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1825.

THE HOUSE ELECTS ADAMS.

81

of the House was called, every member save one answered to his name. The members having seated themselves in delegations, and the sergeant-at-arms having given the chairman of each two ballot boxes, the Speaker directed the voting to begin. As soon as the four-and-twenty States had voted, a teller was chosen by each delegation. Twelve, under the lead of Webster, sat at one table and counted the ballots in one set of boxes, and twelve under John Randolph sat at another table to count the ballots in the second set of boxes. But scarcely had the tellers announced to the Speaker that Adams had received the votes of thirteen States, Jackson seven, and Crawford four, than a few people in the gallery began to clap and a few to hiss.* For this the Speaker ordered the galleries to be cleared, after which the proceedings went quietly on, and John Quincy Adams was duly declared to have been elected President of the United States for the term of four years beginning March 4, 1825.

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CHAPTER XLIII.

SOCIALISTIC AND LABOR REFORMS.

FIFTY years had now gone by since the farmers of Massachusetts made the first appeal to arms in the struggle for independence, and forty-nine since the thirteen colonies threw off allegiance to Great Britain and founded the Republic of the United States. Our country when independence was obtained was a very little one. It nowhere touched the Gulf of Mexico. It just touched the Mississippi. Its population numbered scarcely three million and a half of souls, and nowhere within its bounds was a city of forty thousand people. Since that time its domain had been extended across the continent; the waves of the Pacific now beat upon its western confines; the waters of the gulf now washed the shores of three great States and one Territory; while on the soil of the Republic dwelt six million of the happiest people on earth. The States had multiplied from thirteen to four-and-twenty. Four* cities boasted of more than forty thousand inhabitants each, and two † of more than one hundred thousand. Fourteen had each more than ten thousand, while scores of towns which in 1825 contained a thousand and more population did not exist in 1776.

Quite as marvellous was the social betterment. No man, whatever his station in life, whatever his business, trade, or occupation, was without its influence. Life along the seaboard was getting easier. Much of the old hardship of earlier times was gone. Increase in population and in wealth, joined with improved means of communication, had greatly expanded

*New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore.

+ New York (1820), 123,706. Philadelphia (1820), 112,772.

1825.

NEW TRADES AND OCCUPATIONS.

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business opportunities. New industries, new trades, new occupations had arisen, and now afforded ways of gaining a livelihood unknown in the time of Washington. Manufactures had grown up since 1807, and had dotted the Eastern and Middle States with a thousand mills and factories. Steamboats were now on lake and river. Canals now joined great waterways, while a network of turnpikes spread out in every direction from the chief cities. These civilizers had so abridged distance that in 1825 the frontier and the seaboard almost touched. Boston was but two days from New York, New York but eleven hours from Philadelphia, and Philadelphia but five days from Pittsburg and fifteen hours from Washington. Freight could now be moved from New York to Buffalo through the Erie Canal for four cents a ton per mile, tolls included. These rates revolutionized business. The field a merchant or a manufacturer could cover by his enterprise seemed boundless. The whole West, as well as the East, became his market, and transportation companies for the handling of freight had been established in order to enable him to reach that market. Banks were multiplying. Insurance companies, steamboat, turnpike, and canal companies, mills, and factories were springing up on every hand. Simple as these things seem, they changed the whole course of life.

Tens of thousands of men who under the old conditions would have been doomed to eke out a scanty livelihood by farming, or by cobbling, or by toiling in the crowded ranks of unskilled labor, now found new occupations opening before them. They became mill hands and operatives; they turned machinists and mechanics; they served as engineers and firemen on the steamboats, as clerks and book-keepers in banks and insurance companies; they handled freight, tended the gates on the turnpikes or the bridges on the canals; drove the horses that dragged the canal boats, or found employment in some of the older industries which, such as tailoring and printing, shoemaking, stage-driving, hatmaking, and carpentry, had been greatly expanded since the war.

The rise of new industries and the development of old caused an immense increase in the number of working-men and working-women. The growth of this class brought up

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questions of reform, and with 1825 the labor movement began. Less hours of labor, higher wages, better treatment, payment in honest money and not in depreciated bank paper, became the demands of the time. Some of these were as old as the Republic. Journeymen shoemakers, journeyman tailors and carpenters over and over again had struck, or "turned out," during the past forty years. Now the grievance was the employment of non-union men; now it was low wages; again, it was giving out work to women. Twice the purpose of the strike was to secure a shorter working-day. The first of these movements occurred in 1791, when the members of the Union Society of Carpenters at Philadelphia ordered a turnout. They complained that in summer they were forced to toil from sunrise to sunset for five shillings a day, and in winter were put on piecework, and demanded that the year through a working-day should be from six in the morning to six at night, with an hour for breakfast and another for dinner; or, what was the same thing, ten hours of labor. Nothing came of the movement, they were forced to yield, and in all likelihood not one of them ever lived to see the time when the working-man did not labor thirteen hours out of the twenty-four. During the summer, when the sun rose early, every cobbler, every carpenter, mason, stonecutter, every laboring man, was hard at work at four o'clock in the morning. At ten an hour was taken for lunch, and at three another for dinner, after which work went on till, according to the almanac, the sun had set.

The second protest against so long a working-day was made in 1822 by the journeymen millwrights and machine workers of Philadelphia. They met at a tavern, and passed resolutions that ten hours of labor were enough for one day, and that work ought to begin at 6 A. M. and end at 6 P. M., with an hour for breakfast and one for dinner. Their action went no further, and led to no immediate result. But the fact that the men who formed the meeting were machinists was one of many signs of the expansion of labor. Yet another was afforded in 1824 in New York city. A tariff bill was then before Congress, and the people all over the seaboard States were supporting or opposing it in memorials

1825.

CONDITION OF THE WORKING-MAN.

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and petitions. New York, as a great commercial city, was full of anti-tariff men, and by them a meeting was called and held in the City Hall. But a band of weavers from Paterson, from Westchester, and from the mills in the city marched to the Hall, took possession, interrupted the proceedings with cries of "No British goods!" "Tariff, tariff!" "American manufactures!" "Protection to domestic industries ! " smashed some chairs, tore up some benches, broke lamps and windows, and went away. The rioters, it was said in explanation, were aliens, weavers imported from Great Britain, men who had not been long enough in the United States to acquire citizenship. The statement was true, and, trifling as was the affair, it showed that the time had come when the ranks of labor were being recruited abroad; that the importation of foreign operatives had begun; and that a new element was introduced to still more complicate the industrial questions pressing for settlement.

The condition of the working-man stood in need of betterment. In the general advance made by society in fifty years he had shared but little. Many old grievances no longer troubled him, but new ones, more numerous and galling than the old, were pressing him sorely. Wages had risen within ten years, but not in proportion to the increase in the cost of living. In some States he was no longer liable to imprisonment for debt, unless the amount was larger than fifteen dollars, and in others than twenty-five. If he was so fortunate as to save a few cents out of the pittance he earned, and lived in either of the four great cities, there were savings banks in which he might with reasonable safety deposit the fruits of his economy and receive interest thereon. These were decided gains. Nevertheless, his lot was hard. The hours of labor were still from sunrise to sunset. Wages were not always paid weekly or monthly, but often at long and irregular intervals, and frequently in bad money. His ignorance of finance and of the tricks of business men made him the recipient of counterfeit notes and bills of broken banks, or of institutions of such doubtful soundness that the paper he was forced to receive at its face value would not pass with the butcher or the baker save at a heavy discount. When

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