coal trade bulletin - Clpdigital.org

All the developments of our lives, from the
earliest and most severe of our struggles, have
been based upon knowledge of what has been done,
how it has been done, who has done it, and what
its relations have been to the public good. This
is merely to say that the development of material
resources hase gone on in the open. Discoveries
and
IMPROVEMENTS IN METHODS
or machinery have been shared by all our people,
for the plain reason that, in the growth of industry,
every man has had a chance to learn something
about the process and thus to share in it
warranted by his inclinations and abilities. We
early acquired the habit of setting forth in each
community what men were doing to improve their
own condition and thus contribute to the work of
society. When a new house was built, or a new
home or industry founded or exchanged, some
kindly, enterprising neighbor or writer has so
communicated the fact that it has found record or
recognition. The ways, the industry, the methods
employed, have all found recognition from all
interested in improvement. If a farmer found
a new process or product, or an improved kind of
seed, or a way of using old resources to better
advantage, it soon becomes public property open
for adoption or imtation by all. A new mill, or
mine, or railroad, giving additional facilites, was
welcomed as something not only useful but neighborly
and its small fame was spread through its
area of interest and influence.
It is only since the so-called day of big things
that there has been a tendency toward concealment—the
hiding of a light under a bushel.
Somehow, while with all our resources and a farreaching
imagination, we have been pining because
we were limited to small things, when the
big things come we resent them. When they have
acquired a new interest for an increased number
of people we hesitate to
WRITE THEIR HISTORY
with the result that, with our enormous development
in the manufacture of iron and steel products,
textiles, chemicals, ships, and other articles
of use and necessity, and with the added scientificinterest
in them, it is safe to say that, relatively
to population and intelligence, our people really
know less about the commanding industries that
have grown up around these articles than did
their predecessors a half a century ago when the
units were small. There seems to be something
in mere size that brings concealment and a lack
of appreciation of the importance of that knowledge
which accompanies real news about industrial
movements.
Perhaps, the fault may lie in the men who
now direct or manage these industries—an as­
THE COAL TRADE BULLETIN. 37
sumption that somehow their business does not
interest anybody, or the assertion of a desire to
do what they will with their own, when in fact
it is their own to a smaller degree than was the
case under the simpler methods and with the
smaller production of earlier days. These industries
were then the exclusive property or interest
of the men who, in most cases, managed them,
whereas now this rarely happens because they
have grown to proportions which render it impossible.
Probably, this decline in interest may
grow out of the fact that what is everybody's business
is that of the nobody of the adage; but
whatever the motive or reason, I am convinced
that most of the misunderstanding, the suspicions,
the
QUESTIONING OF MOTIVES
or methods, now prevalent, grows out of the inability
of the mass of our people to find out what
is really going on around them.
And yet we cannot overlook the fact that the
industries which think themselves so big that
they become indifferent to public sentiment, are,
after all, made up of units which, both separately
and together, have an added interest for an
enlarged constituency. They are now important
as parts of a comprehensive industry that affects
the markets of many countries.
Perhaps the maintenance of this interest in a
great city will best illustrate my idea. In New-
York, whose newspapers are crowded to a degree
seen nowhere else, there may be found every
clay in the year a full account of the changes in
the housing of its people. The shifting of ownership
or interest, the issue of licenses for the
construction of even the smallest of dwellinghouses,
or apartments, the mortgages created or
satisfied, are noted in every newspaper, while
the construction of a new office building is followed
with interest by the public from the rockbottom
upon which its lowest caisson rests to
the topmost point of its flagstaff. This is true
because five million people want to know all
about it, and this is only the application among
such a vast population of the methods, that
throughout the whole of our history, have accompanied
the growth of the smallest village or
its most modest industry. It has been due to the
interest which the real estate and building industries
arouse in their constituents—the
CURIOUS HUMAN COMPOUND
which makes up the population of a great city.
It is somebody's business to furnish this news
and he attends to it with a persistence which
finds ample reward.
Now-, the people of West Virginia are just as
keen to know what they themselves are doing
as are those in New York, and yet, relatively to
their numbers, they have nothing like the oppor-