THE CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY AND HIS

LIEUTENANTS.

BY W. R. LAWSON.

[W. R. Lawson, a London journalist, came to the United States several years ago and in behalf of the London Daily News made an investigation of the industrial situation in this country; he had previously made similar investigations of Spain and Germany; Mr. Lawson's shrewd observations were quoted so widely that a demand arose for their publication in book form and the resulting volume "American Industrial Problems" is regarded in England as a standard book on its subject.]

The unquestionably strong point in American industry is its organization. It admits of discussion whether the American workman under equal conditions is more efficient than the British workman, but there can be little doubt that the United States is exceptionally well provided with organizers of every kind. They abound in all the staple industries as well as in every important branch of commerce. How they come to be so plentiful is a question which so far has received comparatively little study. It is in the stage which admits only of tentative suggestions and not of a definitive solution.

There are three special schools for teaching organization— war, mining, and railroading. In each and all of these schools the present generation of Americans have had a severe training. A very large remnant of both the northern and southern armies of the civil war still survives. The generals and colonels, whom it trained by hundreds, as soon as the war was over hastened back to civil life. They became distinguished railroaders, financiers, manufacturers, and merchants. The rough virtues they acquired in camp served them well in business, and this element, though on the decline, is still strong enough to give a decided tone to commercial life. Military spirit continues to show itself in very odd ways.

Immediately after the Civil war a new school of discipline and of organizing power was thrown open to Americans in the mining camps of the far west. There was much more got out of the Comstock lode than mere gold or silver. The old timers who went through that experience, whether they

became millionaires, like Flood and Mackay, or remained poor men, derived from it a splendid education. Subsequently they spread all over the west, and everywhere they proved themselves men of ready resource and strong character. Many of them became managers of large mines and presidents of mining companies. They are to be met with to-day in every important mining district, and most of them can be recognized at once by their quiet, authoritative way of doing things. They can keep their finger on an army of ignorant Hungarian, Swedish, and Italian workmen as if they were children. It is a sort of magnetic power they appear to have acquired through sheer force of governing. However turbulent and unruly the men might be in weaker hands, they recognize strength and dominant will when they feel them. They also know when a firm hand is on the reins, making it useless to kick or grumble.

Managers and mining captains of that stamp are all born organizers. Likewise they are as a rule competent experts in their special line. As such they know their business from beginning to end. To them it is a huge machine, every wheel of which they understand and every movement they can anticipate. The writer has met in the far west several notable examples of this class of manager-the organizing expert. He has a vivid recollection of one in particular-a sinewy silent Cornishman whom he encountered one day on the Mesaba range. He had two mines in his charge, the second being twenty miles away on a different iron ore formation. Both were turning out six or eight hundred tons of ore per day, and employing about six hundred men. Chance threw us in the way of the silent but keen-sighted manager as he was going his daily round of the shaft heads and the various workshops.

He drove up in a strong but light buggy without any groom or attendant. First he had a look at the ore wagons coming up the shaft to see what kind of ore was being taken out. From them he passed on to the "breakers" at the pit head, where the ore is broken, sized, and classified. Thence to the engine house, the machine shop, the air compressor, and finally to the offices. In each place he walked quietly

round, asking a question here, making a suggestion there; now examining a new rock drill, now watching some experiment or other. Having been years underground himself, and through every department of the work above ground, he knew at a glance when things were right. From end to end he had planned the whole establishment, and in more senses than one was its master. His rule was firm but just, and even liberal. It extended not only over the mine but over the adjoining town in which the men lived. Every cottage belonged to the company; so did the schools, the town hall, and the free library. All were under the manager's rule, tempered in some cases with the help of a committee. Above ground and below the whole place was a model of organization. In the long series of operations one succeeded another with perfect regularity, until the ore was shot into the immense ore cars and started off for its shipping place on Lake Superior, where it dropped out of the cars into ore bins, and from the bins was run into lake steamers.

What this kind of mine manager may do is to be seen not only in the western states but in many other parts of the world. It was conspicuously exemplified on the Rand goldfield at a critical period of its history. At the opening up of the Rand many costly mistakes had been made by the self styled mining engineers, who always turn up in crowds on such occasions and exploit them much to their own advantage and the corresponding loss of their employers. The original movement had in consequence collapsed, and it remained in discredit until Cecil Rhodes had the happy thought of calling in some American experts. It is needless to recall the wonderful transformation they effected. Amateur muddlings were replaced by scientific methods. Cheap inefficient plant was cleared out to make room for machinery that would work. Order and system were brought out of chaos. Profits began to appear where hitherto there had been monthly deficits. The Rand was, in a word, reorganized, or rather it was organized for the first time.

The present generation of Americans contains a larger number of great organizers than were ever simultaneously at work before. They have distinguished themselves as railroad

builders, President Hill of the Great Northern, for example; as iron and steel makers, witness Mr. Carnegie; as manufacturers, like Mr. Havemeyer of the sugar trust; as traders, like Mr. Rockefeller of the Standard Oil company; and as rulers, like President Roosevelt. In the methods of these various masters there may be room for criticism, but in one thing they agree they are all of the Napoleonic breed. There is among them a combination of mind, strong intellect, keen insight, and rare patience. The imagination which sees far ahead is united in them to keen grasp of the smallest details. The two opposite qualities of brilliant conception and careful execution are equally strong in them. They have, in short, the gifts both of the ideal and the practical organizer. Some eminent men have possessed one or other of these, but their union in the same man is exceptional.

In whatever other respect the great captains of industry may differ, they are all hard workers. Work becomes a passion with them, and they stick to it day and night, either from sheer love of it or absolute necessity. Their grand organization, the offspring of their brain, generally swallows them up in the end. It becomes so fascinating, and demands from them such incessant attention, that they get little rest unless they tear themselves away from it altogether. Mr. Carnegie gave his whole life to his monumental works at Pittsburg until he was sixty years of age and then retired altogether, feeling perhaps that there was no middle course. Scores of American organizers have gone through the same martyrdom before. The railroad presidents, financiers, and business men of all kinds who have killed themselves by overwork would fill a very long list.

A supreme organizer must necessarily be a hard worker. It is one of the essential conditions of his rôle. The organization has not only to be planned, but it has to be establishedto be built up day by day and year by year, to be watched and tended like a child to see that nothing goes wrong with it, to be modified as occasion requires, and readapted to every change of condition. Only a very hard and enthusiastic worker need put his hand to a plough of that sort, for there is no turning back without absolute ruin. One of the reasons for

the present dearth of great organizers in England may be that the passion for hard work has, to a large extent, died out. The heroic age of industrial enterprise seems to be past, and Englishmen have settled down to a régime of joint stock old fogeyism. Whatever occult merits the joint stock system may have, rapidity of action can hardly be claimed as one of them. Where all initiative is concentrated in a board of directors, not one of whom may have any technical knowledge, movements are sure to be slow. In the United States that obvious drawback is guarded against by having a strong executive distinct from the directorate, and in all technical matters independent of it. The directors are, as a rule, advisory only, and the executive power has a free hand. There is consequently scope for organization, and organizers have all the opportunities they need. They are eagerly looked for, and when found they receive every kind of encouragement, from hundred-thousand-dollar salaries to special audiences of the German emperor.

In comparing the very different rates of speed at which most kinds of engineering work are done in the United States and in Great Britain, it will be found that all the fault is not with the workmen. On our railways, for instance, directors, managers, engineers, and officials of every grade move much more slowly than they would have to do on the other side of the Atlantic. Any one who has an opportunity to see how railway extension is carried out here must be amused at the leisurely character of the proceeding. A spur line of four or five miles, which an American engineer would put through in as many weeks, will easily spread over a season or two on an English railway. A twenty mile stretch will be years old before it has run the gauntlet of directors, select committees, engineers, draughtsmen, and contractors. In these days of international yacht races and polo matches we should like to hear of an American railroad company challenging an English company to a friendly competition in railway building-say fifty miles, to be as near as possible alike in grades, contour, and nature of ground. This would be a most instructive trial of organizing skill on both sides. The British and the American methods of doing such work would be clearly