SEVENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART X. 547 



To illustrate: It came recently under the eye of your speaker that a 

 subsidiary steel concern of the U. S. Steel company, located near Chi- 

 cago, which carries on its pay roll sixty-two hundred (6,200) people, put- 

 ting out daily in railway rails and other finished goods five thousand six 

 hundred (5,600) long tons. If you shall use your arithmetic on these 

 figures it will indicate to you that the average daily output per man 

 reaches 2,023 pounds. This quotient (2,023), I beg you to keep in mind 

 for purposes of comparison with the daily output under the old process 

 which I beg to assure you on competent authority was from 20 to 40 

 pounds per day. Calling the latter figure (40 pounds a day) the more 

 nearly correct of the two, we find the recent producing power in steel 

 making to be fifty times as great as the old producing power and which, 

 if expressed in percentages, would indicate a gain of five thousand per 

 cent. 



This crude array of facts and figures which we have presented may 

 indicate the kind of skeleton way the nature of the movement we are 

 contemplating. It, at least, points out whence we have come and whither 

 we are tending. It is a part of the plan we are following to take up, next, 

 some of the results material and otherwise which have followed this 

 movement. Under the old order of things the days were long and at the 

 end of the year there was nothing ahead. It stands to reason that if four- 

 teen hours a day are spent in toil with no margin of profit in sight the 

 toiler has no heart to think of schools, churches, citizenship and the like. 

 But if, on the other hand, the toiler be clad, have a tight roof, can hire a 

 little help, can "quit" at six o'clock, the world takes on a more roseate hue. 



In fact, the increase in earning power which we have traced has been 

 followed by its natural and legitimate results. Those results might be 

 tabulated in some such form as this: 



First — A higher scale of home comforts. 



Second — A style of dress in keeping with the conventionalities of 

 the world. 



Third — The houses and barns of America are spacious and convenient 

 and have moved farther and farther away from the old standard of the 

 thatched hovel. 



Fourth — that the wage rate for common labor which at the commence- 

 ment of the era we are considering, say in A. D. 1769, was about 12% 

 cents per day, advanced in 1800 to 25 cents per day, thence has advanced 

 in 1840 to 50 cents per day, thence had advanced in 1890 to $1.00 per day 

 and has thence advanced down to the present to $1.25 per day. The wage 

 rate, it will be noted, quadrupled itself within a century. 



By the way, there is an old song popular with another generation, two 

 lines of which ran as nearly as we can remember as follows: 



"Alas! that food should be so dear, 

 And flesh and blood so cheap." 



The art and beauty of that song remains, but, thank God, its pathos 

 has long since departed, for under the new order of things it is flesh 

 and blood that is dear and the food that is cheap. 



But following the movement we have striven to outline were certain 

 results not material in their nature, but which could never have come 



