Dear Tom:
I note by the papers that you have served your bit and are now out again digging around for your own meal ticket.
I also note from the same informative sources, that following your usual proclivity for action, you started something while in the hash foundry, and consequently got a fine run for your money; the result being that you were shook down for your large and munificent earnings when discharged, and turned loose on a warmhearted world without any change in your jeans. But why worry? You’ve got a good and lucrative trade now, learned at the expense of the state of New York; and you know as well as I do that a good clever basket and broom maker, besides becoming a competitor of the unhappy blind, who are wont to follow this trade, can also earn as much as one dollar per day weaving waste-paper baskets for the masses.
I also note that a guy by the name of Osborne interviewed you after your release, and that you immediately put up a howl about your not liking the basic principles which call such joints as the one which you just quitted into existence; and that as per usual the foresighted and profound-thinking editorial writers on several of the big New York joy-sheets, which are published as accessories to the Sunday comic supplements, immediately broke into song and wanted to know what in hell you expected such places to be.
But don’t mind these newspaper stiffs, Tom. One discovers on coming in personal contact with them that, as a rule, their writings are all based on inexperience and the writers may be classified as belonging to the same species as Balaam’s ass. So forget them.
I know this Osborne party personally; and take it from me that if he had been born and brought up in the neighborhood of the gas-house he’d sure have been some rough-neck. He is full of pep and actually thinks for himself. He also has some peculiar ideas relative to the rights and duties of humanity, and your experiences truthfully related to him will probably bring results.
This Osborne guy is no novice in prison dope, and for years has been beefing about society throwing away its so-called “waste material,” when it might just as well be turned into valuable by-products by an intelligent application of the laws of synthetic social chemistry.
It’s his dope that if some Dutch guy can beat it into some big industrial joint, say like those of the United States Steel Company or the Standard Oil, and by an intelligent application of the laws of nature change waste material into valuable by-products and big dividends, that it is up to society to experiment a little with its social junk pile and see what a little of the right kind of chemistry will do to the waste material to be found therein.
I can distinctly remember when the big blast furnaces around this man’s town were cussed right along for dumping slag and cinders into the local river as waste material. The aborigines and other natives hereabouts used to form committees to call on our old college friend, Andy Carnegie, and tell him about it. Andy, of course, felt badly, but used to come back with a “What’s biting you people, anyway? Nobody can eat this slag, can they?” He had to put his waste somewhere, so why not use the rivers? Along about this time, however, in blows a Dutch boy named Schwab, he studies the question of slag and other waste material and its utilization; and now said slag is converted into high grade cement, price, $15 per ton, f. o. b. cars, Pittsburgh, Pa.
Ditto the juice from the oil refineries which polluted the rivers when I was a kid. At present writing this former waste material that used to wring hectic curses from all the river water-users from Pittsburgh to Cairo is changed into thirty-two separate compounds; and yet some people actually think that John D. stole his coin when the truth of the matter is that he simply hired a guy to study out plans for the utilization of waste and then beat the other stiffs to it before they were next.