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 products for the manufactured products of the mechanically expert nations. 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, who 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, have 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. Canada, South America, Australia, South Africa, and all countries where white men colonize 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, tends 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 we cease to be a self-sufficing nation, bringing raw materials and products of the soil from distant portions of the earth, and sending 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 XIX

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 impossiblity 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 over 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 dependant upon the supply of meat that could be grown within driving distance, 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 the civilized world. Every description of the industrial revolution in England gives great attention to the cotton and woolen industries, for it was in these industries that the transition was most striking. And perhaps the most striking feature was the long distances over which the raw material had to be transported and the wide markets in which the finished product could then be sold. Before the development of the railways, water transportation was the only cheap form; and England was peculiarly well situated with respect to ocean transportation.

However great the economies of large-scale production may be, if the cost of transportation were as great as it once was, the small producer, using locally-produced raw materials and selling on a local market, would save so much on the cost of transportation as to give him an advantage over the biggest factory located a long distance away. The cheaper transportation becomes, the less the saving of transportation costs will figure as an advantage in industry. Every industry will then tend to be located in the place where other advantages are greatest. When freight costs one cent per ton per mile, one can readily see that one could ship a suit of clothes weighing, say ten pounds, a long distance without adding perceptibly to the cost of the suit. The freight for a thousand miles would be only five cents. If it cost twenty-five cents per ton per mile, distance would be a very large factor in the location of a clothing industry.

Water transportation developed first. Historically, water transportation was cheapened long before we had cheap land transportation. Consequently we find that commerce in a large sense developed first on the water. Great cities were located where there were advantages in water transportation. Considerable commerce has always been carried on, from the very earliest times, by means of caravans traveling over land, but the cost of this kind of transportation was so great that the commerce which developed under these conditions was necessarily confined to articles of luxury which embodied large value