market. It has been claimed that when the rate was made it showed no profit whatever; but it undoubtedly helped to pay the expense of bringing the cars back. A dividend earned by saving expense looks just as good as any other dividend to the stockholder. Mr. Hill found that one of his greatest inventions was the hauling of freight at a loss and making it pay dividends.

As time went on, with larger trainloads, better grades, and better engines, lumber paid its way. An increase in miscellaneous freight from the West also helped to bring

The Far West wanted Eastern tonnage all the year round and had nothing to ship but lumber. Now lumber could not be carried from Washington and Idaho at any kind of a reasonable rate to compete with the lumber of Michigan and Maine. When When Mr. Hill was really building the Great Northern from a little country line to a trunk line, the long lines of eastbound empty cars used to drive him to distraction, and he thought more about how to fill those cars up than about anything else.

Finally, he went out into the West and figured out a rate on Washington and Idaho Jumber that would put it into the Eastern

it about that instead of having more freight moving West than East, the tables were turned and Mr. Hill found himself hauling empty cars to the West. They worried him just as much going that way as they had coming East. When anything bothered Mr. Hill it was time for another traffic revolution.

The Orient, at that time, was opening up. Mr. Hill sent men to the Orient to find out what they wanted most. He found that if American cotton could be laid down in the Orient at a reasonable price there would be a good market for it. He went into the cotton country and made

a rate on cotton to the Orient via Seattle. That is merely an illustration. In addition to that he built two of the biggest freighters that had ever been turned out in American yards and put them to work on the Pacific Ocean. As a result of all this activity he managed, for a while, fairly well to equalize the tonnage East and West. The average trainload went up to a maximum that established records never equalled on a miscellaneous-traffic railroad. Profits on the Great Northern

reached dizzy heights. Mr. Hill again demonstrated his claim to be known as the Father of real efficiency in railroading.

When the records show a full trainload on any one track a locomotive is called into service and the full standard train is despatched on its way. Freight does not move like an express; but it moves-which, after all, is the acme of perfection in handling railroad traffic. The American freight car and its efficiency is one of the fundamental bases of our prosperity.

T

HE Wilson administration has a traveling salesman in the Cabinet. Quite appropriately, this traveling salesman occupies the post of Secretary of Commerce. Perhaps it would be more respectful and dignified to describe Mr. William C. Redfield as a "successful business man." However, the fact is that, although Mr. Redfield has filled nearly every position in several large manufacturing plants from shipping clerk to president, his most striking qualities are those usually possessed by the resourceful, energetic getter of business. He is the man who has transformed his factory from a domestic concern into one with trade ramifications in all parts of the world, whose business imagination has reached from Brooklyn to Germany, Egypt, India, and Japan. As Secretary of Commerce Mr. Redfield is also a kind of sublimated commercial traveler for the Nation. His chief ambition is to widen the horizon of American industry; to lift the American business man out of the slough of parochialism

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into which he has fallen largely as a result of a coddling protective tariff; and to make him, what his natural advantages and his own industry and genius entitle him to be, the most aggressive and successful competitor in the markets of the world. It is only a question of a few years, Mr. Redfield believes, when the United States, and not England or Germany, will be the largest exporter of manufactured articles. We are already third. Moreover, the Secretary has definite ideas as to the way in which this change is to be wrought.

It would be impossible, after a few minutes' talk with Mr. Redfield at the Commerce Department, to take him for anything but what he is. As he sits at his desk, now diving at the telephone, now swinging around in his swivel-chair and implanting his feet against the adjacen: wall, now jumping up to make a meme randum on a calendar, now leaning for ward and emphasizing his point by bring ing his fist down upon his palm, now clinching the argument by shaking :

menacing forefinger- he is there again in his native element, not Redfield the public man, the Congressman, the Cabinet minister, but Redfield the maker and seller of drop forgings, the president and traveling representative of the American Blower Company. He talks to you as if you were a prospective customer; his conversation and he really has a remarkable flow of words effervesces, idea following idea with a really Gladstonian abundance. Newspaper pictures have already made his appearance pretty familiar; the round, bald head, the small, blue eyes, the red and somewhat weatherbeaten face, the rather rotund body and stout legs. He is, indeed, one of the few members of the Cabinet who offer opportunities to the caricaturists. caricaturists. Numerous writers have devoted entire articles to his red and flaxen whiskers; indeed, Mr. Redfield's whiskers have been eagerly seized upon as one of the few picturesque patches in a somewhat gray Administration. But Mr. Redfield has mannerisms that are far more remarkable than these appendages. One is especially noteworthy. When he has reached the climax in his argument he usually leans back in his chair, transforming his body into a straight line from head to feet. He then takes a lead pencil from a pocket, firmly grips it in his hand, and inserts it into his mouth, expressly opened for the purpose. One expects him to bite upon it; but he doesn't; he makes one or two feints, then removes the pencil and replaces it in its pocket. There it remains until another crisis in the conversation arrives. Another cherished Redfield possession is a small note-book. If, in conversation with the Secretary, you happen to say anything worth while, he takes this little book from an inside pocket and makes an entry. As he has been doing this from childhood, Mr. Redfield must have a fair-sized library of such miniature volumes.

In spite of these formidable habits, Mr. Redfield has his less serious side. He is fond of flowers; one of the most familiar sights in Flatbush, the section of Brooklyn in which he lives, is Mr. Redfield, early in the morning, bending over his rose-bushes. In summer time, up in

Maine, he enjoys fame as a fisherman; he is one of the most successful choir singers in the City of Churches; he has been known to serve as the impressario of a cantata; proud as he is of being a director in the (reformed) Equitable Life Assurance Society and president of the American Manufacturers Export Association, he is equally proud of being president of the Flatbush Glee Club. As a young man, he even qualified as a member of the Theodore Thomas Chorus. He has found another relaxation from business as superintendent of a Sunday schoola position he filled for fifteen years in a large Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn. Mr. Redfield, in fact, is as well posted on the Bible as on the tariff, and discusses it with the same enthusiasm and authority. He knows as much about the Babylonian captivity as about Schedule K.

After all is said, Mr. Redfield's predominant quality is, indeed, seriousness. It is the most conspicuous note in the Redfield family. He comes of the sternest, rock-bound, New England stock. His father was an abolitionist; he has five sisters living now in Pittsfield, Mass., all notable as leaders in civic work. One sister is secretary of the Anti-Tuberculosis Association, conducts classes in current events, and lectures on European travel; another, the widow of a college professor, is vice-president of the Pittsfield Business Women's Club; another is head of the Berkshire County Home for Aged Women; another presides over the Fresh Air Fund and is the author of "A Reasonable Way to Study the Bible." All the family traditions suggest aggressive citizenship, a keen sense of duty, a realization that the world, after all, is a rather important place. However, although there may have been a tinge of Jonathan Edwardism about the Redfield home, it also had all the good old-fashioned New England qualities. Mr. Redfield is now our leading prophet of "efficiency"; he gained his first conception of efficiency from his mother. The elder Mrs. Redfield's reputation as a housekeeper is still one of the traditions of Pittsfield. In Mr. Redfield's early home nothing was at loose ends; "cost accounts" were clearly understood,

"economic wastes" were unknown, scientific management was developed to a high point. And Mr. Redfield, even as a boy, showed a profound interest in facts and in exact science. With him and his sisters statistics were a perpetual delight. It was in these early Pittsfield days that Mr. Redfield acquired his note-book habit. One of his favorite pastimes was to keep accurate data on such subjects as ocean liners their names, tonnage, dates of sailing, and similar details; he had also a separate place for entries on locomotives; some of his old friends go so far as to say that his note-books contained records on all the locomotives in the country. Figures certainly interested this remarkable boy more than baseball. Machinery had the same charms for him that the swimminghole has for most youngsters. That Mr. Redfield knew far more than most boys is the strong impression of his old associates. He was also fond of talking and exceedingly disputatious. On a question of fact he was always right his accuracy was so deadly, indeed, as to be fairly annoying. When Mr. Redfield, a boy sixteen years old, obtained his first important job-family business reverses made it necessary for him to abandon an ambition to go to college- his industry deeply impressed the town. He worked for a paper man named Whiting, and became known as "Whiting's dray horse." He was a traveling salesman; he used to go from village to village, taking orders, and then, returning to headquarters in Pittsfield, he would pack the merchandise with his own hands, and propel it in a wheel-barrow to the railroad station. For For his services he received six dollars a week.

And now Mr. Redfield had his first experience with an economic fallacy which he has since been busily exposing. One day his employer called him into the office and "fired him." He did it gently enough; Redfield was a good man, he said, but he was too expensive. He couldn't afford to pay him six dollars a week; he must get a cheaper man. "It's the only time in my life," says the Secretary, "that I was ever 'bounced.' My employer had the idea which so many American manufacturers have now, that a high salaried

man

like me, getting six dollars a week was necessarily expensive. Of course, what you pay a man does not signify whether he is cheap or expensive; it's what he produces that regulates the matter." Mr. Redfield has since elaborated this idea in several masterly speeches; he never tires of exposing the accepted theory that wages, considered apart from the real point - the efficiency of workmen

is an element that determines the cost of production. Discouraging as this early experience was, therefore, it was not thrown away. Resiliency is one of the Secretary's distinctive characteristics; he quickly rebounded from this misfortune, and found himself in Beekman Street, New York, looking for a job. From now on his career is that of the average self-made American "business man." He sat upon a high stool as an accountant, stood back of a cashier's cage, collected bills, went on the road, acted as salesman in a furniture store, and learned the routine in other ways. All the time he was exercising that innate love of statistics and developing his natural tendency to "scientific management." Certain "inefficiencies" in modern business continually impressed him. Once he had a place as bookkeeper in a newly established iron works. He soon discovered that his employers had no idea what their product was costing. They were selling machines for $8,000 that cost them $9,000 to make. Mr. Redfield. in his precise and confident manner, laid these facts before the president.

"You're an arrogant young man,” the president said. "Do you think you know more about my business than I do? — I. who have been making these machines for thirty years?"

That, of course, is the attitude of the average manufacturer to-day to the outsider who attempts to teach him "efficiency." In this particular case the haphazard method proved fatal; the corporation failed, and Mr. Redfield moved

His next employer, Mr. J. H. Williams, of Brooklyn, was a man of an entirely different stamp. He was a business man who made good Mr. Redfield's fondest dreams. In fact, Mr. Williams was apparently one of the most remarkable

products of American industrialism. In his conception of the economic basis of manufacturing, of the connection between prosperity and the tariff, and of the relation of employer and employee, he had reached, in 1885, a stage of enlightenment which only a minority of American manufacturers have attained to-day. Thirty years ago his establishment fulfilled the severest requirements of the modern efficiency engineers. He had his costs. figured down to hundredths of a cent; his machinery was always adapted to its particular task; his men were contented, industrious, and prosperous. Mr. Williams, indeed, had a completely thoughtout philosophy of business. He separated the essential qualifications to success into four parts-labor, management, coöperation, and machinery; and this represented the order of precedence. The human eleThe human element, in his estimation, was the most important. His house could never prosper, he used to say, unless his men prospered, too. And prosperous workmen, he declared, rightfully demanded four things: good wages, regularity of employment, reasonably short hours, and the advantages now generally known as "welfare work." He regarded it as the most enlightened economy that he paid wages higher, if anything, than any of his competitors; he voluntarily cut the working day from ten hours to nine, the result being, as he had foretold, a better and scarcely diminished product. He never skimped his men on piecework; he permitted them to earn just as much as they could; the more they earned, he said, the better for his business. "Earn as much as you can," he used to say to his men, "and don't be afraid of earning too much." If a man struck for higher pay on adequate grounds, Mr. Williams regarded it as indicating inefficiency in management; a properly managed concern ought to know when circumstances warranted a "raise," and he took pride in the fact that practically all the advances were made unsolicited, such was the men's confidence in him. He was a pioneer in "welfare work"; his factory was the first in this country to install a hospital and bath tubs for its workmen. All these things Mr. Williams claimed to have done not primarily because

he was a humane man, although he was that, but because he looked upon these things as good business. For the same reason he disagreed on broad lines with the policies of protectionists, rivals and customers alike. Indeed, he often said that if it would result in a general lowering of our tariff walls, he would be glad to forego the artificial protection of his own products. And Mr. Williams's career seemed to justify these revolutionary procedures. In 1883, two years before Mr. Redfield joined his staff, the plant consisted of a rented wooden shed and three hammers hammers he was a manufacturer of drop. forgings; it now occupies three whole city blocks. There were other compensations. When Mr. Williams died, in 1904, every employee attended his funeral by general request; his wife stood at the head of the coffin and shook hands with them all.

What Mr. Redfield is to-day, he largely owes to this inspiring association, although. many of his tariff views have since expanded with his subsequent associations with other industries. Mr. Williams evidently found in his new bookkeeper a kindred spirit. Mr. Redfield's rise was rapid; in a few years he became vicepresident and, at Mr. Williams's death, succeeded him as president for a year before he went into the manufacture of blowers. Here Mr. Redfield had learned and practised those principles of scientific management with which his name is now identified; he had also acquired, from actual experience, considerable knowledge of foreign trade. In the nineties the Williams concern found its largest market in the bicycle business; with the collapse of the bicycle industry, it had to open up new fields. Drop forgings, in which it specialized, were largely used in Europe; to most Americans, however, the idea of competing for this business was absurd, as the foreign manufacturers monopolized it. Didn't the Williams concern pay the highest wages of all manufacturers? Didn't the English and German factories have the advantage of the "pauper labor" of Europe? In the opinion of Mr. Williams and Mr. Redfield, however, these facts did not settle the matter; they were "insane" enough to believe that they could still pay high