March 1, 1914.] 



THE INDIA RUBBER WORLD 



283 



The Doctor went further and said that the raising of 

 wages and shortening of hours do not necessarily in- 

 crease the working man's happiness ; that happiness must 

 come from interest in one's work — as the "whole prog- 

 ress of civilization depends upon universal, steady, pro- 

 ductive labor" — rather than from success in avoiding it. 



These are all very sound contentions of the wise New 

 England scholar and should be taken to heart by every 

 working man. There certainly is no happiness for the 

 man who looks upon his daily occupation, whatever it 

 may be, simply as a punishment from which he is to 

 escape as early and often as possible. A man who goes 

 through his daily task with one eye on his work and the 

 other on the clock is sure soon to get a distorted vision — 

 his work eye will grow weaker and his clock eye will get 

 stronger. As President Eliot says, the two great objec- 

 tions against labor unionism as now conducted are its 

 lack of moral sense and its system of rewarding the 

 shirker rather than the worker. 



gular feature is that it is not done by a greater num- 

 ber of manufacturers. 



THE PERENNIAL MAKING OF AUTO. LAWS. 



CO-OPERATIVE ADVERTISING. 



/^NE of the large tire companies of Akron has 

 ^-^ given considerable publicity of late to the fact 

 that it has established a service bureau in its advertis- 

 ing department for the purpose of supplying dealers 

 selling the company's products with advertising copy 

 and appropriate cuts. The dealer pays for his space 

 but the matter to be used therein is supplied him gratis 

 by the manufacturer. 



This is altogether an efficient and sensible form of 

 co-operation. There are undoubtedly a great many 

 retailers who would like to advertise the goods they 

 have to sell. They are perfectly willing to meet the 

 expense — which often in the local papers of small 

 communities is not very high — but the great bugbear with 

 them is the copy. The preparation of an appropriate 

 business announcement seems to them quite as for- 

 midable as the composition of a sonnet or a symphony. 

 This service bureau maintained by the manufacturer 

 saves the dealer all this disturbance of nerves and 

 distress of mind, and also undoubtedly saves him not a 

 little money, for space is of little value unless properly 

 filled, and poor advertising often does more harm than 

 good. 



To be sure this is not a new idea. It has been tried, 

 in some cases intermittently and in other cases con- 

 tinuously, by other rubber companies. The only sin- 



VV/HEN a member of one of our state law-making 

 "' bodies cannot think of any other way by which 

 he can render full service to his constituents for salary 

 drawn he introduces another automobile bill. The legis- 

 lators of nine states convened about the middle of Jan- 

 uary. Inside of the first four weeks 114 different meas- 

 ures regulating the use of the automobile had been in- 

 troduced in these nine states, iVIassachusetts leading 

 with 44. 



As a sample of this class of legislation it might be in- 

 teresting to cite one of these Massachusetts bills, which, 

 if passed, would compel the use of a splash-guard on 

 every motor vehicle. The fact that no splash-guard has 

 yet been invented which really guards from splashing 

 was of course an unimportant detail in the mind of the 

 legislator. Splash-guards have been a subject of con- 

 siderable experiment, particularly in Europe, and espe- 

 cially in Paris — some made of rubber, some made of 

 metal, and some made of both — but none has as yet been 

 devised that efficiently lives up to its name. But, as al- 

 ready said, that fact in no way disturbs the law-maker, 

 who insists on making splash-guards compulsory. 



Several western municipalities recently passed ordi- 

 nances compelling all motor wagons to be equipped with 

 fenders, regardless of the fact that no fender that would 

 really fend has yet been discovered. But probably the 

 eftect of this sort of legislation is to spur inventors on 

 to greater efforts in devising efficient fenders and work- 

 able splash-guards, both of which are to be desired — espe- 

 cially the fender, for even in these advanced days the 

 preservation of human life is still generally looked upon 

 as of rather more importance than the conservation of 

 human clothes. 



Cotton is being more and more largely used in conjunc- 

 tion with rubber manufacture. Hence the readers of this 

 journal will be interested in the article which appears in 

 another column of this issue, dealing with the questions of 

 where cotton is grown, where it is marketed, and for 

 what particular goods the various grades are suited. 

 This article, together with the group of statistical tables 

 which follow it, will doubtless be of interest to rubber 

 manufacturers generally. 



