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Alexandra Herald and Central Otago Gazette, Issue 368, 28 May 1903, Page 6

BiMd o« Being- MUkeflßMt o« !*• x ttim* Rids«, tk« C«w W«ati to Xmin End for End-Tiwd

If the United States were a huge funnel, with the smaller end at New York, so that all things from all sections could scramble in at one end and land with a certainty at the other, the business men of New York mijrht not be engaged, as they are at present, in what threatens to be the last struggle to prevent the general trade center of America from sloping to the interior of the continent, says Arthur I. Street, in Ainslee's.

Twenty or more years ago nearly •▼erything gravitated toward New York, Boston, Philadelphia and other cities of the North Atlantic sectionThe raw products of every portion of the west, from Utica to Denver, tumbled over themselves to reach the manufactories of the east. The retailers of the west, from the Monongahela to the North Platte and the Sacramento, sent their orders for pots, pans, hoehandles and groceries to the jobbers of the Harlem and the Schuylkill. The farmers of the west shipped their wheat and corn from the Mississippi valley to the shores of the Hudson and the Narragansett to purchase their plows and their hay-rakes. But in the latter portion of the seventies tfcs process began to stop, and it has been stopping ever since. The food stuff and raw material of the west have found that home is a good place to stay. Grocers and furniture dealers and clothiers and shoemakers think that freight charges saved are better than trade-marks of old firms on the Atlantic.

Woods grown in the forests of the northwest and the south are turned into harvesters and wagons and office desks in the vicinities of their birth. The man in the west does his business in the west. The man in the south does hia business in the south. New York is simply submitting to £, law of geography. There are fountains and rivers between the Vest and" the south and the north' an< i ea st, and commodities of like human beings, climb 9T S TAm only for necessity or for I «port. Grain refuses to go up the Blue Eidge in order to get down to the Atlantic, because it can reach the ocean at the gulf or the great lakes with half the effort. Orders for metal or cloth balk at the mountains and the distance to the east and north, because they have found that they can get what they want in the nearer fields of Birmingham and Superior and North .Carolina. As Col. J. M. Lowe, of Kansas City, put the thing rather aptly some years ago, in a speech made in reply to a declaration by railroad managers that the diversion of traffic to the gttlf was to be checked: "It's no use. The fiat has gone forth and all the managers in creation cannot stop it. Western grain will not submit to climb the mountains and be hauled 1,300 miles down to a seaport when it can reach deep water on a down grade in half the distance. For a quarter of a century the west, like a gigantic Alderney cow, has been standing, stretched across the continent with her hind feet in the east, and we are getting tired of all this and propose to change ends."