Excerpt from Modern Industrial Progress

WE live in a world of wonders, and each one's life is of necessity so hemmed in by circumstances that none can see much beyond the horizon of his own habitat. We recognize the progress of an industry that comes within our own experience, but we know little of those with which we are not in personal Contact. The pressman who clamps the plates upon a modern lightning news paper press does not see anything very startling or interesting in the work; the man who pulls levers in the pulpit of a great steel works is not apt to recognize that there has been marvellous prog ress in that line of manufacturing; the attendant on a bottle blowing machine has learned to take his work as a matter of course and so we find it through the entire list of trades and occupations. Yet each of these men is at times impressed with the remarkable advances made in some industry other than his own, because such knowledge comes to one, as it were, suddenly, and not by the almost imperceptible movement that marks progress in the work that is familiar.

The means that have brought about industrial development are worth studying. In the eighteenth century England was the one great centre of mechanical progress. She manufactured not only for Great Britain and her colonies, but for practically all other important civilized portions of the globe. Early emigrants to America did not bring with them the tools of their trades, excepting those of the Simplest character. The laws of England expressly forbade the exportation of tools and machines for manufacturing, or the taking of skilled workmen to the colonies. Her statesmen desired to retain for Great Britain the position of manufacturer and supply-house for the world. Wise and laudable as was this purpose, from a strictly British point of view, the means employed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to guard England's exclusive position in mechanics and manufacturing were a prime cause of American supremacy in several industries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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