the spreading tree, of whom Longfellow sang, is disappearing. He has left the cross-roads in the little village and now works in a machine shop. His friends, the carpenter and the shoemaker, have accompanied him. A few artisans may stay to do repairing and other small work, but the cheaper processes of vast establishments have rendered this migration inevitable for the many. Only the few among artisans can live in the old style.

CONCENTRATION IN LARGE CITIES

Houses are constructed in large establishments and they are sent to small places where it is only necessary to put them together. Merchants have also been obliged to leave the villages where they were owners of independent establishments, to seek employment in immense city retail and wholesale shops, because the railroad has carried their customers away from them.

The amount of production increases continually, but the number of separate establishments where production is carried on decreases uninterruptedly. Milling serves as a good illustration. "The completion of the great mills has caused the abandonment and decay of hundreds of the picturesque, old-fashioned neighborhood mills. In 1870, according to the census of that year, there were in the entire country 22,573 grist mills, 58,448 hands, representing $151,500,000 of capital, and making a product worth $444,900,000. In 1880 the number of establishments was 24,338, the number of hands 58,407, the capital invested $177,300,000, and the value of the product was $505,100,000 (the price of flour had declined ten per cent in this decade). The increase shown in the number of establishments. . . is more apparent than real, the great bulk of flour having been made in a decidedly smaller number of mills in 1880 than in 1870. Since 1880 the blighting effect of the great merchant mills upon the small establishments has become visible to every one. According to the Miller's Directory for 1884, . . . there were at that time some 22,940 mills in the country, a decline of 1398 from the census figures of 1880. . . . From 1884 to 1886 . . . the number of milling establishments has declined to 16,856 . . . a loss in two years of more than twenty-six per cent." The number of mills in the South has declined more rapidly than elsewhere. In 1880, in North Carolina 1313 mills employed only 1844 men, but in the same

state there were only 632 mills in 1886. It is said that the number of mills in the country is destined to become very much smaller still. Readers can readily gather from census and trade reports many similar illustrations of this concentration of business, which is one of the main causes of the existence of present problems.

Tendency of mechanically expert nations toward indoor industries. Large portions of the world's population still remain in a condition of mechanical inexpertness. They find it more advantageous to live from the products of the soil, exchanging these for the manufactured products of the mechanically expert. Other populations, like those of our own West, while mechanically expert, occupy land of such abundance and fertility that they find it more profitable to cultivate land than to turn to the indoor industries. They use their mechanical expertness in contriving and operating farm machinery. They exchange their large surplus of farm products for the manufactured products of other people who are mechanically expert and who occupy lands of less extent and lower fertility. The latter, not having vast areas to cultivate, find less profitable opportunities for their mechanical expertness out of doors than indoors. Therefore they develop the indoor industries. England, which got a good start ahead of the rest of the world in this line of development, prospered amazingly. The eastern part of the United States, together with France, Belgium, Holland, and (lately) Germany, has been following in the same direction. As this tendency increases, the competition among the indoor industries is likely to become so intense as to reduce the profits and drive a certain percentage of the people back to the farms.

Taking the United States as a whole, it is rapidly ceasing to be primarily an agricultural country and is becoming a manufacturing country, following a similar development in England and northwestern Europe. Already more than half of our people live in towns of twenty-five hundred or more. Canada, South America, Australia, South Africa, and all countries colo

nized by white men will doubtless follow in the same direction. There will then be left only the tropics in which to sell the surplus products of manufacture and from which to draw the surplus products of the soil. It is probable that the development of the indoor industries will be checked before that state is reached. In that case each country will have to preserve a balance, or equilibrium, between the indoor and the outdoor industries.

As pointed out in the chapter on The Genetic Industries, the advance in civilization and the general improvement of living conditions tend to add to the relative importance of the indoor as compared with the outdoor industries. The finer the goods we demand, the more work we make, generally speaking, for the indoor workers. Even farm work itself comes, in a sense, to be done indoors rather than outdoors. The substitution of the tractor for the horse may serve to illustrate this statement. The raising of horses is outdoor work; the manufacturing of tractors is indoor work. If we use more tractors and fewer horses a larger proportion of our workers will work indoors and a smaller proportion outdoors.

This is a process which must be expected to continue even though we remain a self-sufficing nation. If, ceasing to be a self-sufficing nation, we bring raw materials and products of the soil from distant portions of the earth and send in exchange the more refined products of the indoor industries, we must expect that manufacturing will become in larger and larger degree our dominant occupation.

CHAPTER XXI

TRANSPORTATION

Moving things over long distances. Since all industry consists in moving materials from one place to another, it follows as a matter of course that transportation must form an important part of the industrial system. That which we call transportation differs, however, from other kinds of work in that it consists in moving materials over long distances,-distances which are measured in miles rather than in inches, feet, or yards. The transportation system has been likened to the veins and arteries of the physiological organism, just as the telegraph and telephone systems have been likened to the nerves.

The development of the factory system as described in the preceding chapter and of large-scale production in general would have been impossible without cheap transportation.

The railway and the factory have gone hand in hand in their development and in their economic results. With the means of transportation which existed two hundred years ago large industries would have been impossible. The substitution of turnpikes for common roads, of canals for turnpikes, and of railways for canals was as essential a part of industrial progress as was the development of the factory system.1

Without a wide market on which to sell its large product a large factory or manufacturing establishment would be an impossibility. In the days of restricted local markets, when each little community was almost self-sufficing, small shops having individual handicraftsmen could supply the needs of each such unit. Not the least important of the changes which have come about since the middle of the eighteenth century has been the

1 President A. T. Hadley, Transportation, in Palgrave's "Dictionary of Political Economy."

battering down of the walls which divided one restricted market from another and the creation of nation-wide or world-wide markets instead of a series of local, restricted markets.

The widening of the market. Cheap transportation, more than anything else, has made possible the development of nationwide and world-wide markets. Raw materials sometimes have to be brought long distances, especially in a case where several different kinds of raw material enter into the making of a given product. These different kinds of raw material are not always found in close juxtaposition. The iron ore of the Lake Superior region would be practically useless, because of its distance from the coal fields, were it not for cheap transportation on the Great Lakes, by means of which it can be carried almost to the mouths of the coal mines of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

In other cases the raw material itself is produced over such wide areas as to make centralized and large-scale production an impossibility without cheap transportation. The slaughtering of meat animals and the curing and packing of the meat is a case in point. These animals must be grown on the farms and ranges, which cover considerable areas. Without cheap transportation they would have to be slaughtered and consumed nearer the sources of production; with cheap transportation they may be sent to a few large packing centers, and from these centers the meat can be distributed over practically the whole country and over considerable portions of the civilized world. Without cheap transportation every large city would be dependent upon the supply of meat that could be grown within drivingdistance; that is, within such distances as the animals could travel on foot. They would have to be slaughtered near each center of consumption in order that the meat might be distributed economically. Without cheap transportation the cotton industry of New England could never have developed to such proportions as it has. The raw material is all produced hundreds of miles, and most of it thousands of miles, away from the factories. The manufactured product, in turn, is distributed over the entire country and considerable portions of