Our Achievements and Prospects: American

Continuing concentration and centralization of capital in great enterprises and in every field of production will be compelled by small margins of profit and the competition of instantaneous and world-wide communication. At the same time labor, more skilled, better educated, more thoroughly organized, finding a larger purchasing power in wages, and intelligently commanding its recognition by international compacts, will improve its condition, will find the means of quick and peaceable settlement with capital, and the relations of these two great forces will be much more beneficent and friendly.

Artists, whether with brush or chisel, or upon the lyric or dramatic stage, will require for success profounder study, broader experience, and more universal masters; but they will secure these essentials in schools at convenient centres, not only of countries, but of territorial divisions of countries. The great artist who can produce a picture which will rank with the works of Raphael or Titian and of the best exponents of modern schools will receive as adequate reward as ever for his masterpieces, and at the same time the processes of copying by the assistance of nature and chemistry will be so accurate that, with a copyright, his revenues will be increased, and his picture, perfect in every detail and expression, as well as in its general effect, and cheaply reduplicated, can be the delight, the inspiration, and the instruction of millions of homes.

Then there will be an increase in socialistic ideas and tendencies. The aim will be for a full and complete experiment of the principles of State paternalism and municipal communism. As we face the future we have no doubts as to the result, nor do we doubt that the inherent vigor of nations is greater as their institutions rest upon the liberty of the individual; yet, like the French Revolution and the theories and experiments which carried away the best thought and the highest aspirations of our own country in the earlier years of the century, the popular tendency is for the trial of these methods of escape from ever-present poverty and misery and old-age disability. Human nature, however, has in all ages manifested itself in the social organization according to its lights and its education. Light and intelligence both accompany opportunity and experiment, and control them; and the twentieth century will close with the world better housed and better clothed, its brain and moral nature better developed, and on better lines of health and longevity. It will also exhibit increased and more general happiness, and the relations of all classes and conditions with one another will be on more humane and brotherly lines than we find them as we look back.

Let us reckon American manufacturers from the infancy of the cotton and wool production in 1794 at practically zero on the one side, and on the other Europe, with the accumulated capital of over a thousand years and the accretion of the skill of all the centuries. The race-course of progress was open to the Old World and the New. Father Time kept the score, and Liberty said, "Go." To-day, after one hundred years, the American farm has become the granary of the world; the American loom and spindle and furnace and factory and mill supply the wants of 76,000,000 people in our land, and we exported in the fiscal year ending in June, 1900, domestic merchandise to the enormous value of $1,370,000,000. Europe, pushing forward on a parallel course, finds herself outstripped at the close of the century by this infant of its beginning in agricultural production, in manufactured products, in miles of telegraph and of railway, and in every element of industrial and material production and wealth. She finds one after another of her industries leaving her to be transplanted to this country, even with the conditions of labor, which makes up ninety per cent. of the cost of all manufactures, nearly fifty per cent. in her favor. American inventive genius has cheapened the cost of production on this side of the Atlantic to the advantage of American wages, and the principles of the Declaration of Independence have done the rest. Our population has grown from 3,000,000 to 76,000,000; our accumulated wealth, from less than $100,000,000 to about $70,000,000,000; the number of our farms, from probably about 100,000 to 5,000,000; our agricultural products, from just sufficient for the support of 3,000,000 people to an annual commercial value of $4,000,000,000. The workers upon our farms have increased from about 400,000 to 9,000,000; the operatives in our factories, from a handful to 5,000,000; and their earnings, from a few thousand dollars to $2,300,000,000. The increase in wages has been correspondingly great. Ever since 1870, it has been sixty per cent., and the purchasing power of money has enhanced about the same. Our public school system was very crude at the beginning of the century, and the contribution of the States for its support very small. Now we spend for education annually $156,000,000, as against $124,000,000 for Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy combined.