THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITIES.
“But I was on the right track; I was in a land of opportunities. I soon found work and a business that was to my taste; a business, too, that the good Providence has removed in part, at least, from the domain of the competitive destroyer—the business of producing crude petroleum from the earth.
“Since 1870 I have been more or less of an oil producer. In 1866, I came to the Ohio oil fields and began the business of producing oil at Lima. Since that time I have followed it both in Ohio and Indiana, and to some extent in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. In 1893 I invented some improvements in appliances for producing oil, and, finding manufacturers unwilling to make the articles, fearing there would be no profit, I concluded to undertake their manufacture. This brought me in contact with labor conditions in a city for the first time in my life. As a rule, labor in the oil fields had enjoyed large wages compared with similar classes outside. I found men working in Toledo for a fraction of a dollar a day. I began to wonder how it was possible for men to live on such a small sum of money in a way becoming to citizens of a free republic. I studied social conditions, and these led me to feel very keenly the degradation of my fellow-men, and I at once declared that the ‘going wages’ rule should not govern in the Acme Sucker-Rod Company, which is the firm name of our business. I said that the rule that every man is entitled to such a share of the product of his toil as will enable him to live decently, and in such a way that he and his children may be fitted to be citizens of the free republic, should be the rule governing the wages of our establishment.
“To break down the feeling of social inequality, we began to ‘get together,’—that is, we had little excursions down the bay. We invited our workmen and their families, and also some other people who live in big houses and do not work with their hands. We sought to mix them, to let them understand that we were all people—just people, you know.