Jasper County Democrat, Volume 22, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 April 1919 — AN ENGLISH VIEW [ARTICLE]

AN ENGLISH VIEW

While many of our people are fearful lest we shall not be able 1 successfully to meet English com-J petition in world trade, there is a strong feeling in England that’ Americans may distance the Eng- ( lish. Indeed, the Saturday Review is greatly concerned over the outlook. It finds that we have al-; ready enormous advantage in our greatly cheaper coal. Lloyd George is quoted as saying: “We have lost huge orders in Brazil, where we once dominated the market. We used to send coal ships to the Argentine and come back with wheat and meat. We have lost that trade.” “The miracle of a merchant ma-, rine,” says the Saturday Review,' "almost non-existent since the! Civil war, is now expanded for all to see." Shipyards have sprung up all along our coast line. Rates, it is said, are “being cut, and cut again.” Ninety per cent of our great new merchant fleet will use oil for fuel. “Better machinery,” says the English paper, “improved port facilities, well-housed and well-paid crews, operating in relays, and other means of* saving ‘the turn round’—these are the new hustling factors of America’s commercial day?’ Our labor situation is thought to be quite as favorable. Here the appeal is to Mr. Gqmpers, who says: We shall not have Britain’s trouble with the restriction of output, for we follow a different policy. Bring in all the improved machinery you can find, and all the new tools We will help you to improve them further, and we will get the uttermost product out of them. * • ♦ Work two shifts a daf if you please, or work your machines all round the clock in three shifts. <■' We insist on the normal workiifg day with full effort. It is pointed out further that America is no longer a debtor, but a creditor nation, holding obligations of the allies to the amount of -more than $9,000,000,000. Our exports, as all know, have increased

enormously, those to South America rising in the last four years from J 124.000.000 to $314,000,000. “Far-reaching economic and financial measures,” it is said, “have been adopted to stay any decline in this great prosperity, such as came in 1873 after the high tide which followed the Civil war.” The impression generally prevailing in this community was that It was England and not the United States that had been forehanded in this business. We are glad to know that our people and government have not been asleep. Much is made of the superiority of our diplomatic and consular service, the members of which “are now the trained antennae of American trade.” As a result of their efforts an American syndicate has offered to deliver coal at Italian ports much below the English price. The British board of trade has sent to Sheffield •nd other manufacturing centers the following notice: “America is able to sell steel all over the world at £5 a ton cheaper than we in this country can. Please inform us how this arises.” Fifty thousand tons of American coal have gone to the state railways of Sweden, and another 50,000 to Rotterdam. We are underselling Welsh tinplate by almost 2 shillings a box. “It is the same,” says the Saturday Review, “with motor cars, farm tractors, agricultural implements and locomotive engines for all lands, from Belgium to the Argentine.” Trade bases have been established in Europe, and Americans are already invading the Scandinavian markets, and those of the Baltic Rdssian states. Yet at the same time we are going to ship 17,500,000 tons of food to relieve the hunger of Europe. We have, of course, a great advantage in our large use of machinery. Fifty per cent of our coal is cut by machinery, as against 10 per cent in Great Britain. We produce 1,000 tons a man, while the British produce but 240 tons. The mechanical horsepower of an American worker is two or three times greater than that of the British, and his wages are three or four times greater. Finally, • according ito Lloyds, American shipbuilding last year was three times the tonnage launched the previous year,

and 25% greater than th* combined output of the rest of the world. < The English paper evidently thinks that Great Britain will have to “step aoroe."—lndianapolis News.