properly when they get it. To such straits has many an honest, self-respecting man fallen under the repeated blows of fortune. His unpracticality made the failures,' the failures made the despondency, the despondency paralyzed the will. Now what can we do for him? How shall we get him up on his feet? You can ease your pain by giving him money, and so sinking him a little lower. Try for something much finer than that. Why not give his case the benefit of just a little of that imagination that we have been considering, and that will come to your aid if you will simply put yourself for a few minutes squarely into his shoes, and then ask yourself what you would do if you were he and needed work Don't tell him to apply at some of the big stores or factories; he has made many such applications; his own poor imagination has helped him to that extent. Keep him away from the beaten track! There are professions and occupations to be discovered all around you that as yet have not been worked at all. I will tell you what was suggested the other day to one poor fellow of this sort. He was told to make a business of going round to houses and washing pet dogs for their owners. You laugh at it, perhaps, but it didn't take over a month to create for that poor man a good business that was non-competitive and independent. He charged fifty cents a dog, and in most cases it was a regular weekly service. It was not difficult to get the business. There was no one else doing it, and your wife will tell you that the washing of a dog is not the scheduled work of any one of the maids in the house. I admit it is not easy work, nor always agreeable, but, personally, I would rather do it than sell coal-hods in the basement of a department store from eight o'clock in the morning till six o'clock at night. In the dog-washing business you are independent; you work for yourself; you operate a genuine industry; no superintendent dictates your hours, or discharges you at his leisure; you are your own boss. This last may seem a little thing, perhaps, but to the man who has one spark of ambition or one remnant of self-esteem yet left to him it may mean much. It is a finer thing to make a human being fit for liberty than to set him free, and in this small chance to govern his own career there is the seed of true independence. And now, shall we not all agree that there is a faculty which can accomplish in business such remedial and constructive work as we have been considering? It is not enterprise, nor thrift, nor industry, nor sagacity, nor courage. Nor can all these qualities combined supply the place left vacant by the lack of imagination. They each have their value, and by any of these roads a man may win to success. But the faculty of which I now conceive MAKES BUSINESS! HIM CAPABLE OF UNDERTAKING ANY THE BUSINESS OF A FACTORY1 BY PHILIP G. HUBERT, JR. ET me take a big cotton-mill making and man wants to enter the business of making calicoes, the question of capital is the first consideration. Most of our cotton-mills and paper-mills are stock corporations, largely because of the vast capital needed. The larger the plant the cheaper the product, is an axiom in the cotton business, especially when staple goods, such as sheetings, are to be made. There is always a market here or abroad for American sheeting, and the sales are often made in such vast quantities that the danger of overstocking the market is as nothing compared with fancy dress-goods, shoes, or worsted cloths, the fashions of which change from one. year to another. It is not unusual to hear of the sale of thousands of bales of sheetings in one operation. It follows, therefore, that the manufacturer must be ready to take advantage of these periods of profit, so to speak, and be ready with his tens of thousands of bales of goods, where the manufacturer of goods liable to depreciation through change of fashion, such as shoes, hats, fancy printed cloths, etc., does not dare to manufacture much beyond the current demand of the market, and is consequently debarred from manufacture upon the vast scale seen in the mills at Fall River, Lowell, and Lawrence. 1 By courtesy of the author and Charles Scribner's Sons. Copyright, 1897. F The capital needed for cotton-mills being therefore very large the mill I have selected as a type having a capital of three million dollars, and its property being assessed at nearly five millions - the ownership is commonly held by a stock company. Boston is said to depend for its cake upon the profits of the New England cotton-mills. When cotton goods sell at a loss, Commonwealth Avenue, metaphorically speaking, is reduced to bread. It speaks well for the business that in the last twenty-five years there have been no failures of importance among the New England cotton-mills. In calico printing one-tenth of a cent a yard is a fair profit. In paper manufacture three to five per cent upon the product will yield ten per cent upon the capital invested. In sugar refining one-sixteenth of a cent profit upon a pound is more than satisfactory. In making pianos the average wages of the operatives are high as compared to cotton and shoes, and the capital involved comparatively small. Wages in the piano factories of New York and Boston average nearly twenty dollars a week, taking the whole shop, but the profit upon the product in good years runs as high as fifteen per cent. In the manufacture of locomotives, the average wage is high, no women finding employment, while in the manufacture of small arms it is correspondingly low, women being largely employed. Reviewing the whole field, it will be found that the product of factories is constantly growing in value and wage increasing, as compared to the capital involved. The difference between the cost of manufacture and the retail selling price, or the share falling to the middleman or men, varies according to the class of product, the rule being that in staple goods it is small, and growing smaller every year, while with fancy goods and what are known as novelties it is large. Common heavy cotton cloth, costing eight cents to make, sells at retail for about nine cents; fancy calicoes may sell at retail for double what they cost to produce. In sugar, half a cent a pound is the average difference between costs and retail price. Shoes costing two dollars to make sell at retail for three dollars. The necessary capital having been subscribed and the manufacture of cotton goods decided upon, the question of site is next to be settled. In the past, good waterpower has been of the chief importance in the selection of a mill site. The splendid water-power on the Merrimac, at Lowell, Nashua, Lawrence, and elsewhere explained the existence of gigantic mills at these places. Steam, however, is rapidly replacing water-power, notwithstanding the improvements made in turbine wheels. In most of the older mills of New England steam now shares about equally the work with water, while in the new mills it takes almost the whole burden. When the margin of profit is so close as in any of the industries I have had occasion to mention cotton, paper, shoes-apparently trifling things may mean success or failure. For instance, a girl who uses the left hand in adjusting a certain movement. of the spindle instead of the right, does it, taking a thousand repetitions of the operation to make an average, about one-fifth of a second faster than the girl who uses the right hand. This seems an insignificant trifle, but multiply its effects by the million, in this particular trifle as well as in others, and the mill in which the faster method is enforced will forge ahead of the one in which it is not. Another curious instance is cited in the fact that a certain gigantic flour mill of Indianapolis ascribed a balance on the right side of the ledger one year to the fact that ten hoops had been used on its barrels that year, |