Developing the Estate
I
THE old home is mortgaged for about eleven dollars an acre, including the swamp and the hardscrabble. Never mind how it happened — it was in a good cause and worth while. The selectmen have raised the taxes so that now it hardly pays to run the cider-mill; some of the cows are going dry, and the hired man wants more money. Eggs are a dollar a dozen, but the hens won’t lay. A new kind of tramp is hanging round, and last night Joe Politski’s barn was burned. The boy is on duty as a special constable, and Sis is doing his chores. Something has got to be done.
Agricultural experts may properly object to this presentation as not faithfully depicting life on the farm to-day; dramatic critics may reject it as an inadequate scenario for the first act of a new Old Homestead. Let them do it. It was intended for neither, but it does define with close approximation the situation of the American people on their estate to-day.
For wholly commendable reasons we have placed a mortgage of twenty-one billion dollars on the nineteen hundred million acres of our continental farm. Taxes of a ubiquity and magnitude unheard of previously take heavy tribute of all accomplishment. Many profitable industries are slowing down and government contracts aggregating billions are being liquidated. Wages have risen rocket-wise, both as to height and as to potentiality of explosion. There is an unprecedented demand upon our food-supply, and the price of the things we buy has made living a problem of the higher mathematics. Bolshevism, contagious as the influenza, is abroad in the world and not unknown at Ellis Island. Millions of our young men are in the army, and have yet to reckon with the elevator-girl and the women who are building refrigerator cars.
If the situation on the farm is one which calls for action, we have still other problems. Housing facilities are everywhere inadequate; the expense of building is almost prohibitive. Public utilities are disorganized, industry is in the throes of readjustment, operating costs of every kind are at flood-level, while permeating everything is a strong governmental pressure toward Socialism. The whole configuration of our environment has been remoulded as by glacial action.
Fortunately, there has come to most of us an awakened vision, broader sympathies, a finer patriotism, a quickened sense of responsibility. We desire, as never before, to serve, and we recognize within ourselves a new capacity for large affairs. The spirit of coöperation is abroad, if not yet immanent.
Strongest, perhaps, among us, of all the new influences born of the war, is the determination to derive from it some compensating good, a determination which scorns indemnities, seeks no territory, asks no favors; which turns within rather than without; but which will not be satisfied until many burdensome follies and injustices of the past have been corrected, or until new achievement permits comfort and decent living to all who deserve them, provides true equality of opportunity, and furnishes an environment in which growth is stimulated rather than inhibited. With new burdens on our shoulders, this mortgage on our acres, these taxes pressing down on all endeavor, how are these aspirations possible of realization? We must create new wealth in vast amounts and render actual the potential values now neglected. There is a way to do this, and one way only. It is through the development of our estate, the Estate of the American People.
The United States is an aggregation of undeveloped empires, sparsely occupied by the most wasteful people in the world. The Yellowstone Park is three times the size of Luxemburg. There are both space and climate in California for a new Italy and a greater Greece. Our Gulf States exceed in area, and are incomparably richer in resources, than the German Empire, Holland, Japan, Formosa, and Great Britain together. The Scandinavian peninsula, with its limited natural resources, supports ten million sturdy and prosperous people, under climatic conditions similar to those of Alaska; while our great territory, nearly twice as large, and rich in agricultural soil, in fisheries and furs and untouched coal, with mines which have already yielded metal values exceeding $350,000,000, with spruce and water-power to supply the world with paper, maintains a white population of scarcely more than fifty thousand.
These comparisons, thought-compelling as they are, leave the great heart of our estate untouched, and indicate no more than faintly and remotely the stupendous possibilities of development that lie dormant and convolute within it. Though already we produce twenty-five per cent of the world’s wheat, forty per cent of its iron and steel, sixty per cent of its cotton, sixtysix per cent of its oil, seventy per cent of its copper, and seventy-five per cent of its corn, our estate includes countless storehouses of untouched wealth, and its present agencies of production have a capacity for growth which may well tax credulity.
What are the broad and underlying facts which justify such unrestraint of statement, and to what measures do they clearly point for the development of our estate?
We have land enough to allot to each individual of our population about seventeen hundred and fifty acres, with Alaska and some islands to spare, although such uniformity of distribution is hardly desirable in the absence of a long-distance dinner-bell. Little more than two fifths of this great domain is in farms, and of the farm area only about one half is improved and bearing crops. We are ineffective farmers, growing fourteen bushels of wheat per acre while Germany grows twenty-eight and England thirty-two; content, with less t han half a bale of cotton to the acre on land which requires only better cultivation to yield at least a bale. In a year of foreign famine and unprecedented prices at home, only forty per cent, according to Mr. Hoover, of our white potato crop of 390,000,000 bushels reached the market. For our present purpose, therefore, the chief significance of t he $24,700,000,000, which represents the value of our 1918 crop and of livestock on the farms on January 1, lies in the fact that it is within our power to double the area of our cultivated land and at least quadruple our agricultural production.
Speaking of him as a class in which there are many notable exceptions, the American farmer has been in the past a two-dollar-a-day man. His ordinary field crops have not returned him much more than day-laborer’s wages, while such profit as the farm could be made to yield was derived from the incidental activities which utilized the family labor: the butter, eggs, honey, and meat, the orchard and the cider-mill. It is therefore of peculiar and great significance that farming to-day is rapidly taking place, and gaining recognition, as a business — a business which demands technical knowledge of a high order, management, skill in coöperative, largescale marketing, and which offers in return all the possibilities of development and increased reward that business as we have known it affords. The change comes at an opportune time, for agriculture in all the nations of the world was breaking down under the pressure of the industrial system. Moreover, to no other business in the world is there now available so vast an organization for the scientific study of its problems as that maintained by our Department of Agriculture and by the well-coördinated agricultural colleges and experiment stations. It is fortunate that this is so, for never has the world been more in need of an increased foodsupply. It needs as well a different and better and more satisfying type of rural life, and this we now have on our estate a unique opportunity of developing.
II
The comprehensive plans of such experienced colonizers as MacRae of North Carolina offer, in place of isolated and lonely farms, compact farm communities, each with a social centre large enough to ensure contact and companionship, good schools, some reasonable opportunity for amusement, and a chance to look into a shop-window. From these centres concrete roads radiate to the farms themselves, whereon are dwellings in which good taste and skilled design have had a part. Provision is also made for experimental farms to test new practice, and for demonstration farms to afford convincing proof of its advantages when they exist. The compactness of the social organization permits the use of community tractors, threshers, driers, and ensures the benefits of coöperative buying and selling.
All such plans, if well considered, provide for teaching truck-farming as a trade. They encourage community specialization on crops for which the locality affords some peculiar advantage. They aim to keep the settler for the first three years closely in contact with agricultural advisers of experience. Finally, they must offer long and easy terms of payment.
Already, in many of the Allied countries and especially throughout the British colonies, ample provision has been made to assist returning soldiers in establishing themselves as successful farmers. Australia contemplates the expenditure of £20,000,000 for this purpose. A proportionate amount for us would be $2,000,000,000. Advances for improvement may run as high as $6000, and terms of payment range from twenty years in Ontario to forty years in Queensland. The interest rate is seldom more than one half of one per cent above that paid on the public securities of the colony. The prospective soldier-farmer is trained on demonstration farms at current wages.
To what extent our own soldiers may be inclined or persuaded to take up farms is, of course, wholly problematical. The experience of Australia suggests that the proportion may reach fifteen per cent; that of Canada indicates that it may even exceed forty per cent. Our Secretary of Agriculture is conducting-through the Reclamation Service and with a special appropriation of $200,000 — a preliminary investigation of lands suitable for reclamation by government agency as sites of model rural communities for soldiers. The project contemplates the ultimate utilization for farm purposes of approximately 300,000,000 acres now classed as arid or cut-over land or swamp. Its size implies that it is not intended for soldiers alone. For them only it would be generous to a fault. The preliminary survey is proceeding rapidly and has already disclosed an abundance of good land in the Southern, Central, and Northern States. In New York and Massachusetts state officials are similarly mapping large tracts.
The experience of our Reclamation Service has shown that to ensure success the settler must possess some money and be prepared for hard work, economy, and self-denial. With these, and a general oversight and direction from expert agriculturists, — since even a Congressional medal cannot make a man a farmer, — satisfying returns and ultimate independence are reasonably secure.
From the recent official records of the various projects which make up the million acres now under irrigation in the United States one may cull reports of real performance which have all the fascination of oil-stock advertising. The Yuma project in Arizona opened a new valley of the Nile, where four crops of alfalfa are now raised on what once were arid lands. The streets of Yuma and Somerton are crowded with the automobiles of farmers, enriched by thousands of acres of splendid longstaple cotton, alfalfa, corn, and feterita. Another irrigated valley in Arizona, that of the Salt River, has few superiors in the world, and has come in three years into great prosperity. Arizona planted to cotton last year 92,000 acres. Its crop was ninety-six per cent perfect, the best record in the United States.
On the Minedoka project in Idaho the first crop on twelve acres of new land was white clover grown for seed. The yield was 8000 pounds, of which 7000 were sold at 42 cents a pound. Settlers in the Boise River project, also in Idaho, claim to have already made it the greatest potato section in the country. They received from each acre of land in the 1918 crop from $350 to $400. From the Yakima project in Washington were shipped 5000 cars of apples over one railroad, with as many more to follow. Sixty tons of cherries from t hree acres brought $7000, or $24 per tree. From two and three-quarters acres were packed 2044 boxes of pears, which sold for $5544.
These examples are, of course, exceptional rather than typical. They could, indeed, be duplicated many times in older sections of our country. They are, nevertheless, flashes which light up the possibilities of American agriculture when more of the spreading acres of our estate are cul tivated by trained farmers who treat farming as a business.
Standing timber still constitutes one of the great resources of our estate. Despite a long riot of waste and destruction nothing less than appalling, — with the end of our reserves not only in sight, but almost within reach, —it would seem as if the time had come for us as proprietors to begin to apply ordinary intelligence and prudence in the care and use of what remains, and to attempt in some comprehensive way such restoration as may yet be possible. The wastes in lumbering are proverbial, and, as Mark Twain said about the weather, we all talk about it, but nothing is done. With a total annual cut of 40,000,000,000 feet, board-measure, of merchantable lumber, another 70,000,000,000 feet are wasted in the field and at the mill. In the yellow-pine belt the values in rosin, turpentine, ethyl alcohol, pine oil, tar, charcoal, and paper-stock lost in the waste are three or four times the value of the lumber produced. Enough yellow-pine pulp-wood is consumed in burners, or left to rot, to make double the total tonnage of paper produced in the United States. Meanwhile, our paper-makers memorialize the community on the scarcity of paper-stock, and pay $18 a cord for pulp-wood which they might buy for $3. It takes many years to produce a crop of wood, and wood-waste, which now constitutes from one half to two thirds of the entire tree, is too valuable a raw material to be regarded longer merely as an incumbrance, except by an improvident management.
But the wastes in lumbering, colossal though they are in absolute amount, are trivial compared to the losses which our estate has suffered, and still endures, from forest fires. The French properly regard as a national calamity the destruction of perhaps a thousand square miles of their fine forests by German shells. And yet the photographs that they show of this wreck and utter demolition may be reproduced indefinitely on 10,000,000 acres of our forest lands swept each year by equally devastating fire for which our own people are responsible. You have doubtless already forgotten that forest fire which last autumn, in Minnesota, burned over an area half as large again as Massachusetts, destroying more than twenty-five towns, killing 400 people, and leaving 13,000 homeless.
The exhaustion of local supplies is economically disastrous, although we may still possess large bodies of standing timber elsewhere. It is costly, and should be humiliating, to import pulpwood from Norway and Anticosti Island, and send it a thousand miles by rail to mills in the interior. Many towns, even so attractive a little city as Bogalusa, Louisiana, are wholly dependent on one or more lumber operations. When this is gone, the people must move away for lack of employment. Farms dependent on a local market are abandoned. Nothing is more tragic than to follow the trail of exhausted lumber industries in such states as Pennsylvaniaand the Lake States. Lumbermen estimate that the virgin supplies of pine in several of our Southern States will be exhausted in from ten to fifteen years. We are rapidly destroying our turpentine reserves, and thus entailing great prospective loss upon the states, the nation, and the world.
In the United States thousands of public and private building enterprises, delayed by war, now seek realization. The European demand for lumber is second only to that for food. Thousands of villages and tens of thousands of farm buildings must be rebuilt entirely. Europe is also planning vast wharf, railroad, and industrial extensions. All these things are largely dependent upon American lumber; LatinAmerican stocks also are exhausted. How shall we justify ourselves if, in the face of demands like these, we continue to burn our own limited reserves?
We need, so obviously as to make argument ridiculous, a vastly increased and adequate organization for fire-patrol and protection. This may well employ some of our returning aviators. And we need to develop and carry into effect a comprehensive programme of state and federal reforestation, which shall ultimately restore wealth and beauty to millions of the scarred acres of our estate.
III
Winding through our estate, and linking together farm and hamlet, town and country, are about 2,500,000 miles of public roads, but only twelve per cent of this great mileage has ever been improved by any form of surfacing. Over this network of highways, many of them so bad that loads can move only when weather permits, we send 5,000,000 motor vehicles, of which ten per cent are trucks, and maintain a freight movement estimated at 2,000,000,000 ton-miles. Since improvement of the average road reduces the cost of haulage ten cents a mile, we permit our highway system to be burdened with the equivalent of two million tollgates, each exacting a tax of ten cents for every ton of freight which passes through it. The delays and expense to business, the depreciation of farm-properties and losses to the farmer on his produce, the checks upon intercommunication and contact, and the deprivation of pleasure, for which the condition of our roads is responsible, are beyond computation.
The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 ensured substantial and continuous improvement over a period of five years; but this is a mere beginning. The interests of every business and of every citizen require a great coördinated system of federal and state highways, over which may move easily and on schedule, over regular routes, the traffic of rural motor-expresses, collecting farmproduce, taking it to market, and returning with merchandise and supplies from town. Such trucks are now, under especially favorable conditions, operating as cheaply as freight cars, and are even being used for the wholesale transportation of live-stock. Numerous motor-express lines are already in successful operation, and are proving generally cheaper and more prompt than the old utilities. Meanwhile, it takes five acres of land to feed a horse.
The other day an aeroplane flew across the English Channel, carrying a grand piano. The already commonplace London to Paris passenger trip requires about three and a half hours between hotels, and the tariff is said to be $78.50. During a recent month the aero mail between Washington and New York came through every day, with no default for weather, and 105 of the 108 flights were made without interruption. The total cost per mile was 63 cents, including repairs and department overhead. These planes easily carry five or six hundred pounds of mail, while others, already built, can carry fifty people. All this clearly means that in plans for reconstruction we have to reckon with a new factor in transportation, and that, as we once built wharves, we must now build landing fields.
If free verse possessed the epic quality, one might write an Iliad on the woes of our railroads. They are, from every point of view, of far more significance than the deficiencies of our highways. Not only is it necessary for the development of our estate that our railroads function efficiently — they must also function profitably; otherwise, we have to choose between widespread financial disaster and covering deficits by increased taxation. No past, experience in government ownership of anything suggests it as a means of profit; nor, on the other hand, does the old condition of enforced competition under private ownership seem more likely, if restored, to meet the requirements of the present or the future than it did t hose of the past. The trend of expert opinion is apparently toward private ownership, coupled with legal sanctions which shall encourage a regulated cooperation among the roads.
However this may be, it is clear that nothing short of a comprehensive readjustment and coördination of all our transportation facilities will meet the real requirements of the situation. Waterways, highways, railways must be brought into close articulation, and each must be so developed as to perform adequately its appropriately specialized functions.
Meanwhile, with more commerce requiring movement than the facilities of our estate as now administered can move, traffic on the Erie Canal has shrunk to half its former volume; our 295 navigable streams, which offer a free right of way for 26,410 miles, flow practically unburdened; we expend five times more power to move a ton of freight by rail than its transport by water would require.
As long ago as 1905, 8500 rivercraft were plying on the Rhine alone, and a large proportion of the total traffic of Germany was water-borne. One reason for our own failure to utilize our vastly greater opportunities for rivertransportation is found in the absence of convenient and adequate terminal facilities. In each of a considerable number of cities on rivers and canals in Germany, the provision made for handling and storing freight and boats represents a larger investment than all the facilities for similar service on the whole of the Mississippi River above New Orleans. It was the better railroad terminals which won the old fight against the boats. We ought now to have adequate terminals serving both, and should permit traffic to follow the line of least resistance. Still more essential is the establishment of harmonious relations between railroad and water lines.
In any adequate system of utilization and control a river must be considered as a whole with reference to all its parts and uses: its power for destruction as well as its capacity for service. It is unprofitable to build terminals, only to have them swept away by floods. The flood-damage on the Mississippi has exceeded $100,000,000 in single years. In 1912, 5797 square miles were flooded in Louisiana alone, and crevasse after crevasse between Memphis and New Orleans created a continuous inland sea from Arkansas to the Gulf. There was reason and justification behind the slogan ‘After Panama the Mississippi,’ and no plan for the development of our estate will be complete that does not provide for the control of this great arterial system.
Much work must be done, and in the doing of it many wheels must turn to satisfy the requirements of modern civilization. To do this work and to turn these wheels requires power. All the human muscles in the world could not supply one half the power now consumed on our estate. A well-placed water-wheel, however, will furnish the power equivalent of a hard-working slave, at a cost of one dollar a year. Cheap and abundant power is, therefore, a prime essential of the development, on modern lines, of a great industrial commonwealth.
The energy of falling water is one of the great undeveloped assets of our estate. The utilization of a small fraction— less than fifteen per cent—of the water pouring over Niagara Falls supplies the industries of Buffalo and Toronto with cheap power, operates their street-cars, lights their houses, and has made of the region around the Falls the greatest centre of electro-chemical development in the world. It supplies in quantity such basic products as chlorine and alkali, aluminum, magnesium, sodium, abrasives, carbide, cyanamide; and there was first attempted the commercial fixation of atmospheric nitrogen as nitric acid for fertilizers and explosives. Could our people once visualize Niagara Falls as flowing coal instead of water, and wasting its energy in a vast conflagration through the Gorge, how long would they permit our miners to toil in tens of thousands underground to maintain even so magnificent a spectacle?
The utmost energy of Niagara represents, however, but an insignificant proportion of the water-power potentially available on our estate, where the possibilities of development attain an estimated total of 200,000,000 horsepower. Five million tons of coal a day would hardly generate as much. The water now flowing idly from our highlands to the sea could turn every factory-wheel and every electric generator in the country, operate our railroads, and still leave much energy to spare for new demands. We have developed scarcely three per cent of its ultimate possibilities, and only about ten per cent of those which are readily available without elaborate provision for storage. We have common carriers for freight in our railroads, for oil in pipelines, for intelligence in our telephone, telegraph, and cable systems. We need now to develop a great common-carrier system for energy, which shall nationalize industrial opportunity now limited to favored and restricted areas, and by eliminating the transportation of unnecessary coal, relieve our railroads of the major portion of their heaviest burden.
The integrated development of our river-systems is thus intimately bound up with flood-prevention through storage, agriculture through irrigation, transportation, and the generation and wider distribution of power, which is the prime mover of industry. Half-way measures will not serve. The problem demands a broad constructive policy which shall take due account of all its several phases.
But power is derived also from the chemical energy of coal, which, under our present economic system, supplies at least ninety-five per cent of our industrial requirements for power. Coal is, however, much more than a source of heat and power: it is a storehouse of chemical values, — ammonia, benzol, tar, and 1200 coal-tar dyes and products, — and it lends itself readily to transformation into coke and gas. In what relation does this basic resource stand to the development of our estate?
Of coal we possess in West Virginia alone more than Great Britain and Germany combined. The country as a whole has a coal reserve of more than 1,500,000,000,000 tons, but of anthracite there is left not more than 190 tons for each of us. Lignite is even more abundant than coal, and there is a last, untouched reserve in peat. Our coal-miners bring to the surface annually about 650,000,000 tons, of which 90,000,000 tons is anthracite. We have mined less than one per cent of our soft coal, the kind commonly used for power. This is normally worth at the mines about $1.15 a ton.
These figures, by themselves, would seem to point, as indeed they do, to almost limitless industrial possibilities; but in the humiliating record of our past use of coal there is ample proof that these potentialities will fail of realization unless our methods of utilizing this major resource of our estate are radically and fundamentally changed.
Our bituminous coal is mined under disastrously competitive conditions by a thousand uncorrelated producers. Its selling-price at the mine is too low to permit of conservative mining methods, and its cost to the consumer is generally too high to furnish him with the cheap power which he needs. Our railroads crack, as they did last winter, under the burden of transporting coal, most of which might to better advantage be burned either at the mines or at centres permitting power-distribution, as electricity or gas. Beehive coke ovens and scores of thousands of isolated powerplants now waste chemical values to an annual total of at least a billion dollars. The widespread use of gas for power would double the effective energy of the coal, and would permit, besides byproduct recovery, the saving of another billion now needlessly spent in mining and transportation. We are indeed a prodigal people, prospering for a time by methods which would end European civilization within a generation.
In England, which is already far ahead of us in the economical utilization of coal-values, plans are now under consideration for the establishment of super-power-plants at the mines and at centres favorably placed for the receipt of coal, the distribution of gas, and the transmission of electrical energy. It is to similar immense plants, coupled with the common-carrier system of transmission lines for power, that we must look for any adequate utilization of our own coal-values and a broader basis for our industry.
Surpassingly rich as our estate is known to be in iron, copper, sulphur, clays, and other major raw materials for a vast and varied industry, we may for present purposes conclude our appraisal of its assets with a brief reference to our stores of petroleum and natural gas. In 1918 we produced 345,000,000 barrels of petroleum; our consumption of natural gas was something like 750,000,000,000 cubic feet. We have, since its discovery, wasted more gas than we have used, and with it some billions of gallons of gasoline. We recovered at the casing-head in 1917, 217,000,000 gallons, of gravity so light as to permit its expansion to 500,000,000 gallons by blending with heavier distillates of petroleum not otherwise available for motor-fuel. Thousands of wells remain to be connected with recovery plants.
The wastes in our petroleum industry, under which term refining is not here included, have been shocking and stupendous. Fields are abandoned with from thirty to ninety per cent of the oil still underground; vast areas have been ruined by admitting water into the oil sands; fires take heavy toll. In all not more than twenty-five per cent of the oil underground reaches the pipeline, and less than half of that is utilized to the best advantage.
IV
We have surveyed our estate hurriedly, and from a height, as in an aeroplane, and the prospect has been one that should fire the dullest imagination with the vision of the coming greatness of America, provided only that we rise to the measure of our opportunity. The record of our development of our resources is, indeed, in mere achievement, in figures of production, a shining one; but its lustre is dimmed to shadow by the portentous brilliance of the handwriting on the wall. We have been prodigal wasters, reckless destroyers, mere skimmers of cream. Unrestricted individualism must now give way to controlled coöperation, guided by a constructive economic policy which is nation-wide in scope. We must bring to the solution of our peaceproblems the unity and cohesive power developed by the war. The plans of Europe for reconstruction are already far advanced, while out of Washington has come no adequate directive impulse.
Not only is the ultimate purpose of all production the satisfaction of human wants, but the human element in production is the most important, and often the limiting, factor. All plans for reconstruction must therefore fail, as indeed they should, unless they bring reasonable satisfaction to the workers upon whom their material realization depends. With Bolshevism, destructive alike to intelligence and property, spreading in Europe, and many signs of unrest and discontent patent to observers here, it is evident that the first concern and effort of those to whom our reconstruction problems may be intrusted should be to reach, if possible, an understanding and agreement with labor, upon a basis so fair and so obviously advantageous to the interests of all, that a long period of reasonably harmonious coöperative effort may be assured. The industrial creed which has already been indorsed by the Chamber of Commerce of the United States may well serve as the scaffolding for the erection of this essential structure of mutual understanding and good-will.
Discontent, properly directed, is a great constructive force. Only when no way seems open to its relief, does it become destructive. It should therefore be made convincingly clear to labor that the maintenance of its present returns and the satisfaction of its prospective demands are possible only by raising the productive power of the individual. Wealth which is non-existent cannot be divided. Our estate contains resources abundantly ample for all legitimate satisfactions of a population many times as numerous as that which it now supports. But undeveloped resources are not wealth. They were here with the Indians. Their potentialities can be realized, not bylabor alone, not by capital alone, not by labor and capital together, unless through the coöperation of the executive brain and science. The war has at last placed science above the salt, even at bankers’ dinners. It has penetrated the Privy Council. Chemistry is saluted by the man in the street, and chemists are putting the dollar sign in their equations.
But the problem of reaching an abiding satisfaction involves far more than wages and hours of work. A way must be found to restore something of the old pride and joy of craftsmanship. That this is not impossible, even under the factory system, has been demonstrated by the quality competitions instituted by Wolf, who, in commenting on them, points out that in the past the average employer has been so engrossed in creating an organization to express his own individuality that he has forgotten to afford the opportunity for self-expression to his employee. So it happens that, in many of our large corporations, the preposterous situation prevails that, to maintain a workingstaff of one thousand men, from three thousand to seven thousand enter and leave the organization yearly.
Progress has been linked in many minds with poverty. The new Progress must be the bountiful mother and almoner of plenty. Increased production docs not mean, for the individual, more work or harder work. It does mean more efficient work and a new attitude toward work: the desire to make every stroke tell to the utmost. It means gang-ploughing with a tractor, intensive truck-farming, growing beets which yield twelve per cent of sugar instead of eight, grinding with carborundum, cutting deep into the metal with tools of high-speed steel. It means microscopes and pyrometers, slide-rules and graphic charts, recording instruments, wise planning, and the laboratory control of materials and processes. In a word, it means willing, painstaking, and well-paid effort, backed by capital, guided by science.
VI
To bring our acres to full fertility, to build up and utilize adequately our forest reserves, to reorganize, develop, and coördinate our transportation systems, to generate our power advantageously and distribute it widely, to check the reckless and encourage the effective use of our resources, — all to the end that we may evolve and establish better and more satisfying types of rural and urban life — are the basic and interlocking problems involved in the development of our estate. Obviously, all these things require coöperative effort on the grand scale which calls for executive abilities of the highest order. Most of them, also, involve the active participation of the government: some of the more important can hardly be done at all except as governmental activities. With the fiasco of the aeroplane programme fresh in our minds; with government control of the railroads adding $126,000,000 to the expense of operation in a single month; with delays in mail, delays in paying soldiers, delays in ordnance; with municipal administration the ineffective and often shameful thing it is, how can we hope to place this new and greater burden on our public administrations with any expectation that performance will square wit h opportunity?
If Democracy, and especially our own democracy, is to prove itself ultimately wort hy of the stupendous sacrifices which have been gladly rendered in its name, if it is to actualize the potentialities of a situation unique in the world’s history, it must first develop a deeper sense of individual responsibility, and then call to the direction of its affairs a far higher type of administrative capacity than it has been content with in the past. There is no alchemy in the ballot-box which will transmute a good mixer into a great executive, and no accolade can confer brains with office. To do the things we have to do demands vision and wise planning, nation-wide coördination of attack, effective and economical administration, technical knowledge, and much research to bring more knowledge. The conjunction of these essentials is happily not unknown in the larger aspects of American business life, and it is to the American business man in his higher stages of development that we must turn in this Day of Opportunity. He is fresh from great achievement, as a volunteer, in extemporized relations to the government in the emergency of war. We must now, in our own interest, as proprietors of the estate, provide for him an authoritative and permanent place in our governmental system.
No Congressional committee, no academic council, no ephemeral organization can cope with the stupendous problem. The mutually entangled intricacies of its component elements can be gradually reduced to order and woven into the majestic tapestry of an adequate general plan, only, it would seem, by a permanent commission, as detached from partisan politics as the Supreme Court, comprising in its membership the best executive, economic, and technical brains in the country, and planning and operating over long years. This commission should stand in close relationship to the Chief Executive and to the Congress, its members being appointed by the President, subject to confirmation by the Senate. It should be compact, with no more than fifteen members, including the Secretaries of Agriculture, Labor, Commerce, and the Interior, through whom the chiefs of the scientific bureaus of the government would be brought into its deliberations. Above all, its members must be drawn chiefly from the great constructive and productive agencies of the country, and must be truly representative of the aspirations and interests of our citizenship. Whether its individual components are members of House or Senate, Republicans or Democrats, should in this relationship be of interest only to their biographers.
Such an Economic Commission would evolve from many economic studies and proposals for specific betterments coördinated plans which would bind together in a close articulation the attainable benefits of each. In the exercise of an intrinsic function, it would submit to Congress recommendations for the required legislation, and apprise the country of the need and reason for its demands. To it should be assigned ultimate responsibility to Congress, through the President, for the execution of its duly authorized proposals.
The war has developed amongst us a new Bushido, another Samurai class pledged to service. Its membership includes those who have toiled with brain or hand for the common good in a supreme emergency; devoted women; our youth who on land and sea and in the air have dared the impossible and achieved it. Shall we permit this unity of purpose, this capacity for coöperative effort, to become quickly dissipated in the perpetuation of past mistakes, or shall we, by judicious planning, direct these new and potent forces to the development of our estate, to the end that it may furnish the material basis for a higher civilization?
‘It is well to be wise in a great moment.’