Competition Grows Fiercer.
I was in England in November, and met a sad sight—Trafalgar Square filled with idle people, large numbers of idle people asking for bread up around Hyde Park. Why? The men who carry on the work, who paid the pay-rolls, are no longer engaged in the business.
What they had they have turned into money, and have bought securities or something else, trying to save what they have got.
In the west of England, which was a great center of broadcloth manufacturing and of woolen goods, their output is less than a quarter of what it was twenty-five years ago. Germany is selling cutlery in Sheffield.
And I took pains to look around London, and to walk into the shops and find out. I couldn't buy a pair of lisle-thread gloves that were not made in Germany. Underclothing, stockings, cloth, almost everything made in Germany. They have a system of education in Germany. They educate their men.
Now I am not going to undertake to say that their way is better than ours, but I want to impress this on you, that when this country has a hundred and fifty million people they have got to do something; they have got to earn a living.
Who will buy the goods? Who will employ them? In what shape are they to meet the competition that England is meeting to-day? And a million and a half of idle men asking for bread in England, and no bread for them except such as charity doles out. They have got to be carried out of Great Britain and a new place found for them. There is no other solution.
It is all well enough to talk about what we are doing. Examine it closely and you will find that we are doing nothing except selling our natural resources and exhausting them. When you dig a ton of ore out of the ground you can't plant another ton, as you could potatoes; it is gone. And when the fertility of our fields, the fertility of the soil is gone, where are we going to replace it from?
Teach the Boys to Work.
I am not going to find fault with education; it never hurt anybody. But if, in place of spending so much time and so much money on languages and higher studies, we fitted them for the life that they are going to follow, for the sphere in which they are going to move, we would do more for them.