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disease, and he employs the very cheapest city labor—father, mother and children all employed in the same pest hole—and this product comes into competition with the product of the model city and village factory.
Now, some enterprising business men conceived a plan whereby they could undersell the cheap slum workers by moving their factories to the Pacific Coast and employing cheap Chinese labor. Prior to the Exclusion Act the cigar factories of San Francisco employed about forty American citizens and nearly seven thousand Chinese.
Competition; yes, a survival of the fittest. Those who can adapt themselves to the system survive, and those who cannot are sure to perish.
Dunn and Co, inform us that in 1864 there wert 520 failures with liabilities of $8,579,000, while in 1907 there were 11,725 failures with liabilities of $197,385,225.
Those best fitted to survive decided that competition was the death of trade, and therefore as far as they were concerned there should be no more competition, and formed a trust, known as the American Tobacco Company. This trust believes competition is all right when it comes to crushing an independent manufacturer or dealer, and above all it thinks it's good for the workers to compete fer each others' jobs.
When Porto Rico was gathered under the protecting wing of the American Eagle, the American Tobacco Company promptly took advantage of the cheap labor there, with the result that 125,000,000 cigars are now annually coming into the United States free of duty from Porto Rico. The Porto Rico cigar makers are now fairly well employed, while thousands of American cigar makers are idle. In 1902 the cigar makers' unions expended for out-of-work benefit purposes $15,558. In 1908 they expended $101,483.50, an increase of $85,925.50. Surely these gentlemen of business are far seeing, for away down in the Philippine islands they discovered still cheaper labor whom they hoped to exploit and bring into competition with the Porto Ricans and Americans.
The Trust (American Tobacco Co.) in 1909 asked Congress to admit duty free from the Philippine Islands 150,000,000 cigars annually.
A bulletin of the Department of Labor shows that there were employed all told in the cigar industry in the Philippine Islands about 20,000 people at an average
