Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/501

Rh the industries in which it was most successful, namely: 1. The lessened price of the commodities to the consumer, their superior quality, and the circumstance that they were articles required by all, but especially by the middle and humbler classes, at once created an enlargement of demand so rapid and strong that it fully kept pace with the more efficient and swifter means of production; 2. The augmented gross produce arising from the decided success of the invention in rendering labor more efficient, in saving time, and improving quality, and reducing the outlay and risks of capital, was divided between the employers and work-people wholly by the operation of natural causes. There was no interference of the Legislature on one side or the other; and practically there was no interference of trades-unions to enforce a minimum rate of wages, or to impose restraints on the skill, industry, and deserts, of the individual male and female laborers. Everywhere there were inferior, middling, and superior laborers, earning corresponding wages; and everywhere the skillful and handiest laborers passed naturally into the class of employers and capitalists. It was a free and wholesome coöperation of capital and labor to supply the best and cheapest articles to the cash demand of a vigorous consumption; and the profits arising from the trade were divided between wages and capital wholly in proportion to the special skill and industry of the individual employers and employed; with the result, as we have seen, of raising wages from 50 to 100 per cent., and adding immeasurably to the comfort, health, and independence of the laborers, but especially of the female portion of them.

But such a result is neither more nor less than distribution of the proceeds of production of the most exact and equitable kind. On a large scale the increased quantity of wealth arising from the invention of the sewing-machine has been divided precisely as—on grounds of equity—it is most fit and beneficial that it should be divided; and this equitable and wholesome division has taken place as a necessary consequence of the most efficient methods of production being left at perfect liberty, as regards both workmen and masters, to arrive at the cheapest means of commanding and stimulating consumption. If at an early or later stage of the establishment of the sewing-machine it had been possible for the male to exclude the female workers; or, for the two combined to prevent the use of the machine in the houses of male or female workers; or, for any trades-union to enforce a minimum wage, or to impose restraints on individual skill and invention devoted to increase the gross profits—that is to say, the fund alone available for division between labor and capital—it is easy to see that the whole march of the improvement would have been retarded and thwarted. It is clear, also, that the two circumstances which have very materially assisted the success of the machine, as regards both producers and consumers, have been: 1. The small cast of the machine itself, which admitted its effective use in the homes of the