Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/367

Rh Congress, "The Nineteenth Century farmer was no farmer at all; he was a miner, mining the fertility of the soil, and selling it for the bare cost of the mining." We sell our cotton to Switzerland at 14c. a pound, with scarce any labor in it. We buy it back in the form of fine handkerchiefs at $40 a pound, all labor. We export bar iron and import razor blades; export hides and import gloves; export copper and import art bronzes. We must acquire the skill of the foreigner to the end that our exports shall carry the maximum and not the minimum of high-class labor.

Providence has been kind to us, but Providence is likely now to leave us a little more to our own intelligence. We must henceforth sell more brains and less material. We must, to the utmost degree, develop our human efficiencies. In them is our supreme natural resource, and the only one that increases with use and will increase forever and immeasurably. Other nations, lacking our raw materials, make the cultivation of their human resources the substantial basis of their prosperity and happiness.

We are going in the right direction. The percentage of these semi-crude products in 1906 was 63 per cent. Last year it was near 50 per cent. And our great captains of industry have shown the way, for we note in passing that substantially half of our total manufactured exports are of the four items, food-stuffs, crude copper, mineral oils, and the cruder products of iron and steel. Our manufacturers of shoes, typewriters, sewing machines and agricultural implements have made as clear a demonstration of the coming development wherein American Inventions and comforts may be everywhere accepted. Professor Fisher of Yale estimates the value of our human resources, the brain and spirit and muscle of our people, at two hundred billions of dollars,-or five times the value of all other resources combined. What a tragedy that we have, as a nation, been careless of this resource; that we have been inconsiderate of the happiness of the average worker; of his right to highly developed self-expression and citizenship. In this the American democracy has been more careless than the monarchies of Europe. Our captains of industry find their joy of life in the development of the day's work. When 35,000,000 operatives find a similar joy derived from a developed intelligence we shall be an irresistible force in the world's betterment.

Many other things may be said, and have been, as to the development of foreign trade. We must have banks in foreign countries and a merchant marine. We must stop generalizing and be specific. We must get over our provincialism and be catholic in our sympathies. We must realize that the ocean which used to separate the countries, now binds them together. The $1.25 which carries a ton of freight one hundred miles on land, carries it a thousand miles on water. Merchandise delivered at the nearest salt-water port is almost as good as delivered at any other port in the world. The day of the brotherhood of the nations is at hand.

We may well thank Providence that not all men are as we are; that