A Chance for Manufactories 

 in California. 



I. B. HcMAHILL. 



CLIMATIC conditions. 



HE climatic conditions of California are such that, according to 

 the United States census of 1900, the workmen of California 

 produce 32.9 per cent more in value of product, and with less 

 fatigue, than do the workers in the Eastern States. This is 

 accomplished in the face of the fact that concerns here are 

 at least twenty-five years behind in equipment as compared 

 with like concerns of the East, and are producing work on a retail 

 basis as against wholesale production East. It is certainly more pleasant 

 for a workman, and more conducive to good workmanship on his part, to be 

 able to live in his own vine-covered cottage, as he can in California, instead 

 of being herded in some tenement district of a great city. This is possible 

 in California. It is also possible for him to accomplish more in a factory 

 where there is an abundance of light and where the cold of winter does not 

 have to be shut out by a great deal of walls and but few windows. 



COST OF FUEL. 



"The lack of a good and cheap coal" has been one of the chief argu- 

 ments against the development of manufacturing in California. This is 

 now entirely overcome by the discovery of oil, which, at 70 cents a bar- 

 rel, is equal to coal at $2.25 per ton. The cost of handling coal as against 

 oil has been demonstrated most successfully at the Salinas Sugar Factory, 

 where a few men control the furnaces burning oil, which burning coal 

 would require the attention of many more employees. Given coal at $3.60 

 per ton and oil at 70 cents per barrel, the oil is cheaper as a power-producing 

 fuel by 37 1-2 per cent. 



When it is taken into consideration that a manufacturing plant using 

 any quantity of oil can contract for the same at less than 70 cents per bar- 

 rel, it will be seen that the question of fuel in California is considerably in our 

 favor, for the best Cumberland bituminous coal costs the Eastern manu- 

 facturer $3.60 per ton. 



/ COST OF ELECTRIC POWER. 



Electric power is being produced in California more cheaply than in 

 the East. 



raw material. 



New England has long been given the palm for manufacturing, 

 but few know that while doing this she has imported from abroad 

 and from other sections of the United States fully 75 per cent of her raw 

 materials used in manufacturing and 85 per cent of her foodstuffs. Cali- 

 fornia, on the other hand, is importing to-day in foodstuffs but little more 

 in value than the annual income of the Santa Clara Valley, which is only 

 twenty by sixty miles in extent. 



This State has within her borders two of the greatest deposits of 

 hemitite iron known to exist in the United States, her underlying stratas of 

 oil show inexhaustible volume, her forests produce some of the finest woods 

 known to manufacturing, her mines are productive to an extent and variety 

 unprecedented, and what she has not must yet be discovered elsewhere in 

 the known world. 



