THE TRIUMPH OF THE AMERICAN IDEA 201 



so fierce is the competition the American made shoe is creat- 

 ing that he has no other resource but to submit to our arbi- 

 trary demands. 



Notwithstanding this victory in England, the introduc- 

 tion of American machiner}" has not proved so successful there 

 as it has in other countries. The British trades unions fight 

 the American invasion tooth and nail, regulating the number 

 of machines each man is allowed to operate, and their output 

 per diem. In Russia, however, Yankee ingenuity is wel- 

 comed from one end of the empire to the other. American 

 lathes, the largest in the world, bore cannon for the army and 

 turn out screw shafts for the navy at St. Petersburg; Yankee 

 ice plants exist in Siberia, our cotton presses are sent to Cen- 

 tral Asia, while the rapid development of IManchuria is entirely 

 due to the adoption of American machinery of every kind. 



In Italy, Finland, and other continental countries the 

 story is the same, while at the Paris exposition, owners 

 of American screw making machines offered to turn all 

 brass rods brought by visitors into screws of any desired 

 size, taking no other payment for the work than the waste 

 filings left over. 



It is needless to say that America is carrying the idea of 

 labor saving machinery into her new colonial dependencies. 

 The largest sugar mills in the world, thoroughly equipped 

 with electrical devices, are going up in Cuba; to build these 

 more rapidl}", American workmen are sent to Cuba and paid 

 several times the wages asked by the native workmen, yet 

 the high priced men have proved less expensive. Moreover, 

 men w^ho spend millions on these w^orks in Cuba employ ex- 

 perts to travel everywhere seeking out any new invention that 

 will cause the monster rollers to turn out a greater volume of 

 molasses for sugar making. At any moment a successful 

 working model may cause millions of dollars' worth of machin- 

 ery sent to Cuba in the past two years to be relegated to the 

 junk pile. In our far off Philippines, hundreds of miles of 

 trolley lines are to be built, while many other improvements 

 are projected on an equally gigantic scale. 



In fact, everywhere, to the furthermost corners of the 

 earth, the American idea makes new triumphs every day. 



