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Show OUR HUMAN RESOURCES ' ' C ff--H :- Younq tHahns at Prospectors .i : -r: -'---X School ' - . s ; , r 1 ADDRESS OF PAUL H. HUNT To Associated Civic Clubs of Southern Utah CAPT. Stansbury in his report to congress on a "Survey of Great Salt Lake" in 1847-8 mentions a horrible practice of the Indians in Utah of selling their children to the Navajos to become later slaves of the Spaniards In Mexico. This practice is unprecedented unpre-cedented in biological history. In the lowest forms of vegetable and animal life, parents sacrifice themselves them-selves that their young may survive. sur-vive. Plants give the last drop of juice from roots, stalks and leaves to nourish the seeds; fish batter themselves to pieces on the rocks In ascending rivers to spawn where the young may be free from their natural enemies in the sea; the females of certain scorpions in Mexico lay their eggs on their backs and are consumed alive when the young scorpions hatch. Utah with an area of 82,000 square miles, 3 under cultivation, cultiva-tion, has about 520,000 population, or slightly over 6 to the square mile. Coming to maturity each year are about 5,200 young men and women. Surveys show that In order to earn a livelihood, these young people are leaving the state at the rate of 3,600 a year, 300 a month, or 10 each day. We are in fact exporting our own flesh and blood that the remainder of us may survive. We do this, not like Indians, for profit, but at huge losses to ourselves and the state. There has been expended by maturity ma-turity on the average boy or girl $1200 to $1500 for education, $5000 for food, clothing and housing and at least $1000 for church, recreational recreation-al and medical purposes, a total of $7000 to $7500. We are exporting this investment in our young people peo-ple at the rate of $70,000 a day, more than $2,000,000 ;i month and $25,000,000 a year. But money is the least of our losses. The blood losses we suffer suf-fer cannot be replaced. We are sapping our future vigor, initiative and vitality at an appalling rate. If continued we shall become a state of old men and women and spinsters. The Southern States lost 600,000 vigorous, courageous men out of a population of less than 10,000,000 in five years of warfare. Such losses have stunted the natural growth of the South to this day. Here' in Utah we are losing our best blood at the rate of 2-3 of 1 a year and do not seem to realize the seriousness serious-ness of the situation. These young ; people, earning their livings in California or Detroit, are as much loss to the futura welfar of Utah as if their bodies were fertilizing ferti-lizing the slopes of Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg. In addition to the loss of two-thirds two-thirds of our young people, we have between 25,000 and 30,000 unemployed. un-employed. This fundamental social and economic problem, beside which all our other difficulties are insignificant, will tend to disappear disap-pear when we are growing at a rate that will offer opportunities to our young people to earn a living. liv-ing. While the industrialization of Utah has been going on for many years, a great deal of our economic thinking is based upon the outlook of a pioneering agrarian state, although al-though the opportunities for pioneering pio-neering in agriculture and stock-raising stock-raising have long since ceased. We fear industrialization because we do not understand it and, because of these prejudices, we are hostile toward it, although, as I see it, it is our only salvation. Let me point out some of the benefits we all receive from these great aggregations of capital we call corporations. In 1927 I bought a General Motors car for $4160 and in 1935 turned it in for a small alio al-io .ance and bought a far better car for about $1100. The purchasing purchas-ing value of my automobile dollar in these 8 years had increased almost al-most 400, or, I had received the equivalent of nearly a 50 dividend divi-dend in purchasing power a year. I did not receive this dividend as a stockholder of General Motors. Had I been a stockholder I would have received about 6 a year, but as a consumer I got 50 a year; this because stockholders were permitted to receive their 5 dividend, if earned. The reason rea-son people would invest their savings sav-ings in General Motors stocks and bonds and thus finance facilities by which a better automobile could be manufactured each year at a profit and still at a smaller selling price, was because so far our laws and the judgment of a majority of our people have protected from confiscation con-fiscation of private property. I might clamor against General Motors Mo-tors stockholders receiving 5 a year because I am not a stockholder, stock-holder, but in so doing I would be upsetting our whole industrial system, throwing hundreds o f thousands of men out of employment employ-ment and endangering my own indirect in-direct dividends of 50 a year. Let me cite you another example closer home. (In the second half of his address, ad-dress, to be given in another issue, Mr. Hunt points out the relationship relation-ship of nonferrous metal mining1 to the population and unemployment problems in Utah). |