Puslapio vaizdai
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waterways, run in collaboration with the railways, assures him cheap transportation. In times of stress special railroad rates are granted to save him from disaster. Expert personal advice is furnished for his smallest problems, and care is taken to insure a ready market for his products. Coöperative associations provide for the small farmer the most modern machinery at a moderate rental. If he has to borrow money on mortgage or to make a shortterm loan to get in his crop, a system of land-bank associations assures him easy terms. He pays between three and four per cent. for his money on mortgage, and about five per cent. on short loans.

The American farmer who can obtain money at double the German rate is lucky. We permit a chaotic system of distribution whereby the farmer gets only a third of the value of his product, the rest being swallowed up in transportation charges and by the numerous middlemen.

The result is that while Germany has doubled her agricultural production in twenty years, with virtually no increase in acreage, we have been declining steadily to agricultural unpreparedness. The German farmer's acre of worn-out soil has been made to yield twice the product of our young field. In the five years ending with 1884 our exports of food-stuffs in crude condition and food-animals exceeded the imports by $453,000,000. During the five years before the European War our food imports exceeded exports by $374,

000,000.

The transportation policy of Germany has helped to solve her problem of preparedness. Bismarck declared in 1884 that the railways "are intended rather to serve the needs of trade than to earn a profit for their owners." Germany solved her railway problem by government ownership. We may meet ours in some other way, but it is still to be solved. One sixth of our railway mileage is represented by bankrupt roads operated under receivers. The railroads are subjected to fortyodd brands of regulatory statutes in the different States. Our laws tend to restrict the railroads to small, competing units,

when the general welfare could best be served by a single coöperative machine. The rebate and the special rate, which have been found useful in building up industry in Germany, are forbidden by our laws. We permit reckless manipulators to loot our roads of millions of dollars.

The railroad problem is closely allied with that of big business. Back in the eighties the movement toward industrial combination was investigated both in Germany and the United States. The German Government adopted a policy of watchful encouragement. Our legislators gave us the Sherman Anti-Trust Law. In this country the rise of the Standard Oil Company put an end to wasteful competition in the oil business. The Government, with the idea of restoring this competition, had the company dissolved. In Germany similarly hurtful competitive conditions prevailed in the potash industry. The Government ordered the warring units to combine. The Standard Oil Company has been accused of unfair practices. The German Government made sure that the potash combine would play fair, even going so far as to fix maximum prices for its products for the domestic market. In Germany it has been recognized that big business units are essential for the successful capture of foreign markets. Our Government has consistently pursued a policy of breaking up big business units, even if they did play fair, simply because they were big. The German in foreign trade has not only a business, but a nation behind him. Too often the American in foreign trade not only has to fight his competitors abroad, but his Government at home.

True preparedness is part of a series of problems-problems of human welfare, problems involving agriculture, industry, banking, transportation, all interwoven together. Our statesmen must face these problems squarely and intelligently if we are to be prepared for war. For this we must find men who are capable of thinking in terms of the nation instead of in terms of little localities, of little businesses, of little political advantages.

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HE first thing I can remember was

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being shoveled out of a great incubator, called a factory, along with several hundred brothers and sisters. All the men in that factory wore diamond shirt-studs.

While I was wondering at this, an old motor-truck named Mercury said to me with feeling:

"Ah, if all the workmen in the world could be as well off as the ones here, there would be no more poverty, and no people so poor as to have to ride in fords!"

I was loaded on a freight-car and carried many, many miles. The car jolted so terribly that I should have gone all to pieces had I not been built for jarring. None of the train-crew showed me any sympathy. They were wicked men, and used language that frequently sent a tinkle of shame to my mud-guards. I did not then know, as I do now, that the purestminded automobile has to endure all its life words and tones of the most shocking

sort.

My first master was a careful and conscientious man. He had a large garage full of fords, and he always kept a sharp eye on the door to make sure that nobody who walked out carried off one of us.

One day a man came in with a twentydollar bill that he wanted changed. "Sorry," said my master, "but all I have in my cash-drawer is $2.69. I'll have to give you the rest in fords."

Whereupon he handed him me and one of my brothers and three extra tires, which just made up the amount.

This new master, whose name was Mr. Pious, was very good and humane. He drove me with a gentle foot, and he would say to his children: "Be kind to Black Jitney. Never scratch him or bend him." The chubby little fellows grew so fond of me that before long they would trot sturdily beside me.

Their mother, however, was a cold, imperious woman. She cared nothing for the feelings of a ford. She would drive me at a grueling pace till my radiator was parched with thirst and my gears fairly cried out for oil. Speed was her one desire, and naturally I could not satisfy her. Even when I ran so fast that the effort made me shake from top to tires and I was in danger of losing my lamps, she would call me "ice-wagon" and "rattletrap" and other cruel names, and refer unkindly to the fact that she could count the palings of the fences that we passed. Finally, this hard-hearted woman prevailed upon her husband to sell me and buy a big sixteen-cylinder Pope-Gregory. This car, as I afterward learned, was so vicious that the very first time she took it out for an airing it assaulted three helpless chickens and a pig.

My next master was a young man whose private life was such as no well

brought-up automobile could have approved of. Every evening, after he had kept me in the garage all day long fuming with impatience and spilled gasolene, he would make me carry him for hours and hours with some young woman who ought to have known better.

What sights and sounds I had to endure-I who had always kept the strictest decorum! Worst of all, his deplorable conduct began to affect me. I found myself thinking thoughts which I had never permitted to enter my mind before, and looking with more interest than I should at seductive, satin-trimmed limousines. My morality was in danger of skidding.

One evening while my master was dining with a young woman at a roadside inn I was left to wait in the adjoining garage. But I was not alone; for close beside me stood a little French landaulet, the most disconcertingly alluring car I had ever seen. Her lines were exquisitely shapely; she was a goddess on wheels.

"Good evening," she sparked enticingly. "Are n't you the car that stood next to me at the country club last Thursday night?"

There was a daredevil gleam in her lamps which set my carbureter a-splutter. "Yes," I answered, infatuated.

"I knew you, even though you tried to hide your name. Was n't it lovely-just Was n't it lovely-just us two in the moonlight, touching tires!" A quiver ran through me. I knew that unless I could back out in a hurry, I was lost. I tried hastily to reverse; she had me completely short-circuited.

Heaven knows what might have happened had not my master entered at that moment and saved me. The instant he laid hold of my crank I gave vent to my pent-up emotions in a way that nearly burst my muffler; and when he pressed down the pedal, I fairly leaped through the door in flight.

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neither did the people I was carrying seem to have control over me or over themselves.

All at once my left fore tire exploded violently, veering me aside into a milepost. My master and the young woman landed in a clump of bushes, but I was maimed for life. Bad example and bad association had ruined me. Many an innocent, unsophisticated car is thus driven to destruction all because its owner fails to live up to his moral responsibility.

I lay there all the rest of the night, while my gasolene ebbed away drop by drop. In the morning some men came out from the city and dragged me in. They performed a most painful operation on me, amputating various shattered members and grafting on several feet of tin.

Then, before I was really convalescent, I was sold to a new master. This person was a harsh-speaking, unfeeling man, who cared for nothing but money. He drove up and down the streets all day, inviting people to get in and ride; and when they did get in, he forced each one of them to surrender a nickel.

He was very cruel to me. Instead of showing any consideration for my broken health, he would say openly, "Well, I 'll get what use I can out of this one, and then buy another." Not once did he ever throw a blanket over my hood in cold weather or steady my slipping wheels with chains. He was so penurious that whenever he drove me through a crowded street, he would shut off my gasolene, and make me run on what I could breathe in from the exhausts of other cars.

Wretched indeed is the old age of an automobile. Bereft of the beauty it had when it was a new model, it declines into squalid neglect. No amount of painting and enameling can restore its youthful bloom.

One day this master was driving me through an amusement park when I broke down completely. He got out, and prodded me brutally in the magneto. I had not the strength to budge.

He grew very angry, and the people in the tonneau demanded their money back.

A crowd of idlers gathered to witness my humiliation.

Becoming purple in the face, my master nearly twisted my crank off. He heaped upon me the most insulting and unjust imprecations, as though it were my fault that my health was gone, even making distressing insinuations as to my ancestry. Words failing him, he fell to belaboring me with a hammer and monkey-wrench.

The spectators looked on with indifference. Some of them even urged him maliciously to the attack.

"I'd sell the thing for fifty cents!" he exclaimed, with a shocking oath.

Suddenly an elderly, kindly-faced man pushed his way forward through the crowd.

"I'll give you that for it," he said. "Only stop battering it!"

My master left off hitting me. He looked surlily at the speaker and then at the crowd.

"You can have it," he said between his teeth.

Hot tears of gratitude dropped from my cylinders as my deliverer pushed me to his near-by home. From that moment to this I have never known anything but happiness.

For my dear old master is a photographer, and he keeps me basking in his sunny studio, and friendly people, many of them young couples who have just been married, come in to have their pictures taken while sitting in me. I am petted and made much of. My working days are over. But what makes me happiest is the knowledge that I can never be sold.

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