MANUFACTURING
Manufacturing Conditions and Developments. Millions of dollars are annually spent in building new factories. Other millions are spent in equipping them with the best machinery that trained and experienced men have been able to devise. Still more millions of money are annually paid to the officials who manage and the employees who man these enormous manufacturing plants.
Why? Why could not these expert employees labor in their own homes or their individual shops, and produce the manufactured goods without all these enormous expenses? What are the necessities which impel men to spend these vast sums of money in erecting, equipping, and operating these immense plants?
Casually considering the question, the factory or manufacturing plant does not seem to be a real necessity. A large force of employees working under a single management does not seem to be the most economical method of producing the desired goods. Certainly every man is free to choose his own particular line of work; and there are many persons who, seeing a large force of employees giving their entire life work to the enrichment of successful manufacturers, while the employees themselves work long hours at hard and laborious tasks and fare so poorly that they are seldom enabled to save any considerable portion of their wages, not infrequently ending an industrious life in poverty and want, are led to believe that the factory is not a necessity or even a benefit to mankind, but rather a means for reducing the individual worker to a condition of grinding servitude, voluntary perhaps, but often the result of dire necessity.
These people, considering all the hardships in the life of factory employees, are likely to hold and often to express the opinion that the highest welfare of the human race really demands a return to the simpler life of early days, when a much larger proportion of the people lived upon farms, producing their own provisions, raising the flax and the wool wherewith they clothed themselves, quite independently of the wealthy classes, whether bankers, capitalists, or manufacturers, the factory as we know it to-day having hardly begun its marvelous era of existence.
Let us consider for a moment how all this has come about. In the earlier years of the independence of this country, the chief dependence was upon the results of agricultural work. In due time the development of the resources of the country has placed manufacturers at the front, so that in very recent years the value of manufactured products has become nearly double that of agricultural.
These results, like many others of a less notable character, commenced from very small beginnings; and it has been by inborn mechanical ability, remarkable ingenuity, patient development, and tireless energy, that mechanical undertakings have been developed from meager initial facilities, until, in the vast manufacturing enterprises of the present day, the American mechanic in nearly all lines leads the world in originality and practical achievement.
Early New England Mechanics. When the early settlers of New England labored under the restrictive and harassing laws of the Mother Country, and under their administration were goaded and exasperated beyond endurance in many ways, not the least of which was that of being obliged to purchase many manufactured articles from England at extortionate prices—or, if purchased from other countries, still paying taxes to England for the privilege—they rebelled. Determining to buy no more foreign goods, they set out, at first in most clumsy and primitive fashion, to make for themselves such articles as were really necessaries, and, in noble self-denial, to live without those which they could not make for themselves. They doubtless little realized, however, that they were thereby laying the foundations of the greatest manufacturing country in the world. By the principles thus inaugurated, they instituted the first industrial boycott in the history of the country—the one that has had more important and far-reaching influences than anything of the kind before or since.
Industrial Freedom. While the departure of the Pilgrims for this country, and the making of their homes on the "stern and rock-bound coast" of New England, were for the purpose of seeking religious freedom, it is also true that freedom soon meant very much more than this to them; and with a larger conception of their opportunities and possibilities, some of which were in reality forced upon them by adverse circumstances, there came to them the inspiration of industrial as well as religious freedom. The world has seen and has given them due credit for the determined and heroic manner in which they went about their self-appointed task; and they have amply demonstrated to posterity their appreciation of and grasp upon the possibilities and conditions, and the breadth and nobility of character which they exhibited in working out the many perplexing problems that confronted them.