While César Vaval’s parents were still alive they spent much effort in teaching him the things they believed he ought to know: “No slavery is any goo… - James A. Michener

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While César Vaval’s parents were still alive they spent much effort in teaching him the things they believed he ought to know: “No slavery is any good. Danish is worst by far. French is best, maybe. But you live for one thing only, to be free.” His parents had died at about the same time, worked to death by the owner of their plantation, but before they died they told their son: “Study everything the white man does. Where does he get his power? Where does he hide his guns? How does he sell the sugar we make? And no matter how you do it, learn to read his books. There’s where he keeps his secrets, and unless you master them, you’ll always be a slave.

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About James A. Michener

James Albert Michener (3 February 1907 – 16 October 1997) was an American author of more than 40 titles, the majority of which are novels of sweeping sagas, covering the lives of many generations in a particular geographic locale and incorporating historical facts into the story as well.

Biography information from Wikiquote

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Alternative Names: James Albert Michener James Michener

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One of the most expensive commodities a nation can have is a cheap labor force. From this a host of consequences leaped forth as inevitable. — If you get labor for almost nothing, you have no incentive to buy expensive tools and the quality of your product will lag behind that of nations who do use the best tools on the market. — If you keep your labor occupied on menial tasks that are best suited to machines, your work force never develops those skills that would earn you more income. — If you employ ten to do the work of one, none of the ten will work to maximum efficiency because each will realize that what he or she does isn’t significant. — If you don’t pay your labor good wages, how can they ever afford to buy what you make? You limit your potential market by 50 percent at least, and if every employer in the region pays the same low wages, your market can vanish altogether. — A nation’s wealth is generated when the money from wages is quickly spread around because this causes more goods to be produced, and real wealth consists in the making and interchange of goods.
And then I made the discovery: ‘Ricardo was wrong. There is no fixed quantum of money in the world, or in any nation. The rich man doesn’t suffer deprivation when labor gets a bigger share, for that larger amount means a bigger total for him.’” — Chapter VII, “Ideas”, page 257-258

Panic of 1873 had already cast its shadow across the money markets of New York and Chicago; prudent men were beginning to draw in their investments, but the men and women involved in this outlandish affair were so wealthy and so protected that the panic could not touch them.

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The abuses stemmed from the fact that the owners of the railroads never saw themselves as servants to an expanding nation; they were men trying to squeeze the last penny of profit from a good thing, and to accomplish this, they subverted legislatures, perverted economic law and persecuted anyone who tried to hold them to a more honest discharge of their duties.

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