THE TRIUMPH OF THE AMERICAN IDEA 203 



is demonstrated by the fact that while we drove all competi- 

 tors out of the far east once we began sending our wonderfully 

 finished tools to Manchuria, now that American lathes are 

 being introduced into Germany, Berlin, and Hamburg manu- 

 facturers are enabled to imitate our tools to a nicety, laying 

 their products down in the far off Asiatic markets for 25 per 

 cent less than we can afford to sell them. This fact is causing 

 the overhauling of many an American machine shop, new 

 machinery is being invented and installed as rapidly as possi- 

 ble, and every device for cheapening the cost of production is 

 eagerly investigated, so that our tool trade may once more 

 recapture the markets of the far east. 



Our success in the far east seems to have encouraged our 

 manufacturers to attack ever3^where independently. We 

 have actually begun within the past few years to send fashion 

 plates to Paris. Instead of imitating, we dared to originate 

 for the Parisiennes, until to-day we are actually making fashion 

 plates for the world, from London to Yokohama, and from 

 Bergen in Norway to Capetown, South Africa. We set the 

 fashions because we make the plates — the mechanical part, 

 mark you — more cheaply, rapidly, and better than any coun- 

 tr}^ of the globe. So far ahead are we in art printing that 

 Europe sends to America for the making of her catalogues to 

 advertise the articles that go broadcast through the world to 

 compete with our own products. 



But America does not utilize her ideas merely to astonish 

 foreigners. They are utilized at home in many most daring 

 and useful ways. Both at home and abroad, we now harvest 

 the world's crop by machinery, thus more than trebling the 

 possible food supply of the globe. In this country, where the 

 idea originated and reaches its highest development, California 

 now contemplates sending figs, irrigated, gathered, and dried 

 by machinery to undersell the hand gathered crops of Smyrna, 

 while a company has actually been organized to introduce 

 the date palm on our irrigated western deserts, with the 

 avowed purpose in view of sending machine picked and 

 packed dates to Arabia and Egypt to compete with the native 

 fruit. There are evidently no Micawbers in America, for 

 when it seemed impossible that silk could be raised profitably 



