Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 May 1893 — WE HAVE OUTSTRIPPED EUROPE. [ARTICLE]

WE HAVE OUTSTRIPPED EUROPE.

The United States lias Become the Greutest Manufacturing Country. Air. R. 11. Edmonds, one of the most eminent authorities on the conditions of recent progress in the United States, contributes to the Engineering Magazine an interesting aud valuable paper entitled “A Decade of Marvelous Progress,” from which a few conclusions are extracted. The United States is now the leading manufacturing country in the world. We have far outstripped all other nations iu the magnitude of our industrial operations. It is almost incomprehensible that in ten years the increase in capital invested in manufactures should exceed the total invested only twenty years ago. The value ot our manufactured products increased about 60 per cent.; add GO per cent, to the output of 1890 end we would have $13,703,000,000 in I£o0 —but that is too much to expect. The same rate of growth in mining interests in this decade ns in the last would make our mineral output in I£oo nearly $1,200,000,000, while a smaller percentage of gain, only equaling in volume the total increase in 1890 over 1830, would bring the figures over $950,000,000. If our coal miners add to the output of 1890 as many tons as they added to that of 1880, ignoring in this the percentage of growth, 217,003,030 tons will be the production of 1900. No other country in the world ever advanced in population and wealth as the United Suites is doing. The progress of the past shows no signs of halting. In fact, the development of our foreign and domestic trade and commerce and of our industrial interests is steadily broadening out.

Contrast our position and condition with Europe, with resources surpassing those of all Europe, with wealth creating possibilities in soil, minerals, timber, and climate unequaled by Europe, and practically without limit to their profitable utilization, with a homogeneous population of 63,000,000 people unvexed by the arbitrary regulations of half a dozen different governments and free from the drain of standing armies, the United States justly commands the wonder and admiration of the world. Gieat Britain is no longer the manufacturing center of the world, for we have taken the foremost position in that line. Its vast iron and steel business is yearly increasing in cost of production, while ours is decreasing. It cannot meet the world’s glowing demand for iron and steel because it cannot increase its production to any great extent. It produces less pig-iron now than it did ten years ago. Much of its ore it imports from distant countries. Its cotton is nil imported. It spends about $750,000,000 a year for foreign food-stuffs. On the continent every nation is burdened with debt and none of them can ever hope to pay off its obligations. Measured by their natural resources and advantages for continued growth against their debts and the many disadvantages under which they labor they are practically bankrupt. In all of them the cost of production and living must steadily increase. In the United States we have scarcely laid the foundation for our future greatness. Iu natural resources we are richer than all of Europe; we are paying off our debts faster than they are due, we have barely scratched the ground in the development of our mineral wealth and our agricultural growth cau scarcely be limited.