Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/331

Rh reached an unprecedented development, and this as regards quantity and variety and quality. If Industry knew what it was doing when in 1829 it offered a prize for a locomotive-engine available as a draught power, its knowledge has brought it rich fruits. With that invention it gained a basis for increased production, and made it possible to bring together the raw material and the power at points where human skill and the other favorable conditions for production were found. The railroad carried coal and lime to the iron-mines, and cotton to the valleys where men's hands and valuable water-powers were waiting to be used; blast-furnaces and forges rose here, spinning and weaving establishments there. Industry was released from its bondage to the few spots where all the conditions favorable to its development existed together: and became mobile. It was enough after that if any one of those conditions was given in any place; what was wanting could be supplied at relatively small expense by means of the railway. Thus have great industries developed themselves mainly under the operation of these agencies. The remarkable phenomena in the economical field connected with these enterprises are the division of labor and the tendency to the equalization of wages, both as between different places and as against fluctuations in the prices of goods; the former prominently exemplified in the confinement of particular enterprises to special branches of production; the latter favored by the easy migration of laborers from place to place, and the rapid spread of news of advances in wages, as well as by the possibility of coalitions against uneven scales.

Just as a community of interest has been produced in the world's trade by the operation of railroads and telegraphs, so it has been in industries. Every advance in technics shortly becomes known and common, while those who are backward in taking it up suffer during the transition. On the other hand, local crises are felt by related industries far from the place of their origin, till, in fact, the distance becomes so great that the market is protected against the effects of the shock by the cost of transportation. But here, again, the flexibility and efficiency of the means of communication are of great help in overcoming such crises and equalizing their mischievous consequences.

The movement of persons has undergone quite as important a growth as that of goods. In the "Review of the World's Economy," already named, the number of passengers carried by all the railroads in all parts of the world, in 1882, is estimated at 2,400,000,000, or an average of six and half million a day. The absolute number of passengers carried on steamers is smaller; but here, as was also the case with goods, they are carried for longer distances, and more days' journeys, than on railroads; so that, estimated by the mile or the day, the amount both of freight and passenger work the steamers do will appear to much better advantage.

The significance of the facilitation of passenger transportation is