Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/822

802 tons of coal for one mill and a few cart-loads for the other. If my engineer and firemen and coal-handling cost me in all $5 per day, I must pay out for this charge $1,550 per annum, and in twenty years $31,000. So, for these two items, I have to pay in twenty years $85,000 for one mill, while the other costs me for the same items nothing. It really seems as if "a masterly inactivity" is the true policy when one considers the propriety of starting the cotton manufacture at the North with steam; but, on the contrary, a very masterly activity at Augusta, Ga., and at many other points in this favored land of "Dixie."

Our mild climate and short winter enable the operatives to make themselves comfortable at little expense for fuel and clothing. They swarm to all new mills that are inaugurated, and think they are fortunate to find work. We have few strikes here; hardly any in my experience of nearly fifty years. The relations between the employed and the employers are almost always of a kindly character. If we had twice as many mills at work to-day in the South as we now have, employé's could be found to take every position except for a time some especial departments of the work.

I have to buy 4,000 bales (1,920,000 pounds) of raw cotton for each of my mills. For the Augusta mill I pay probably fifteen cents per bale to get it from the Augusta market to my mill on the canal—say $600 in all. For my other mill I have to pay a small drayage here, and fifty-five cents per hundred pounds to get it from Macon (if bought here) to, let us say, Philadelphia; 1,920,000 pounds, at fifty-five cents per hundred pounds, costing me for freight alone $10,560 against $600 for my Augusta mill. If the same prices and the same rates should continue, my twenty years would net me an outlay for freights alone, without drayage, $211,200 against my Augusta drayage of $12,000, leaving a balance of $199,200 against my Northern steam mill as compared with my Augusta water mill; and adding the power items as above estimated, viz., $55,000 for twenty years, there has grown up a balance against steam of $254,200. It thus appears that, if both mills should endure for twenty years, I would have made a quarter of a million dollars more by staying at home than by wandering out in search of pastures new.

The account seems to be growing very large against my steam mill, but I am compelled to bring up other items against it. For instance, I buy the same quantity of cotton for each mill, and I choose to take fourteen per cent as the measure of waste in both mills, not quite believing that it should be so much. But the comparison is fair, as the amount is the same in both suppositions. Fourteen per cent of 4,000 bales is 560 bales, which I haul to my mill at Augusta at fifteen cents per bale drayage, or $84 in all,