What's What in America

by Eugene V. Brewster

(Simplified for the Uninitiated.)

The one great desire uppermost in the minds of men is to get the greatest good from the earth, the source of all wealth, with the least possible labor and effort. In the so-doing, both experience and reason teach that economy is the watchword. It is the life blood of civilization—the essence of industrial prosperity. The basis of all philosophy is "I want," and in the pursuit of happiness and contentment, economy must be the watchword.

WASTE.

The destruction of the smallest useful atom is an injury to every living person; and the more useful the atom, the greater the injury. A great fire, a flood, a devastating cyclone, is not only a calamity to those immediately affected, but it is a universal loss; for, the great human family is just so much poorer, the world's progress has been retarded, and our onward march toward the perfect civilization has been checked. Likewise, every stroke of labor that does not go toward making the world better or richer is wasted energy. The man who insists on making shoes, or raising wheat, or digging coal, when he is mentally, physically and by nature ill-adapted to that calling, is a drone and a burden upon society. He is wasting energy and impeding the general progress, because he is doing something which others could do better or quicker, and he is therefore the cause of misplacing two persons in unproductive and unnatural callings.

MACHINES.

The labor saving machine is the personification of economy. It, and all great inventions, are welcomed by civilization as great economizers of the world's work. It is wasted energy for man to do by hand that which a machine can do as well and in less time. The machine economizes production and therefore lightens and lessens the toil of the human family. Ten men in a shop or industry, each assigned to that branch of the business to which he is best adapted, form a combination for economy identical with a machine. If a linotype machine, operated by one man, can do the work of say five type-setters, the world is richer to the extent of about what four men could create in other vocations,—allowances being made for the labor required to make the machine itself.

DEPENDENCE.

A person can no longer make his own hat, coat, shoes and house, and raise his own vegetables, as Crusoe did. Ten thousand men are co-operating to give him his shoes alone. There are the men who kill the animal which provides the hide, the men who carry it to the jobber, the men who strip it, the men who cure and tan it, the men who pack it, load it on the trucks, put it on the cars, unload it, carry it to the leather merchant, and the innumerable clerks, bookkeepers, advertisers and stenographers who help sell it to the shoe manufacturer, the additional transportation, the endless variety of hands it passes through in the factory, and the countless hands that handle the finished shoe before it reaches the consumer; and then,—the telegraph's part in the manufacture or sale or transportation of that shoe, and the mails and the advertising, each employing thousands. Even the linen thread used in the shoe has a similar history; likewise the pegs, the needles, the machines, the cloth lining and the metal eyelets. And the shoe is a small part of a man's necessaries. What does all this show? The inter-dependence of men, one upon the other.

CO-OPERATION.