Stuyvesant Fish Says That Americans Are Wasteful, While Pastor Wagner Praises Our National Character--John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Professor Fagnani Discuss Joseph's Corner in Corn--Thomas F. Ryan Holds That Opportunity to Win Wealth is Necessary to Industrial Progress--Andrew Carnegie as the Financier of Spelling Reform--With Other Opinions of Representative Men on Questions of the Time.
_Compiled and edited for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.
Unnecessary Waste is the Crying Evil in All Our Business Administration, Says Stuyvesant Fish.
"The Higher Economy" is the theme upon which Stuyvesant Fish, the well-known president of the Illinois Central Railroad, discourses in the _Arena_ for March. Mr. Fish is a solid figure in finance. His idea of economy is not parsimony, but thrift--the prevention of waste. The higher economy, he points out, is needed in the household, in the state, and in the management of corporations. First, he speaks of waste in the household:
No one will question that our people are spendthrifts, earning money freely and wasting it to such an extent as to make it proverbial that what is thrown out of our kitchens would support a frugal people in almost any country in Europe.
Conditions in local, State, and Federal government are much in need of reform, continues Mr. Fish:
There is not only waste and extravagance in administration, and what is now commonly called graft, which is a combination of bribery and larceny, but, what is economically worse, the laws are so framed as not to get the best use out of the taxes paid by the people. What we have to fear is not so much the magnitude of the appropriation as that our laws require that an uneconomical and therefore bad use be made of them.
In the Post-Office Department, for example, there was, in 1905, a deficit of fourteen million dollars, which the writer thinks was due to laws and not to administration. Government free matter cost twenty million dollars. Rural free delivery cost nearly twenty-one millions, the receipts covering only about one-quarter of this sum. Mr. Fish does not think it surprising that under laws which not only permit, but require, such a waste of public revenues there is a deficit, and that the deficit should be growing rapidly.