When it is further considered that the Census of Manufactures in the United States includes in its list of manufactures all products of slaughtering and meat-packing establishments wholesale, valued in 1905 at 112 million dollars, the product of printing and publishing newspapers and periodicals only, valued at 309 million, and the product of canning and preserving fish, oysters and vegetables, valued at over 100 million--it will be seen that an effort to determine even approximately the share of the world’s manufactures produced by the United States or by the various manufacturing nations of the world is a difficult--an impossible--task.
It may safely be asserted, however, that the United States is the world’s greatest manufacturing nation, and that the value of our manufactures exceeds those of any other country. This is due, as already indicated, to the fact that our supply of raw materials is 213 greater than that of any other country, our supply of materials for producing power also greater than that of any other country, our use of machinery for manufacturing far in advance of that of any other nation, the activity of our inventors and the skill of our workmen quite equal to those of any other part of the world, and the demands of our home population upon our own manufacturers far in excess of those of any other country, both by reason of the large population and high purchasing power of a people prosperous and active in all lines of industry--agriculture, transportation, manufacture. The country which produces three-fourths of the world’s cotton, twice as much iron and steel as any other single nation, as much copper as all of the remainder of the world combined, more of wood suitable for use in manufacturing than any other country, more wool than any other of the manufacturing nations, and a population much larger than that of any other country actively engaged in the manufacturing industries, has quite naturally and almost necessarily become the leading manufacturer of the world.
The growth of the manufacturing industry in the United States has been phenomenal. Stated in the methods of valuation followed by the census above referred to--the gross valuation--the value of manufactures produced in the United States has been, speaking in round terms, in 1850, 1 billion dollars, in 1860, a little less than 2 billion, in 1870, 4¼ billion, in 1880, 5⅓ billion, in 1890, 9⅓ billion, in 1900, 13 billion, and in 1905, a little less than 17 billion, though the figures usually quoted for 1905 are 14.8 billion, owing to the fact that the Census of 1905 only included factory products, and added parenthetically an estimate of 2 billion as the probable value of the “mechanical and neighborhood industries,” thus bringing up to nearly 17 billion the total properly comparable with the totals of 214 earlier periods, which in all cases included the mechanical and neighborhood industries.