duction," was due, to a great extent, to the yet imperfect development of the art of practical mechanics"; and that mechanical skill will ultimately effect "a return to the system (now almost extinct) of independent, self-sustaining domiciliary labor" by the introduction of cheap, compact, easily set up and operated labor-saving machinery into the smaller workshops and the homes of the workingmen. Should the difficulties now attendant upon the transmission of electricity from points where it can be cheaply generated, and its safe and effective subdivision and distribution as a motive force, be overcome (as it is not improbable they ultimately will be), thus doing away with the necessity of multiplying expensive and cumbersome machinery -steam-engines, boilers, dams, reservoirs, and water-wheelsfor the local generation and application of mechanical power, there can be no doubt that most radical changes in the use of power for manufacturing purposes will speedily follow, and that the anticipations of Dr. Siemens, as to the change in the relations of machinery to its operatives, may at no distant day be realized. The third cause which has especially operated in recent years to-occasion discontent on the part of labor has been undoubtedly the increase in intelligence or general information on the part of the masses in all civilized countries. The best definition, or rather statement, of the essential difference between a man and an animal that has ever been given is, that a man has progressive wants, and an animal has not. Under the guidance of what is termed instinct, the animal wants the same habitat and quantity and quality of food as its progenitors, and nothing more. And the more nearly man approaches in condition to the animal, the more limited is the sphere of his wants, and the greater his contentment. A greater supply of blubber and skins to the Esquimaux, more "pulque" to the native Mexican, to the West Indian negro a constant supply of yams and plantains without labor, and the ability to buy five salt herring for the same price that he has now to give for three, would, in each case, temporarily fill the cup of individual happiness nearly to repletion. And, among civilized men, the contentment and also sluggishness of those neighborhoods in which the population come little in contact with the outer world and have little of diversity of employment open to them, are proverbial. Now the wonderful material progress which has been made within the last quarter of a century has probably done more to overcome the inertia, and quicken the energy of the masses, than all that has been hitherto achieved in this direction in all preceding centuries. The railroad, the steamship, and the telegraph have broken down the barriers of space and time that formerly constituted almost insuperable obstacles in the way of frequent intercourse between people of different races, countries, and communities, and have made the civilized world, as it were, one great neighborhood. Every increased facility that is afforded for the dissemination of intelligence, or for personal movement, finds a marvelously quick response in an extended use. The written correspondence-letters and cards-exchanged through the world's postal service, more than doubled between the years 1873 and 1885; while in the United States the number of people annually transported on railroads alone exceeds every year many times the total population of the country; the annual number for the New England States being more than sixteen times greater than their population. Under these powerful but natural educating influences, there has been a great advance in the intelligence of the masses. They have come to know more of what others are doing; know better what they themselves are capable of; and their wants have correspondingly increased, not merely in respect to quantities of the things to which they have always been accustomed, but very many articles and services which within a comparatively recent period were regarded as luxuries, are now almost universally considered and demanded as necessities. At the same time, the increased power of production and distribution, and the consequent reduction in the cost of most commodities and services, have also worked for the satisfaction of these wants in such a degree that a complete revolution has been effected during recent years in the every-day life of all classes of the people of the great industrial and commercial countries. Let any one compare the condition of even the abject poor of London, as described in recent publications, with the condition of English laborers as described by writers of acknowledged authority not more than forty years ago,* and he can not resist the conclusion that the very outcasts of England are now better provided for than were multitudes of her common laboring-men at the period mentioned. But the widening of the sphere of one's surroundings, and a larger acquaintance with other men and their pursuits, have long been recognized as not productive of content. Writing to his nephew a hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson thus concisely The condition of agricultural laborers in general, and large classes of artisans, in the United Kingdom, forty or fifty years ago, as described by Carlyle in his "Past and Present" and "Sartor Resartus," and by another most reliable English authority, Mr. W. T. Thornton, in his "Overpopulation and its Remedy," was so deplorable that it is now difficult to realize that it ever existed. + Increased facility for communication between Great Britain and the United States has without doubt been a large factor in occasioning the present profound discontent of Ireland; and political subjugation and their existing land system have been more intolerable to the Irish peasant and artisan, since they have been enabled to compare the in expressed the results of his own observation: "Traveling," he says, "makes men wiser, but less happy. When men of sober age travel they gather knowledge, but they are, after all, subject to recollections mixed with regret; their affections are weakened by being extended over more objects, and they learn new habits which can not be gratified when they return home." Again, as the former few and simple requirements of the masses have become more varied and costly, the individual effort necessary for the satisfaction of the latter is not relatively less, even under the new conditions of production, than before, and in many instances is possibly greater. Hence, notwithstanding the large advance in recent years in the average rates of wages, and their increased purchasing power, there is no less complaint than formerly of the cost of living; when (as M. Leroy-Beaulieu has pointed out in the case of France*) the foundation for the complaint is for the most part to be found in the circumstance that a totally different style of living has been adopted, and that society makes conformity with such different style a standard of family respectability. There is, therefore, unquestionably in these facts an explanation of what to many has seemed one of the greatest puzzles of the times, namely, that with greater and increasing abundance and cheapness of most desirable things, popular discontent with the existing economic condition of affairs does not seem to diminish, but rather to greatly increase. And out of such discontent, which is not based on anything akin to actual and unavoidable poverty, has originated a feeling that the new conditions of abundance should be further equalized by some other methods than intelligent individual effort, self-denial, and a natural, progressive material and social development, and that the state stitutions under which they live with those which their expatriated fellow-countrymen enjoy elsewhere. # "The Fall in the Price of Commodities: its Cause and Effect," by Leroy-Beaulieu. Economiste français, April, 1887. As it is important to make clear the full force and meaning of the term "selfdenial” and “natural progressive material and social development," as above used, attention is asked to the following considerations: The investigations of Mr. Atkinson show that an increase of five cents' worth of material comfort per day, for every day in the year, to each inhabitant of the United States, would require the annual production and equitable distribution of more than $1,000,000,000 worth of commodities! In the last analysis, therefore, national prosperity and adversity are measurable by a difference which is not in excess of the price of a daily glass of beer; or, if five cents' worth of product for each inhabitant could be added to the capital of the country in excess of the average for each day in the year, such a year, by reason of its increased exchanges and sum of individual satisfactions, could not be other than most prosperous. Again, the extraordinary and comparatively recent reductions in the cost of transportation of commodities by land and water (in the case of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, for example, from an average of 3-45 cents per ton per mile in 1865 to could, if it would, make all men prosperous; and therefore should, in some way not yet clearly defined by anybody, arbitrarily intervene and effect it. And this feeling, so far as it assumes definiteness of idea and purpose, constitutes what is called "socialism."* The following additional results-industrial and socialwhich have been attendant upon the world's recent material progress are also worthy of consideration by all desirous of fully comprehending the present economic situation, and the outlook for the future. ADVANCE IN WAGES.-The average rate of wages, or the share which the laborer receives of product, has within a comparatively recent period, and in almost all countries-certainly in all civilized countries-greatly increased. The extent of this increase since 1850, and even since 1860, has undoubtedly exceeded that of any previous period of equal duration in the world's history. Mr. Giffen claims as the result of his investigations for Great Britain, that “the average money-wages of the working-classes of the community, looking at them in the mass, and comparing the mass of fifty years ago with the mass at the present 0-68 of a cent in 1885), which have reduced the prices of the common articles of food to the masses to the extent of substantially one half, did not involve in their conception and carrying out any idea of benefiting humanity; but on the contrary those immediately concerned in effecting the improvements that have led to such results, never would have abated the rates to the public, but would have controlled and maintained them to their own profit, had they been able. But, by the force of agencies that have been above human control, they have not only not been able to do so, but have been constrained to promptly accept business at continually decreasing rates, as a condition of making any profit for themselves whatever. And what is true of the results of improvements in the transportation of products is equally true of all methods for economizing and facilitating their production. They are all factors in one great natural movement for continually increasing and equalizing abundance. * On this point the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of Connecticut, in his report for 1887, speaks as follows: "Necessary wants have multiplied, and society demands so much in the style of living that the laboring-man finds it almost impossible to live as respectably now on his wages as his father did thirty years since upon his. That is, wages have not kept pace with the increasing wants and style of living demanded by society. The laborer thinks he sees a wider difference between the style in which his employer lives and the way he is compelled to live, than existed between employer and employés thirty years ago. He thinks that this difference is growing greater with the years. Now, as a man's income is, in general, measured by his style of living, he can not resist the conclusion that a larger share of the profits of business goes to his employer than employers received in former years; that the incomes of employers have increased more rapidly than the wages of employés. The laboring people are fully alive to the fact that modern inventions and the like make larger incomes possible and right. They do not complain of these larger incomes, but they do believe most profoundly that they are not receiving their fair share of the benefits conferred upon society by these inventions and labor-saving machines. In this belief lies the principal source of their unrest.” time, have increased very nearly 100 per cent.* It is also conceded of this increase in Great Britain, that by far the largest proportion has occurred within the later years of this period, and has been concurrent with the larger introduction and use of machinery. Thus the investigations of Sir James Caird show that the advance in the average rate of wages for agricultural labor in England in the twenty-eight years between 1850 and 1878 was 45 per cent greater than the entire advance that took place in the eighty years next preceding 1850. Mr. Giffen has also called attention to an exceedingly interesting and encouraging feature which has attended the recent improvement in money-wages in Great Britain-and which probably finds correspondence in other countries; and that is, that the tendency of the economic changes of the last fifty years has been not merely to augment the wages of the lowest class of labor, but also to reduce in a marked degree the proportion of this description of labor to the total mass-" its numbers having diminished on account of openings for labor in other directions. But this diminution has at the same time gone along with a steady improvement in the condition of the most unskilled laborers themselves." So that, if there had been no increase whatever in the average money-wages of Great Britain in recent years, the improvement in the general condition of the masses in that country "must have been enormous, for the simple reason that the population at the higher rate of wages has increased disproportionately to the others." But all this is only another way of proving that machinery always saves or minimizes the lowest and crudest kinds of labor. One of the most interesting and unquestionably one of the most accurate investigations respecting the change in wages since 1850, in the leading industries of Great Britain, was made in 1883 by Mr. George Lord, President of the Manchester (England) Chamber of Commerce. The results showed that the percentage increase in the average wages paid in eleven of the leading industries of that city between 1850 and 1883 was 40 per cent; the increase ranging from 10:30 per cent in mechanical engineering (fitters and turners) to 74:72 per cent in the case of other mechanics and in medium cotton spinning and weaving. In the United States, according to the data afforded by the census returns for 1850 and 1880, the average wages paid for the whole country increased * This statement was first made by Mr. Giffen in 1883, in his inaugural address as President of the Royal Statistical Society of England, and was received with something of popular incredulity. But recurring to the same subject in another communication to the same society in 1886, Mr. Giffen asserts that further investigations show that there is no justification whatever for any doubts that may have been entertained as to the cor rectness of his assertions. |