Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/749

Rh and the superior efficiency to be thus gained are apparent; and in the struggle of corporation against corporation, it is evident that this form of organization will be evolved as soon as the honesty and intelligence of the laboring classes will admit of it. Next, we may specify organizations very like the foregoing in principle, but which are commonly regarded with as much favor as corporations with the reverse. We refer to co-operative associations. In communities where there is little change from year to year, these may assume considerable importance. Then come labor organizations. When trades-unions were first prominently introduced, the general feeling was one of fright; and in this country there is still some uneasiness as to the working of our great labor organizations. Here they can only be noticed as a part of that segregation everywhere going on. General considerations thus lead us to a belief in their beneficent results, in spite of the many mistakes which they have committed, and will continue to commit. Next, we may recall that all unequal distribution tends to die out, unless, as has been so conspicuously the case in the last twenty years, the aggregation of property in single hands gives a great advantage in its management. Inheritance is a perpetual force for equal distribution. It may, indeed, be counteracted by stronger forces, either political, as in the feudal system, or commercial. But the management of combinations of property is now so usual and easy, as we may see in the case of the Vanderbilt property, that the divisive principle has full sway. Lastly, it needs no prophet to predict that the passion for immense wealth characterizing "great, intelligent, avaricious, sensual America," will decline. In its extreme form it is a passing characteristic of a transitional age; it is like the feverish and senseless desires of youth. Like the passion for power, which "the generality of mankind love so much more than liberty," it must decline when no longer necessary; and it will never again, probably, be so necessary as in the present generation. In so far as passion for power, or show, or wealth entails discomforts, it is bound to die out, unless there are compensating advantages; for they hamper their devotees in the race for survival.

How far we have reached in this great process is a much-mooted question. Numerous instructive facts are, however, before our very eyes. The fabulous amounts spent by the laboring classes for amusements, liquor, tobacco, and various things regarded as luxuries; the amount of money the labor organizations are able to handle; the vast increase in national wealth out of all proportion to the increase in population—competing for the hire of labor; the great increase in savings-bank deposits and depositors; the proved increase in money wages, and in the purchasing power of wages; the decrease, still going on under our very eyes, of the hours of labor; the reduced fluctuations in prices; the increased average length of life, recognized by insurance companies; the increased consumption of necessaries per