While the population was small, labor was difficult to secure. Cities had to be built, roadways opened, railroads constructed, rivers bridged, and a continent brought under subjection. The process of the past four generations was possible only because our fathers economized their own labor and created, as fast as possible, the values they needed to barter off into the markets of the world for capital from the superabundant natural wealth that surrounded them.
Today, we are mining our iron, copper, lead and other metals more rapidly than any other country in the world. The pioneer farmers who worked the soils of the south with tobacco and of the east with wheat, can no longer move off to the west, when, having exhausted the fertility of our lands, they find farming no longer profitable. The hundred thousand vigorous Americans who went last year to Canada with energy, capital and American tools are a concrete evidence that we have reached the end of the course which we have been traveling.
The whole country has been startled by the warning of the far-sighted men, and now the demand for conservation of our natural wealth is becoming more and more insistent. We have been made to realize that every child born brings a mouth that must be fed, a body that must be sheltered and clothed, but no increase in natural wealth. We must still learn that every child does bring two hands which can work, and which, when highly trained and backed by scientific knowledge, can create untold values. Stated otherwise, we must care for our increasing population, not by increased exploitation of our natural stores, but by providing abundant work for skilled labor.
AMERICAN FARM MUST BE FACTORY—NOT A MINE.
Our agriculture has been a process of mining. The farm must now furnish a field for the profitable employment of skilled labor, for the use of capital, and the application of the principles of scientific management, becoming thereby a workshop instead of a mine.
In order to sell the labor power of our people, we must encourage the development of all secondary industries. By “secondary industries” I mean those industries which take raw materials that are largely the product of crude machinery and unskilled labor, and add to them in a large measure labor and capital values.
The agricultural implement manufacturer purchases steel and iron at approximately one cent per pound, and by further refinement creates implements worth eight cents to twenty cents per pound. The automobile maker takes lumber and iron, worth from two cents to four cents per pound, and produces a car worth from thirty cents to one dollar per pound, while the same materials, worked up into cash registers, typewriters, etc., would be worth from $3 to $10 per pound, and in watches from $50 to $5,000 per pound.
CREATE VALUES FROM LABOR.
We began by cutting the maple tree into a cord of wood, worth from three to seven dollars, and each tree furnished material for one day’s work. This same tree—if sawed into lumber—is worth twenty dollars and would furnish employment for one man for three or four days. If quarter-sawed and more carefully treated, it might be worth forty dollars and would furnish employment for more skilled and better paid workers and for a period of from ten to twelve days. And this same lumber, in a furniture factory would produce furniture worth from $100 to $500 and would furnish employment directly and indirectly equal to from six months to one year’s work for one man.
The whole range of values in this series, from the seven dollars’ worth of cord wood or $500 worth of manufactured goods, depends upon the degree of refinement extended to identically the same raw material through the quality and quantity of labor employed upon it, the capital expended and the application of greater scientific knowledge to the processes of production.