}
1

Sn ee ere a

8

 

 

MICHIGAN TRADESMAN

 

 

MicrucanpapesMaN

Devoted to the E Best Jaterests of Business Men

Published at the New ‘Blodgett 1 Building,
Grand Rapids, by the

TRADESMAN COMPANY

One Dollar a Year, Payable in Advance.

 

Advertising Rates on Application.

Communications invited from practical business
men. Correspondents must give their full
names and addresses, not necessarily for pub-
lication, but as a guarantee of good faith.

Subscribers may have the mailing address of
their papers changed as often as desired.

No paper discontinued, except at the option of
the proprietor, until all arrearages are paid.

Sample copies sent free to any address.

Entered at the Grand Ra vids Post Office as”
Second Class mail matter.

 

 

 

When writing to any of our Advertisers,
please say that you saw the advertise-
ment in the Michigan Tradesman,

E. A. STOWE, EDITOR.

_ WEDNESDAY, : ++ MARCH 2 21, 1900.

 

 

STATE OF MICHIGAN { gg.
County of Kent

John DeBoer, being duly sworn, de-
poses and says as follows:

I .am pressman in the office of the
Tradesman Company and have charge of
the presses and folding machine in that
establishment. I printed and folded
7,000 copies of the issue of Mar. 14, 1900,
and saw the edition mailed in the usual
manner. And further deponent saith
not. John DeBoer.

Sworn and subscribed before me, a
notary public in and for said county,
this seventeenth day of March, Igoo.

Henry B. Fairchild,
Notary Public in and for Kent County,
Mich.

GENERAL TRADE REVIEW.

The tide of business seems to have
settled into a steady, even flow, influ-
ences usually causing wide fluctuations
being so balanced as to counteract each
other. For many weeks the price of
transportation stocks has varied on the
average but a few cents, and industrials
would have made the same showing had
they not been more subject to the man-
ipulations of professional operators and
clique interests. The downward tend-
ency of last week has been turned to the
opposite, the average of changes show-
ing a slight gain. Among the influ-
ences which would seem to warrant a
more rapid advance is the enactment
of the new currency law. While there is
great confidence in its ultimate value,
its operation is necessarily preceded by
some months of preparation. As a
matter of fact its passage is attended
by a greater stringency in the money
market than since the recovery from the
December panic. Not least among the
restraining and depressing influences is
the approach of the presidential season.
There is nothing which will more
quickly show the timidity of capital
than uncertainty in political matters,
and while there may be little expecta-
tion of radical change, it is very easy
to hesitate on the possibility. The
volume of business is large, in daily
clearings this month 22.6 per cent.
larger than in 1898, although 16.1 per
cent. smaller than last year. New York
shows the greatest decrease, 19.9 per
cent., owing to speculative inactivity,
but the chief outside cities average 7.3
per cent. less than last year, the Eastern
cities, St. Louis and Louisville showing
losses, while at Chicago the gain is in-
significant.

Those who believe that iron will not
decline in price materially are urging
that a great part of the production has
already been sold under contract at

about current prices, covering the out-
put of 70 per cent. or more of all fur-

 

naces for six or seven months to come,
which they rightly say is a condition
entirely unprecedented. But it is also
true that current prices are made not by
the larger quantity delivered under old
contracts, but by the smaller quantity
which has to seek a market from week
to week, and which, if consumption
does not increase, may not find the mar-
ket large enough. A stronger point by
far is that a great part of the Lake ore
for the coming year has already been
sold at $5.50 a ton or thereabouts, sev-
eral times the cost last year,and there is
likely to be a scarcity of ore suitable
for steelmaking, which will operate to
sustain the price of steel, even if iron
not fit for steel production should de-
cline.

Notwithstanding the high price of cot-
ton, the export movement of that staple
is more than 50 per cent. greater than
for the same time last year. The yielding
in prices of wool is still confined to what
are called special transactions, and some
defect in quality or condition is usually
suggested by way of explanation, but the
fact is that moderate quantities are
actually sold at prices much below those
formerly paid, and still regularly quoted
by many. The goods market is at pres-
ent not satisfactory for men’s goods, al-
though there is much less complaint of
cancellations than of late. In spite of
the continued decline in the Chicago
hide market, the outlook in the boot
and shoe trade is more encouraging and
prices have been advanced in some
grades.

 

Revival of the industry of making cut
nails is reported from Pittsburg. The
reason assigned is a demand that comes
from farmers, who complain that the
wire nails do not hold shingles in place
so long as the old cut nails. Shingles
fastened with wire nails, it is said, are
blown off from roofs after ten years’
service, while those held by cut nails
continue to hold. The acid used in an-
nealing the wire from which wire nails
are made conduces to the undoing of the
nail, the loosening of the shingle and
consequent damage. The demand for
cut nails that reaches the Pittsburg fac-
tories is wholly from agricultural sec-
tions of the country. As the wire nail
is much cheaper and preferred by car-
penters the nailmakers are hoping to
overcome the objection to its use by
turning out a special nail thoroughly
galvanized. Its lasting properties are
guaranteed. The several factories, how-
ever, are increasing their facilities to
meet the calls for cut nails.

 

St. Patrick’s day appears to have been
celebrated this year with far more en-
thusiasm in England than in Ireland.
The reason for it is that the victories of
the Irish generals, Roberts, Kitchener
and French, in South Africa, and the
valor displayed by the Irish soldiers in
the British army there have at last
touched English gratitude and brought
English character to appreciative hom-
age of the finest qualities of the sons of
the Emerald Isle. The outcome must
needs be a softening of race hatreds
and a redressing of Irish grievances.

 

Marshall Field, the greatest merchant
the world ever saw, recently remarked:
‘‘I would rather have my advertise-
ment in one paper reaching the home
than in forty sold on the street.’’

The man who has been there, and
lived on mule meat, knows something
about war that he does not gather from
magazine writers,

 

HEADS OR HEELS.

The student knights of the gridiron
of the Michigan State University not
long ago met their friend, the enemy, of
the University of Pennsylvania and
came home with their visors. down. It
was heels against heels. They had met
the enemy and were theirs. Early in
March the student orators of the same
institutions of learning met on the for-
ensic field and our boys came home with
their temples bound with bay. It was
heads against heads. This time ‘‘We
have met the enemy and they are ours ;’’
and the Tradesman takes this opportu-
nity to extend to the victors its hearty
congratulations.

Aside from the subject which is es-
sentially commercial, it is pleasing to
note that the contest was free from the
taint and the accompaniments of gate
money. A congressman presided and
was introduced by the Provost of the
University. The audience was made
up of Philadelphia’s best in all that
pertains to education and refinement.
Society did not forget that this was a
function where grace and beauty and
position received rather than extended
courtesy and honor and brightened the
occasion with her presence. The West-
ern Reserve University sent its Presi-

dent; Harvard a professor, and New
York a_ distinguished physician as
judges. There was the usual rendering

of college songs with mandolin and
banjo and a reception for the disput-
ants at the University when all was over,
and college and city and town and coun-
try can not help believing and saying
that these are the academic honors that
are best worth striving for and that in
these contests of heads or heels between
university and university, in the minds
of those whose opinion is valuable the
heads have the better of it one hundred
to one.

In making this sweeping assertion the
Tradesman does not forget all that is or
can be implied in *‘a sound mind ina
sound body.’’ The commercial world,
its immediate realm of effort, furnishes
too many instances where an active mind
in a frail body has been hopelessly
wrecked upon the schools of trade to be
unmindful of how much success depends
upon the physical in business; but it
remembers as well that this physical to
be worth anything must have a well-
trained brain to control it. There, if
anywhere, is the training needed. ‘‘It
is the mind that makes the body rich,’’
and the thought is almost too trite to re-
peat, that a strong body with no mind is
pure animalism. ‘That is the one touch
of nature which makes the sporting
world kin; and when brawn is king,
the prize fighter is a prince of the blood.
Not that the sinew is to be looked down
upon, not that bodily strength and vigor
are unessential; but, at their best, they
are only strong servants of a stronger
master, who knows that he is master
and when to use his strength. There
are still Augean stables to ciean and
only Hercuies can clean them ; but while
the task is one requiring the strength of
a god, that strength is powerless unless
the brain of a god directs it. Too often
the brain of Hercules is lost sight of and
his physical development alone consid-
eyed - worthy of esteem; and when that
condition prevails, the athlete of the
arena, although he lay aside the garb
of the scholar, is on a level with the
big-necked brute with which he fights,
and with the brute receives the plaudits
of the animal life that crowds the
benches of the amphitheater, as his

muscle shows him to be the better beast.

 

When, then, the boys came home
from the contest with paeons upon their
lips, and the Isthmian pine leaves in
their hands their alma mater and the
State-upon whose strong arm she _ leans
had every reason to rejoice over the
splendid result. It was brain against
brain and the Michigan Horatii can lay
no happier garlands upon their cherish-
ing mother’s shrine than those they
brought with them from that forensic
strife. In the first place it was a manly
battle of men with men. Manhood pre-
sided and all that is best in womanhood
looked on with smiles and cheers. In
the whole multitude not a satyr was
seen. The law was not called upon to
preserve the peace. No money changed
hands upon the outcome and no_bach-
analian feast disgraced the close. From
classic halls the three went out with
their shields, determined to come back
with them or on them; and those same
shields to-day, the pride of the Univer-
sity and the State, bear ample testi-
mony to the fact that mind is still mas-
ter of matter and that now as always, in
Michigan at least, it is the prevailing
opinion that, in a question of heads or
heels, the heads have it a hundred to
one.

There is something else: The world
to-day is wanting more and more that
kind of victorious manhood which the
Ann Arbor victors represent. More
and more as the years roll by the trained
head is wanted in every life‘calling.
This is, indeed, the country of the ma-
chine, but better than that it is the coun-
try of the man behind it. The shoe-
maker must stick to his last, but, unless
the last and the shoe made on it show
marks of thoughtful handling, work and
workman are alike nothing. During the
last twenty-five years no calling has
been oftener enriched by the well-trained
college graduate than that of the trades
man and during that same period no
company of men have shown greater ad-
vancement. A clown is no_ longer
wanted at the corner grocery. Men with
brains are sought for for the department
store. The traveling man who wants a
day off to meet his classmates at the
Commencement dinner is no longer a
curiosity. Heads of commercial houses
are making places in the ranks of their
workmen for their sons, graduated or
soon to be graduated. Men with the
business harness on are constantly ex-
changing greetings with their classmates
and, business over, grow young again
by reliving the old college days. The
country from one end to the other is
permeated with their influence and from
one end of the country to the other they
are constantly called upon to fill places
of public trust. Not a city to-day is
suffering from trickery and _ ignorant
mismanagement which does not feel the
need of this head training to counteract
and subdue the heel training of the
preceding generation’s riotous boyhood.
This is the country’s want to-day, and
the Tradesman, in a position where it
sees how widespread that want is, joins
heartily with State and University in
the rejoicing at the home-coming of
these prize-bearing boys, because it sees
here a convincing proof that the time is
not far-distant when the heels shall give
way more to the head and the head shall
assume its rightful place in the manage-
ment of the world’s business.

 

When a girl says she will be a sister
to a fellow she has turned down, she
means she will borrow his hats and
coats and neckties and things, to wear
out with the young man she has ac-
cepted.

12
‘
& -
Te
@>
es

- % ,
Ab lh |
wv v
i
!
——_
« a
a & b
|
e | =
_— | «a
' $ ,
j
a
j
{
~
4, 4
ay Gs
a P
& a
és » 4