Excerpt from Commerce and Industry
We stand on the threshold of a new time. We face a new world. Men's minds have changed. The map is changed. The world of industry is changed by financial disturbance, by the dislocations of war, and by a flock of new inventions no thousand years before 1850 ever witnessed. All these things react on each other and give a new and changed usefulness to our old earth. Never before did we have so many good reasons for needing to know about this world which is our home.
This book is an attempt to explain how the earth becomes the home of man especially those men who are pleased to call themselves civilized.
How does climate affect man? How does the soil feed him and furnish him materials for shelter, tools, heat, power and industry? How do the form, location, and surface features of the land affect his efforts at trade? These questions, whose answers form so large a part of economic and commercial geography are of great importance in education and especially in vocational courses. In giving these explanations of the earth, I have always tried to answer the natural question "Why?" Therefore I have had to tell fewer facts in order to leave space for the explanations. This makes less to remember and more to understand. The book aims, therefore, not to be a mere catalog of facts and statistics. The more important facts are there, but the important thing is that the meaning and causes of the facts are set forth as vividly as possible. The physiographic influence in industry is not given in a separate formal statement at the beginning of the discussion of each country, but is treated in connection with the industrial fact which is being explained. Thus, in showing how wheat happens to be grown in a given region, we are explaining both wheat and the region - bringing cause and effect together.
More than half of the book is devoted to the United States. Of foreign countries, Latin America and the Orient receive more than usual attention because of our coming trade expansion with those countries.
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