takes the working man out into the fresh air in his rest hours. The small cost of these wheels well nigh spoils the second-hand wheel business, especially as each year's wheel is always very considerably better than that of the year preceding. The demand for chainless wheels, too, is constantly growing. Nearly sixteen per cent. of the total product this year is of this variety, and about eight per cent. of the total are juveniles.

In the foreign trade, also, there is great progress. Indeed, about fifteen per cent. of the wheels made in this country are shipped abroad. Never did the foreign trade start so prosperously as this year. In Australia, it is true, they are over-stocked. Germany, too, what with secondhand wheels, native product and imports, is not buying, nor England, for practically the same reasons. But from all other countries orders are coming in rapidly-other European countries, Japan, South America and the colonies of the far east. South Africa was one of the best markets in the export trade. The war stopped business for a time. But now there are many large orders entered, and wheels are ready for shipment, waiting for a little word to flash over the cable from the Cape Town agencies. That word will mean "The war is over. Ship all our orders immediately."

America exports at least as many bicycles as all the rest of the wheel-making world, and imports none at all, except perhaps for exhibition purposes.

TH

Advances in Bridge Building.

HE Brooklyn Bridge was nearly seventeen years in building. It took ten years to build the piers. But now the great steel piers of the new East River Bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn have been put up in two years, and the first of the cables is strung across the river from pier to pier. These cables will be in place within the next six months, and then the work of perfecting the approaches, laying the railway tracks, and putting down the carriage and foot paths will be pushed rapidly forward. The engineers expect to have the bridge completed before the first of January, 1903, and the entire work will probably occupy not much over five years, instead of

seventeen.

The company that as the contract to build a railroad bridge over the Hudson between New York City and New Jersey, with a river span of 2,730 feet, and a width of eighty feet, has guaranteed to finish it in six years from the time work begins, and it is believed that an even shorter period will be required for the building of the third bridge across the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn. The total length of this third bridge will be 9,335 feet, its height above water 135 feet, and its width 120 feet. It will carry, beside a central carriage-way nearly forty

feet wide, four trolley tracks and two foot-ways, each eleven feet in width.

It is estimated that 60,000 steel railroad bridges have been built in the United States during the last twenty years, and this steadily enlarging field has brought into existence a great number of bridge-building companies some of which make the whole bridge from the ore to the finished product. Machine tools are now employed to manufacture every part of a bridge, and duplication of parts is adopted to an extent undreamed of a few years ago. There has come to be much truth in the old saying, that "Americans make bridges and sell them by the mile."

The Japanese Study of American Steel Making.

MR.

R. MICHITARO OSHIMA, the head of the Imperial Steel Works of Japan, is on a visit to the United States. The Japanese Imperial Steel Works, valued at $20,000,000, is a government monopoly, and Japan proposes to produce not only the rails and bridges needed for her railways, but also all the more important finished products of the iron and steel industry,

Mr. Oshima was last year sent on a tour of the world to study the best processes and the most modern machinery. He has visited Germany, Belgium, France and Great Britain, where he found that the steel makers are taking lessons from the United States. So he hastened hither, and he has been studying the methods employed in the large steel plants of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and Illinois. He will end his investigations in San Francisco, whence he will soon sail for Japan.

This is Mr. Oshima's second visit to the United States. Five years ago he made a study of American methods and machinery, and he has expressed amazement at the changes that have occurred since 1895. He has shown especial interest in the continuous open hearth process, which has been perfected and brought into general use during the last five years, and in the readiness of our manufacturers to send costly machinery to the scrap heap as soon as more efficient and more economical methods are brought to their notice. He sees in this latter practice one of the chief reasons why America has won supremacy in the iron and steel trade. He has already closed contracts for a large amount of American machinery. The Japanese works will be soon equipped with American machinery and operated by American methods. Mr. Oshima thinks that by American methods and machinery the Imperial Steel Company within five years will meet the demand of the Japanese market. Japanese market. He admires the generous spirit of our iron and steel makers, who put knowledge of their methods at the disposal of all comers.

T

HE bewildering rush of reorganization and of consolidation, and the astounding rise of values (leaving out the artificial features of the rise), give evidence of a new economic era. The industrial world will henceforth work and think in larger units than before, and the financial centre of the earth has clearly shifted to our shores.

Evidence accumulates that we are witnessing not the culmination but only the beginning of great industrial and transportation combinations. Following close upon the formation of the United States Steel Corporation, which controls mines, fleets, railroads, and furnaces, came almost equally great unions of railway properties under affiliated management; and then naturally enough, followed the purchase by Messrs. J. P. Morgan & Company of the Leyland freight-carrying ocean steamship fleet, which is one of the largest English companies.

This purchase brought into American ownership one of the greatest ocean-going fleets in the world; and it points to ultimate coöperation with existing American lines. It transfers to American control a much larger share of ocean-shipping than we have had since the Civil War. The fleet bought by Mr. Morgan consists of eighteen vessels that are engaged in the direct trans-Atlantic trade and twenty that are engaged in the West

Indian trade-with a total tonnage of more than 200,000.

One interesting view of this American purchase of a whole fleet is expressed by the London Daily Telegraph:

"The reflection that the British ship-owner has to look very squarely in the face is simple. America has superseded our agriculture, beaten our coal output, left us far behind in the production of iron and steel, and has passed us at last in the total volume of exports. She has only commenced her final onslaught on our carrying trade, and with these beginnings we may wonder, if such things are done in the green tree, what will be done in the dry."

The first fact that impresses one is that the natural working of commercial forces and of American enterprise seems likely to bring directly the results that the ship-subsidy bill in Congress was meant to bring indirectly. We may see the revival of our merchantmarine in the most desirable and natural way possible by the energy of American financial management. Few events could provoke greater national pride than this. American ships already ply the Pacific. We are in sight, therefore, of transportation lines under closely affiliated ownership across our continent and across both oceans. We do seem likely some day to become the greatest of maritime nations, as we ought to be.

THE ECONOMIC REORGANIZATION OF THE

THE

WORLD

HE wonder is that the ocean-carrying trade has not before been better organized after the manner of railway organizations. There is the same chance for saving expenses and giving a more effective service by preventing the waste of competition as in other traffic or in manufactures; and financially the better organization of a large part of the steamship service is of colossal importance.

But there are other points of view that are more important than the direct financial effects to the owners. If one consolidation follows another until a large part of the ocean-carrying trade comes under one management, and if that management be closely identified with some of our great railway systems and in turn also with some of our greatest manufacturing interests-coal, ore, steel, roads, ships, all as if under common ownership—the practical masters of finance are already outdoing the wildest dreamers of world organization.

And yet no new principle comes into play. The foundations for sweeping concentration were laid when modern methods of transportation and modern labor-saving machinery were developed. We are just now beginning to see in concrete form the prodigious revolution in affairs that has taken place in our life-time. It is only this generation of men that has had the use of large capital as a tool. Only recently have men been able to save enough money or enough things of exchangeable value above their immediate necessities to make colossal organization possible. It is this new tool, capital, that makes our life different from the life of men at any preceding period. Perhaps the most important chapter in all modern history is outlined in this number of this magazine by Mr. Conant, wherein he explains not only the chance that accumulated capital has, but the necessity that it should so employ itself. The world has a larger fund of stored-up savings, incalculably larger, than it ever before had.

And the world now has one other thing of equally revolutionary importance—more men of great organizing and great managing capacity. The spread of well-being and the diffusion of opportunity and of education have developed a larger proportion of strong personalities than human society was ever before able to develop. We have, then, literally, a new

earth and new forces at work, and a new type of man, who is making a new organization of the world. The change from the conditions and methods of a generation ago cannot be fairly described in any other way.

CHANGES BY EVENTS, NOT BY PROGRAMME

THE

HE builders of Utopias have looked for new new order of things, first by the organization of men and then by the organization of industry afterwards. What is taking place seems to reverse this process. First comes the organization of industry which in turn is fast changing the social structure. It is the result of events and not according to any doctrine or prearranged programme that the change is coming, as indeed all great changes have come.

It is noteworthy that now, while these great changes are taking place, little is heard about the dangers that such events were once thought to bring with them. Dangers there may be. But there is much consolation in two thoughts-first, that no active man would return to the primitive conditions that preceded the era of great organization; and second, that we have not yet gone far enough in this new era to have data for final conclusions. Most of our old-time economic and sociological theories are perishing. But practical men now cheerfully run the risk of wreck which they used to be told lay in this direction —so much more powerful is achievement than all the theories that ever were propounded. Whatever economic and social dangers may be before us--and no man can deny that they may be before us-the fact of the greatest present importance is that no man nor set of men has power to reverse or seriously to modify the course of economic events. The only statesmanship or philosophy that is worth a moment's thought is that which seeks to guide, not that which seeks to obstruct. Moreover, it must take as its data the forces that are now at work, not the imaginary forces of preceding conditions.

THE UNPRECEDENTED RISE OF VALUES

LL preceding records in stock-trading in

in

in

April 30, and for several days following, more than 3,000,000 shares a day were sold on the New York Stock Exchange alone. The brokers received the largest orders on record from every part of the country and from