Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/518

502 Many light heads are still eager to. come to the relief of suffering workmen by modifying legislation and opening mines. If these counselors would take the trouble to reflect, they would see that all intervention of the state in the economical domain is essentially disturbing. It is an element of instability, disorder, and waste. With their customs laws which they are constantly making and unmaking; with the changes with which they threaten mining property, sometimes funded property; the free exercise of industries and the freedom of contracts, with the inconsiderate public works they undertake; the loans they contract; the new places they create, and the parasitism they develop, governments, while they are no more useful than flies on a carriage-wheel, count for a great deal in the existing economical crisis. They contributed to bring it about, and they are contributing to prolong it.

For a permanent cheapening of the cost of production a third factor should be reckoned upon—improvement in workmanship. It would be puerile to ignore the fact that the workmen of Western countries, well endowed as they are in other respects, have become infatuated with the new conditions of their life. A too rapid increase of wages, superficial instruction, the sudden possession of political and civil rights which their fathers had not, concentration in cities with a corresponding withdrawal of workmen from the country, all together have contributed to exalt the conceit of a great number of workmen, and especially of their leaders. The results are a seeking for extravagant wages, habits of partial idleness, and a general looseness in the matter of days' works. It would no doubt be a most desirable consummation if the general condition of mankind were such that we could pay even unskilled laborers such wages as they are sometimes able to command in the great cities. But it is not the case. In the world at large nine tenths of the industrious classes are at a long distance from such conditions. Western workmen, especially in the United States, England, and France, forget that by reason of exceptional circumstances they constitute a kind of aristocracy of labor. Like all aristocracies, they have at last given way under their exaltations to the point of losing the taste for labor and the practice of doing their work conscientiously; and their leaders are trying to draw them still further away from the feelings and habits which enter into the make-up of the good and solid workman. Western civilization is incurring a great peril from this source. When China is fairly opened to the world and has become a country of railroads and factories, it will become necessary to make a new adjustment of wages and holidays all over the world, as has already been done with the prices of goods. The exceptional wages of the day, and the two or three "off days" a week, can not survive the approaching competition of the extreme East. The reform that it is desirable to make should not await the coming of this imminent event, or the conversion may be too late. As capitalists have been obliged to accept the situation and resign themselves to a gradual