The professional world. (Columbia, Mo.) 1901-192?, 1902-09-19
AS OTHERS SEE US.

HniJadelpnla Ledger: A commission
Of the British Iron Trade association,
which visited this country to study it's
great steel and iron manufacturing in
dustries, has published a report which
is discussed in some of the English
technical papers. The report itself has
nos yet reached the treasury bIreau of
statistics, but some extracts from it
have been printed by the English pa
pers. The commission was composed
of j. S. Jeans, an authority on the sub
jcct; AXel Sahlin. an expert in blast
fUrnace work; EbeneZer ParEes. a pc
cialist in sheet and bar mill practice,
and Enoch James, who gave special at
teLt:on to the steel industry. Mr..
James says that it is a mistake to sup
pose that Americans work harder than
E~nglishmen. They have to be atten-
tive in guiding operations and quick in
manipulating levers and similar easy
work, and they are much more DESTROYS
than English workmen to get out large
quantities, but they do not work hard
er. They are better paid and more reg
ular in their attendance at the works,
loss of time through drinking habits or
otherwise not being tolerated.
M. Sahlin gives similar testimony,
and adds that Americans aspire to the
higher grades of work and leave to for
eigners the rough manual labor. lie
saw Polish n Hungarian laborers
working for 81 to $3.50 per day along
side of American rollers averaging $12
per day. The average wages of men
employed at Homestead was, according
to Mr.. Carnegie, SO per day, or, as Mr..
Sahlin puts it, &1S7 per annum, against
G6Sper annum in Lancashire and ELS
per mum in South Wales. Mr.. Jeans
gave special attention to the cost of
living, and concluded that the average
American workman, in most of the es-
sentials of life, could live as cheaply
as his British brother. If this be ap-
proXimately true, the American must
have much the better of it, with aver
age wages in these industries of 1885
against $340 in Lancashire and 1895 in
South Wales.
Commenting on these reports, the
London Statist approves Mr.. Sahlin's
remark that "it is not the guns That
win the battle. but the men behind
them" and adds:
What the American admires and
honors is the ability to do; that capa-
city in a man. through his own saga
city, nerve, enterprise and skill, to Gre
ate and employ a fortune. Nobody is
above his work. Everybody works,
and for the sake of work, and thus has
been produced in America with a gen.
Grafton an industrial potentiality more
wonderful and more to be feared than
all the factories and machinery and
plants that these workers have Gre
ated. 1t comes to this, then, that
American labor is not more efficient,
though it is better paid, than ours: and
that American manufacturing develop
ment Is due to the persistent, unresting
Industry which once characterized the
Briton, but for which trade unionism
and athletics have given an apparently
growing distate. All the reporters,
however, seem struck with the strenu-
usnes of American life. The COM
parative absence of a leisured class is
noted as n of the prominent charac-
teristics of the principal cities ard in
dustrial centers of the United States.
In the enu OF industry a man with
out a regular business, or who is not
concerned in the development Of some
industry, is as a fish out of water. No
where, we are assured, is the struggling
youth more kindly encouraged, more
generously aided and more readily
trusted-than in America; and it ia
pleasant to read of an esprit du corps
among the works managers which ore
would hardly expect to find in a land
of such feverish competition"
This is not merely complimentary;
it is true. AS a people we work hard
because we like to work; we are am
bilious and enterprising, and it Is the
human factor, not our machine tools,
that foreign competitors have to dread,
now that the American people have be-
GIN to enter the markets of the world.