Commercial Geography: A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business CollegesRedway, Jacques W. (Jacques Wardlaw)
General
Commercial Geography: A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges
Redway, Jacques W. (Jacques Wardlaw)
Commercial geography
There is scarcely a country in the world that does not yield something
or other to civilized peoples. There is scarcely a household whose
furnishings and contents do not represent an aggregate journey of
several times around the earth. A family in New York at breakfast occupy
chairs from Grand Rapids, Mich.; they partake of bread made of wheat
from Minnesota, and meat from Texas prepared in a range made in St.
Louis; coffee grown in Sumatra or Java, or tea from China is served in
cups made in Japan, sweetened with sugar from Cuba, stirred with spoons
of silver from Nevada. Spices from Africa, South America, and Asia
season the food, which is served on a table of New Hampshire oak,
covered with a linen spread made from flax grown in Ireland or in
Russia. Rugs from Bokhara, or from Baluchistan, cover the floors;
portieres made in Constantinople hang at the doors; and the room is
heated with coal from Pennsylvania that burns in a furnace made in Rhode
Island.
Now all these things may be, and usually are, found in the great
majority of families in the United States or Europe, and most of them
will be found in nearly all households. Certain it is that peoples do
exist who, from the immediate vicinity in which they live, procure all
the things they use or consume. In the main, however, such peoples are
savages.
A moment's thought will make it clear that before an ordinary meal can
be served there must be railways, steamships, great manufacturing
establishments, iron quarries, and coal mines, aggregating many thousand
millions of dollars, and employing many million people. A casual
inspection, too, reveals the fact that all of the substances and things
required by mankind come from the earth, and, a very few excepted, every
one requires a certain amount of manufacture or preliminary treatment
before it is usable. The grains and nearly all the other food-stuffs
require various processes of preparation before they are ready for
consumption by civilized peoples. Iron and the various other ores used
in the arts must undergo elaborate processes of manufacture; coal must
be mined, broken, cleaned, and transported; the soil in which
food-stuffs are grown must be fertilized and mechanically prepared; and
even the water required for domestic purposes in many instances must be
transported long distances.
[Illustration: AGRICULTURE AND MANUFACTURE SUPPLEMENT EACH OTHER]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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