James J. Hill, Seeing Trouble Ahead,
Warns His Fellow Countrymen That
There Are Dangers to Be Met.
At last James J. Hill--the silent railroad king of the Northwest, has
given us his full and free opinion on the business policy of the United
States. Throughout his long career it has been his plan to "say nothing
and saw wood." He has been too busy to talk. The man who plunges into a
dense wilderness, as he did, and transforms it into four or five
prosperous States, has no time to run a public opinion factory.
But recently, while at a gathering of his friends in St. Paul, Mr. Hill
unlocked his tongue and spoke out. It was a remarkable address, made by a
remarkable man, and the meat of it was as follows:
The nation at large feels that it is immensely prosperous.
We are cutting a wide swath; there is no doubt of it. But if
we will get down closer and examine what we are doing, we
will find that we are living profligately and squandering
our heritage in every possible manner.
We should insist upon better cultivation of the land. For on
that one item depends your future growth and prosperity, and
there is no other item to which you can look; no other
source of wealth than that which comes out of the
cultivation of the soil.
If the soil is protected, if it is intelligently handled, if
your crops are properly rotated, if the land is fertilized
and rested and treated with proper care, you have a mine in
the soil that will never be exhausted; quite unlike the
other mine.
The millions and hundreds of millions of dollars coming into
the Northwest from the annual crops, while it is large,
isn't half as large as it ought to be.
Our Free Lands Are Gone.
Our public domain is exhausted. Last year over a million
people came from across the Atlantic to the United States,
and the natural increase certainly is a million and a half
more. What is to become of these people? They are to be
driven fairly into the factories and workshops and no place
else.
They can leave our country and go to the Canadian Northwest,
as many have gone. But that country will be populated to its
extent very soon, much sooner than you think. It has not an
unlimited area.
Try and cast your mind twenty or twenty-five years ahead. At
that time we should have one hundred and fifty or one
hundred and sixty millions of people. Where are they going?
Who is going to feed them? They can manufacture. We have
the raw material. We have the coal and the iron and the
copper and the lead. They can manufacture. Who will buy it?
We have got to a point where we are selling our heritage; we
are selling our rich deposits of iron and our coal and our
rich soil, and exhausting it as well.
People of other countries are exercising the utmost, closest
intelligence in everything that pertains to economy in
production. Take, for instance, the German nation to-day,
and they lead the world or any period in the history of the
world in industrial intelligence and industrial management.
Competition Grows Fiercer.
I was in England in November, and met a sad sight--Trafalgar
Square filled with idle people, large numbers of idle people
asking for bread up around Hyde Park. Why? The men who carry
on the work, who paid the pay-rolls, are no longer engaged
in the business.
What they had they have turned into money, and have bought
securities or something else, trying to save what they have
got.
In the west of England, which was a great center of
broadcloth manufacturing and of woolen goods, their output
is less than a quarter of what it was twenty-five years ago.
Germany is selling cutlery in Sheffield.
And I took pains to look around London, and to walk into the
shops and find out. I couldn't buy a pair of lisle-thread
gloves that were not made in Germany. Underclothing,
stockings, cloth, almost everything made in Germany. They
have a system of education in Germany. They educate their
men.
Now I am not going to undertake to say that their way is
better than ours, but I want to impress this on you, that
when this country has a hundred and fifty million people
they have got to do something; they have got to earn a
living.
Who will buy the goods? Who will employ them? In what shape
are they to meet the competition that England is meeting
to-day? And a million and a half of idle men asking for
bread in England, and no bread for them except such as
charity doles out. They have got to be carried out of Great
Britain and a new place found for them. There is no other
solution.
It is all well enough to talk about what we are doing.
Examine it closely and you will find that we are doing
nothing except selling our natural resources and exhausting
them. When you dig a ton of ore out of the ground you can't
plant another ton, as you could potatoes; it is gone. And
when the fertility of our fields, the fertility of the soil
is gone, where are we going to replace it from?
Teach the Boys to Work.
I am not going to find fault with education; it never hurt
anybody. But if, in place of spending so much time and so
much money on languages and higher studies, we fitted them
for the life that they are going to follow, for the sphere
in which they are going to move, we would do more for them.
I know that in two or three, more or less, railroads in
which I am interested, the pay-rolls cover eighty to ninety
thousand people. We have tried all manner of young
men--college men, high-school men, and everything else--and
I will take a boy at fifteen years old who has to make a
living--his chances will be better if he has to contribute
to the support of a widowed mother--I will take him and make
a man of him, and get him in the first place, before you
would get most of the others to enter the race with him;
simply because he has to work. He has to work, he has the
spur of necessity; he must work.
If there be anything that you can do, I feel sure that you
will all put your hands to the plow and help; but you will
never build a city faster than you have a country to support
it. And that is the first and the most important thing.