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Before going any further, let us consider the relative amounts of horsepower generated by men from the food they eat, by machines from coal and petroleum, and from water power in the principal countries of the world. The accompanying chart reveals the significant fact that, although we ordinarily think of China as a country having nearly four times as many people as there are in the United States, the United States has the equivalent of many times the number of effective workers that there are in China. In short, the United States may be thought of as a country in which the work done is equivalent to the work that could be done by ten times as many people as there are in China, or almost forty times as many people as there are in

the United States. Every person in the United States has thirty-five invisible slaves working for him, and the most significant thing is that these thirtyfive slaves do not consume anything, so that all the product is available for the 'boss.' The American workman is not a 'wage slave,' but a boss of a considerable force, whether he realizes it

or not.

The comparative output of work per person in the various countries of the world is as follows:

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of coal, costing less than one cent, will do the mechanical equivalent of the blacksmith's work. Hence one blacksmith, at ten dollars, aided by eighteen pounds of coal, at ten cents, will do as much work, at half the cost, as ten blacksmiths at two dollars per day each. Since most of the work is done very cheaply by mechanical means, we can pay high wages and still get work done at less cost than any other country in the world.

coal miner's day of work is not great enough so that he can get more than a meagre living out of it. C. F. Kettering tells me that the automobile output per day of American workmen is ten times as great as that of European workmen, which is the same as saying that a European workman has to work ten times as long as an American to get an automobile.

III

Their relative yearly output of work seems, therefore, a sufficient explana- This leads up to three more question why people in the United States tions, the first of which is whether have so much more in the way of com- most of the countries in the world have fort and convenience than the people enough in the way of natural resources of any other part of the world have, on so that their inhabitants, with a suffithe average. The per capita output of cient output of work, can make a good work in this country is so much larger living out of them. The answer to this than the output of work in any other question is probably 'Yes.' The councountry that the consequent divisible tries which do not have coal are probwealth per capita is very much greater. ably the most handicapped; but, in the Not long ago, in talking to an English present development of society, transvisitor about living conditions in coal-portation is so generally available that mining towns, I pointed out to him that it is possible to get coal in exchange for good roads and the multiplicity of something else. Argentina is a firstautomobiles had made it unnecessary class Power with practically no coal to build towns for the miners when supply, but it imports coal, both from opening a new coal mine, in many in- England and from the United States, stances, because the miners are able to sufficient to meet its present needs, and come to the mine in their automobiles the price of coal laid down at Buenos from existing towns and return home Aires is not excessive, because ocean in the evening after their day's work is freight rates are low compared with over. My English visitor remarked, railroad freight rates. Japan is the with a dry smile, that the English coal best example of a country that has a miner would never be able to come to very meagre endowment in the way of his work in an automobile. I refrained natural resources, and yet it has adfrom asking him why, since I suspected vanced from a country as economically he did not know the right answer: poor as China into the position of one namely, that the average daily pro- of the first ranking Powers within the duction of an American coal miner is memory of people still living. It is approximately three and one half times evident that, with its limited supply as much coal per man as the English of power minerals, Japan should, as coal miner produces. Out of the value it does, direct itself toward the proof the product of his day's work the duction of articles of relatively high American coal miner gets enough to value, the production of which calls for enable him to have an automobile. skill rather than mechanical energy. The value of the product of an English Where the supply of mechanical energy

is scant the obvious thing to do is to use mental energy as much as possible. The second question is, how can the countries that now have a relatively small output of work increase their output and thereby increase their capacity to produce and consume? What they need to do is to advance in the same general direction as the countries that have succeeded in multiplying their output of work. Contrary to the opinion of the old Pennsylvania farmer who refused to let his sons go to school because he didn't want them to ‘earn their living a-settin',' what such countries need is more people who are able to make their living 'a-settin'.' Much has been said about the unemployment situation in England, and many people seem to think that it is somehow the fault of the worker that he is unemployed. It seems clear, on the other hand, that the real difficulty is that there is not enough profitable employment available for him, and that is because no more capable brain than his has devised a way whereby, when capital and his labor are jointly employed in the production of something useful, the value of the product is enough to furnish an adequate return to both. Going back to our agricultural simile, much the same situation would exist if there were not enough food produced by the primitive farmer to keep his ox in good condition. The ox is not to blame, because if the work is properly directed enough of a crop results to support both the ox and the farmer.

It seems clear that the only possible cure for the unemployment situation in Europe is through business men finding a way to provide employment and to manage the work with sufficient skill so that there is enough product to provide a good living for both the worker and his employer. This remedy, of course, presupposes that the European

laboring man will be found willing to abandon his extraordinary delusion that there is a limited amount of work to be done in the country and that by limiting individual output of work he is providing work for others. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth; there is no known limit to the amount of work that can be done in any country of the world. By deliberately limiting the work he does in a day the worker is making it impossible to produce enough so that there will be sufficient for a good living for himself and an adequate return on the capital employed in their joint enterprise. If the ox on the farm resolved to work the minimum possible amount, the result would be a crop failure, and both the ox and the farmer would suffer. In the old Hebrew story of the creation of man, God is represented as saying to Adam, 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.' Many centuries passed before man learned how to multiply the output of work by mechanical means and increase the supply, not only of bread, but of butter and sugar as well, without having to sweat more.

But even if the countries that now have a relatively small output of work seek to increase their output, can they ever hope to approach to the productivity that prevails in our own United States? No one can say with perfect certainty of being right, but Japan has demonstrated to us that a people of much ability can make a satisfactory showing of productive work with quite limited natural resources. The Australian native and our own American Indian demonstrate, on the other hand, how little use people of little ability make of natural resources. My own belief is that in many countries of the world the low intelligence level of the people constitutes more of a barrier to increase of productive work than scantiness of resources.

IV

The third, and final, question is, what good does it do us? Such a question savors of the drawing of the red herring of smart talk across the trail of intelligent reasoning. With one who seriously questions whether I am any better off than my grandfather, though my house has three bathrooms and his had none, discussion is as futile as it is between a Christian Scientist and a Rockefeller Foundation doctor the points of view on the accepted things of life are too far apart. But there are some things which are matters of proven fact, not of opinion. The life insurance companies and other social agencies have accurate statistics which show that the average length of life in this country has increased forty per cent in the last half century. In the past twenty years the infant mortality rate has been cut sixty per cent. The death rate from tuberculosis is now less than one half as high as it was in 1900. The State of New York hopes to eliminate diphtheria entirely by 1930. The scientific research and its application that have made this possible are a direct product of our abundance of work.

The capital which has been poured into the building of school buildings, from kindergartens to universities, and the number of people who devote their whole working time to the teaching of others are also a direct expression of abundance of work. Under social conditions where people have to work hard for a meagre living no one has the time or facilities for research, and people do not have the means to pay for teaching. The estimated value (1924) of the schools in New York State alone was $467,700,000 and the yearly cost of maintenance was $250,000,000. The absence of schools in Labrador until outside agencies provided them was a direct result of the meagre living that the people of the region were able to make. The grandchildren of a Finlander who trailed reindeer over the snow are able to acquire their education in a $4,000,000 high school in a mining town in Minnesota, equipped with electric stoves to do their cooking lessons on and with everything else in proportion. What magic has provided for the grandchildren so much more than was available to the grandfather? No magic whatever, but work -work done by mechanical energy, multiplying the useful efforts of man.

THE BREAK-UP OF PROTESTANTISM

BY HERBERT PARRISH

INSTITUTIONS die hard. Especially religious institutions. They take a long time about it. Generations and centuries. The nostalgia of religious habits. The endowments and vested interests. Paganism and the mysteries lingered long in the Empire even after Constantine. It is doubtful if they ever did die entirely. Syncretism kept them alive even in the Church itself. Perhaps nothing really dies. Religious values at least assert the prerogative of immortality. They modify and affect the movements that absorb them.

But Protestantism as an organized religious force is moribund and shows signs of rapid disintegration.

This does not mean that the millions of Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and the two hundred other Protestant sects will come cringing and bowing down to the coped and mitred hierarchy, kissing the amethyst rings of bishops and cardinals, repentant prodigals begging for instruction and reception. Not at all. We are still too near the ages of persecution, the rack and thumbscrew, the Inquisition, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, Westward Ho! and the religious wars to feel confidence in that direction. Anti-Roman prejudice is in the blood. A race inheritance. Protestantism will still protest.

Moreover the educated, the critically intellectual multitudes, a rapidly increasing number, - show no disposition to submit to religious autocracy. If they have conceived of the Bible as a broken reed or a quagmire,

there is no reason to think that they will turn to ecclesiastics swathed in the traditions of dead centuries for guidance to the high places of eternity. They share with the rabble a fixed antipathy to the graded hierarchy, the elaborate ceremonies, plaster images, meretricious decoration of churches, superstitions and fetishism, local Heavens and literal Hells, meticulous doctrines and obsolete philosophies, celibacy and monachism, the assumption of a superior and esoteric knowledge, the tendency to political domination, the assertion of a defined and certain finality in the possession of truth.

A disintegrated Protestantism will no more return to Rome than the troubled democracy of the day will return to the frozen archaism of the feudal system. If Protestantism as an organized religious force is dying in the twentieth century, by the same tokens of broken authority Rome died in the sixteenth.

Autocratic authority in religion is everywhere giving ground.

I

The famous historian, Bishop Stubbs of Oxford, who married his cook, used to advise his students to avoid generalization and idealization. It is good advice for the incipient historian. The Bishop's books are dull reading, but they are eminently sound. It is temerarious to draw very definite conclusions about wide popular movements, and above all

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