The Pleasantville press. (Pleasantville, N.J.) 1912-1929, 1918-04-20
Mr.. AVERAGE CITIZEN
DO YOU PRODUCE AS
MUCH AS YOU CONSUME
Modern Society Founded on Prin-
ciple of Cooperative
Effort of All.
WE DEPEND ON EACH OTHER
Simple Lesson in Economics Proves
That Industry Is the Source of Me-
cessities, Comforts and luxuries
Individual Has Debt to Organization.

Can you picture an average Ameri-
can family seated at a table in the
average American home about to par
take of the average American meal?
1t is a familiar enough sight. There
is the table covered with its white
cloth, the utensils made from porce-
lain, steel, glass and silver, and there
is the food-bread and butter, milk,
tea or coffee, salt and pepper, sugar,
meat, vegetables, fruit, etc. But
scarcely anything there is the direct
result of the labor of any person who
sits about that tablet
When you sit down to a meal do you
ever think who provided it? Do you
even know, in most cases, where the
different c%omponents of that meal
came from? Did the salt and the pep
per drop as mamma from heaven? Did
the flax or the cotton which forms the
tablecloth grow upon the home place!
We're the fbers spun into yarn by your
h~ousekeeper, and was the cloth woven
on the household loom? Did you rear
tllS ullllldl Mll1h oupliiNu LIN "NAe
for the repast? Did the fruit come
from our orchard? Are the milk and
the butter the products of your COW?
Who delved into the earth for the sill
yer, the steel, the lead, the clay which
have been used to make up the utensils
necessary for your most simple meal?
And who changed those raw products
;D.1 +Io 1@,.Oc a,od forlyc nnd 6iShno
you use?
No thoughtful man a consider
such questions without being tremen-
dously impressed with the utter de-
pendence of wen the most independent
man in our present civilization upon
the cooperation of hundreds of thou
sands of his fellow men whom he has
never met and probably never heard
of, largely engaged in some occupa-
ton different from his own and scat
tered about, not only all over his own
country, but many of them located in
far distant parts of the earth!
1t makes no difference what vocation
a nan follows. He may be a farmer
and cause two blades of grass to grow
where only one grew before. He may
be a manufacturer, a retail merchant,
a mechanic or a banker-no matter
what he is, he depends for his very ex-
istence, not only upon those who till
the soil and deal in its products, but
also and to the same extent upon the
great organizations of manufacture,
transportation, communication and
finance which are scattered about all
over the earth.
1t has taken the combined efforts,
the cooperation of thousands of peo-
pie and organizations concerning which
the average individual may know
nothing, to bring about the develop
ment of what we call our modern CIV
ilization. The economic value of your
efforts and those of our employee or
of your employer, as the case may be,
both depend upon the value of the eff
forts of millions of other men, and the
economic value of one cannot be dam
aged without impairing the economic
value of all.
Let us not become so thoroughly spe-
cialists that we forget the other fellow.
If our work narrows down at least let
our knowledge and sympathies broad
en-. If we do not know something of
the problems of each other and have
some sympathetic interests in those
problems we cannon hope to attain, Ell
Their individually or collectively, the
very great benefits which are known to
be the direct results of helpful coop
eration.-Industrial Conservation, n. Y.