sunday morning, the store opened up bravely and flew open in front.