Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/843

Rh continually reverting revolutions of the social conditions of popular life; but it would be hopeless to try to stop the stream of this development, or to turn it back. It must necessarily follow its predestined course, and those countries and peoples will be least affected by its disturbing influence, and wil be the first to participate in the benefits of the scientific age, which do the most to bring it on. But that the coming age will really present better conditions to mankind, and will heal again the wounds that it makes, notwithstanding the unavoidable inconveniences of the transition to new modes, is recognizable from many signs.

Is not the generally apparent lowering of the prices of all the necessaries of life and products of labor with a simultaneous, vastly increased consumption, an indubitable evidence that the human labor required to provide them has become less as well as lighter than before? And that the tendency of the development is such that men in the future will have to labor a much shorter time to provide for their needs? Does not also the fact, evident at the same time, that wages are not falling in a corresponding degree with prices, show that the lot of the working-classes will be a continuously improving one as the scientific age advances? Cheaper production of necessaries means the same thing as higher wages. Higher wages, and shorter hours of work! This louder and louder sounding demand of the so-called working-classes will be realized, therefore, as the natural result of scientific progress. For, except for crises and states of transition, no more will be made than is used, and the average time of work will of necessity diminish with the augmented speed and ease of production.

Another generally evident fact is the reduction of interest. To discern the significance of this fact, we must keep in view that capital—the savings of wages, as political economy calls it—is the standard of value of all wealth. His own or borrowed capital enables a man to obtain the usufruct of the labor of other men. If capital were really abolished, as fanatical and mistaken men are trying to have done, mankind would fall back into a condition of barbarism in which every one would be relegated to the work of his own hands for the provision of necessaries. But the demand for capital can not keep pace with its increase, because the arrangements for the production of goods are growing more facile, simpler, and cheaper. There is, therefore—always allowing for the transitional variations and violent disturbances of natural progress—a larger average accumulation of capital than can be usefully applied; or, in other words, an overproduction of capital is taking place, which must find, and is, in fact, already finding, its expression in a reduction of the rates of interest. The value of the savings of former labor, or of capital, will, therefore, continue to decline in comparison with the labor of the present, and must in the course of time be annihilated.

For the other and seemingly the most weighty objection of the