The history of the first locomotives in America. From original ...

238 HISTORY OF THE FIEST LOCOMOTIVES m AMERICA.
men, assistants, bosses, and -watchmen, who see that orders are
delivered and obeyed with precision and dispatch. This explains
why, in so large an establishment, doing a business so extensive,
machines are produced so uniform in quality and so satisfactory
in service.
"We cannot leave this subject without a word of comment on
the lesson it teaches, as to the value of Anierican manufactures
and the importance of protecting them.
" Here is an establishment, the value of the finished products
of which, in 1869, was 13,430,018.84. Of this sum, 11,068,388.20
was expended for labor, giving employment to sixteen or seventeen
hundred men, and, if we allow five persons to a family, furnishing
a support for a population of eight to nine thousand souls—no inconsiderable
portion of the population of Philadelphia. But
further, the remaining two and a half millions represent the
amount expended for materials, for tools, for railroad, canal, and
steamer freights, for the innumerable incidental expenses of carry-
ing on such a business, and for the return on the capital
invested. But of this expenditure for material bought and used
in the manufacture of locomotives, all, without an exception, save
some few articles not produced in this country, are exclusively
American products or American manufactures. American boilerplate,
American steel, American bar and pig iron, American
lumber, American coal, American copper, and American brass,
are the principal materials from which the Baldwin Locomo-
tive Works constructed their machines. All these articles, as
they come to the works, represent in their cost price principally
labor, and American labor at that— ^labor in mining coal,
in smelting iron, in rolling boiler-plate, in cutting and saw-
ing lumber, etc. If we go back to the absolute first cost, or
the royalty, for the coal and ore in the ground, and the lumber in
the forests, as we logically may, we shall have but a few thousand
dollars as the original first cost for the raw material, which mined,
smelted, cast, forged, planed, turned, finished, and polished, stands
finally on the books as an aggrerate value of nearly three and a
half million dollars, and in its various stages of transformation
and progress has given employment to probably six thousand men,
and supported a population of thirty thousand souls."
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