Unnecessary Waste is the Crying Evil in
All Our Business Administration,
Says Stuyvesant Fish.
"The Higher Economy" is the theme upon which Stuyvesant Fish, the
well-known president of the Illinois Central Railroad, discourses in the
_Arena_ for March. Mr. Fish is a solid figure in finance. His idea of
economy is not parsimony, but thrift--the prevention of waste. The higher
economy, he points out, is needed in the household, in the state, and in
the management of corporations. First, he speaks of waste in the
household:
No one will question that our people are spendthrifts,
earning money freely and wasting it to such an extent as to
make it proverbial that what is thrown out of our kitchens
would support a frugal people in almost any country in
Europe.
Conditions in local, State, and Federal government are much in need of
reform, continues Mr. Fish:
There is not only waste and extravagance in administration,
and what is now commonly called graft, which is a
combination of bribery and larceny, but, what is
economically worse, the laws are so framed as not to get
the best use out of the taxes paid by the people. What we
have to fear is not so much the magnitude of the
appropriation as that our laws require that an uneconomical
and therefore bad use be made of them.
In the Post-Office Department, for example, there was, in 1905, a deficit
of fourteen million dollars, which the writer thinks was due to laws and
not to administration. Government free matter cost twenty million dollars.
Rural free delivery cost nearly twenty-one millions, the receipts covering
only about one-quarter of this sum. Mr. Fish does not think it surprising
that under laws which not only permit, but require, such a waste of public
revenues there is a deficit, and that the deficit should be growing
rapidly.
The Surgeon's Knife Needed.
Under the head of corporate management, Mr. Fish says:
I need not repeat that the country is prosperous, and likely
to continue so. While fully appreciating these facts, we
cannot shut our eyes to the trouble that has been going on
in the center of our financial system.
Having looked into the matter myself somewhat carefully of late, I beg to
say to you in all seriousness that not only in the insurance companies,
but in many other corporations, there is need of the advice and probably
the knife of the trained surgeon. Without pretending to any superior
knowledge on the subject, I think that the root of the evil lies in too
few men having undertaken to manage too many corporations; that in so
doing they have perverted the powers granted under corporate charters, and
in their hurry to do a vast business have in many cases done it all.
We who--as breadwinners, as taxpayers, and as stockholders--provide the
wherewithal suffer because we have set others to rule over us without
holding them to that strict accountability for the discharge of their
trust which the common law and common sense alike demand. Indeed, things
have come to such a pass that in certain quarters it is now considered
indecorous and ill-bred for us, the many, even to discuss, much less to
correct, the shortcomings of the elect few. Such was neither the theory
nor the practise on which our forefathers ordered the economy of this
republic.