What becomes of this forty-five million dollars in wages annually paid by the silk mills of America? Every dollar of it is spent. We all spend all we get. We spend it for necessaries or comforts or luxuries or taxes or foolishness, or we expend it for a house, or a bond, or we deposit it in a bank and someone else spends or expends it.
Let us assume that this particular forty-five million dollars of silk mill wages is paid to western farmers for food. The western farmers send it east for knit goods and shoes and these factories pay it out again to labor and labor sends it west again for food. How often will wages make the circuit?
A man earns, say, five dollars and spends it at night for food and clothes. The merchant spends his profit and pays the balance to the producer of food and clothes. The producer keeps it as a reward for his toil or pays it for wages. In either event, it goes again for food and clothes. William McKinley estimated that wages would thus make the circuit and come back to the wage earner ten times per annum. I believe the estimate conservative. A million men annually earning one thousand dollars each, makes one billion dollars in wages. This billion dollars going to the merchant ten times a year and back to labor as often, makes an aggregate of ten billion dollars in trade every twelve months.
A SUMMARY OF ACHIEVEMENT
Now, hold your breath. The figures showing the material result of fifty years of applied common sense, will stagger you.
When the European war began, our farms were producing more than the farms of any other country on the map. Our mines yielded gold by trainload annually, and we unloaded from coastwise ships and railways on the soil of Ohio alone more iron ore than any other country in the world produced. In fifty years we had builded as many miles of railroad as all the rest of the world, and these roads, before the government began fixing rates, were carrying our freight for one-third of what was charged for like service elsewhere beneath the sky. We cut from our forests one hundred million feet of lumber for every day of the calendar year, and annually pumped from the earth beneath 250,000,000 barrels of petroleum, over sixty-five percent of the world’s gross product. Owing to the rapid exchange of wages for necessaries and comforts and then again for wages, our domestic trade had become five times as large as the aggregate international commerce of creation. Our shops and factories turned out more finished products than all the shops and all the factories of Great Britain and France and Germany combined, plus five thousand million dollars’ worth every twelve months, and we paid out as much in wages as all the rest of the human family. Achieve and be happy!
I hope you will understand that I am not defending either our form of government or our policy. George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin and those other immortal men, may have been blithering idiots when they chose to create a republic instead of a democracy. I only cite the fact that they did create a republic. We might have accomplished more had the government tilled the lands, built the ships, constructed and operated the railroads, erected the factories, opened the mines, transacted the business and put everyone on the public payroll. I only seek to make it clear that this was not done and that we did fairly well, considering.
During all this period, the government accepted as its appropriate function the protection of the citizen, while the citizen sought happiness and secured it through achievement. The government sought to protect him from murder, but did not always succeed. It tried to shield him from robbery, but sometimes failed. It aimed to prevent extortion but was not always successful. It did its best to see that opportunity should knock once at every door, but did nothing to force an entrance or insure a second call. Still, notwithstanding errors, weaknesses and admitted inefficiency, the American citizen has been afforded better protection against all the evils that assail mankind, than the people of any other country and, in the pursuit of happiness, Americans have enjoyed far wider liberty of action, and an infinitely greater percent of realization.