2o6 ALEXANDER H. FORD 



New lines of steamships are to be established between 

 American and Russian ports on both the Atlantic and Pacific, 

 for despite our tariff war with the Czar's government, Russia 

 continues our great land of promise. In fact, immediately fol- 

 lowing Minister Witte's edict directed against American 

 imports, we sent to Russia the three largest shipments of 

 machinery that ever left one country for another. Twenty 

 thousand tons of agricultural machinery for the mujiks in 

 less than a month, and the demand increasing by leaps and 

 bounds, for the American harvesters, reapers, sowers and 

 binders, each doing the work of scores of peasants, release 

 myriads of men from the slavery of the soil to take their 

 places in the workshops, which, equipped with American 

 machinery, are springing up everywhere in Russia. 



But the American idea on foreign soil needs American 

 brawn and brain to get the most perfect results; it is cheaper 

 in the end to send our own active workmen abroad to put 

 together locomotives and install Yankee plants. The West- 

 inghouse people find it economy to place American work- 

 men at the heads of departments of the great air brake 

 works at St. Petersburg. And in England, the Maxim works 

 would gladly use only American workmen, the English 

 trades unions having refused to permit its members to utilize 

 more than a very limited amount of the labor saving power 

 of the magnificent American installation. In vain has Sir 

 Hiram Maxim sought to introduce the American idea among 

 his workmen. The representatives of the trades unions 

 insist that dire laziness is at the root of the American idea, 

 and that the restless American workman merely wears him- 

 self out inventing improvements, so that he may be enabled 

 to loaf while still drawing wages, while the British workman's 

 love of fair play forbids him doing more work than the weak- 

 est individual can accomplish. I know that this idea is 

 carried out to such an extent, in fact, that many unions will 

 not permit workmen in large factories to turn out more work 

 on a machine of new invention than can be done as of old 

 by hand, yet both the Germans and English now imitate our 

 tools, even to the trade marks, and in canny Scotland the 

 reputation of America for perfect workmanship stands so 



