12. News.—Every morning the newspaper can tell about events that happened the day before in every one of fifty countries. This is due to the ocean cable and to the wireless telegraph, which enable men to exchange ideas in a few hours with others who are thousands of miles distant.
13. Coal, iron, and oil have made a new world.—This new world of transport, trade, easy travel, and long-distance messages has come because we have made coal, oil, and water power work our iron machines for us. Coal helps by driving engines that run fac tory machines, locomotives, and steamships. Petroleum helps by running automobiles, ships, trucks, and airplanes. Iron helps when made into engines, railroad rails, machines, freight cars, and steamships. Electricity helps by making rapid conununi cation possible for us—on the land by tele graph and telephones, under the sea by cables, and through the air by wireless.
Every day hundreds of thousands of men are down in mines, digging out coal to keep this world trade going. Miles and miles of freight cars loaded with coal travel on the railroads. On the ocean, at all times, hun dreds of steamers carry coal to places which have no coal of their own. The coaling station map (Fig. 9) shows the routes by which vessels cross the oceans of the world, and the ports where coal is waiting for them. We can now talk to all the world by cable and wireless so quickly that we can know much more of Europe in a day than Washington could learn in a month.
14. The division of most people, instead of having many jobs, as Dave Douglas has, have but one job, and live by trade. This arrangement we
call division of labor. It is easier for a tailor to make two coats, and a shoemaker to make two pairs of shoes, and then for each to exchange his goods with the other, than it is for each man to make for himself one pair of shoes and one coat. For this reason, men have divided their labor, so that one man may do a certain kind of work and another man may do another kind. In a similar way, trade enables us to make a division of labor among the different parts of the world, each part produc ing those things that it can best produce, and exchanging its sur plus for the products which some other region can best pro duce. Since the railroads and steamships have made it easy to trade, people have been able to live comfortably in any region where they can have even so little as one industry. They ex port the surplus product, and buy what they need from many other regions. It is trade that has helped the white man to spread over most of North America so quickly since 1810.
The world is one. Trade has made it so.
The different parts of the world are now connected. No longer do most of the families of the world live apart from other families, as the Douglas family did, or as the people of Lincoln's neighborhood did. Ships, rail roads, telegraphs, and machines have made the people of many lands our helpers. Each country now has something that we buy. Trade has also made us helpers to many other people. We help them by selling to them the things that they want. And thus it is with nearly all peoples in those parts of the world where travel has been made easy.