Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/450

434 made this matter a special study, considers one third as the minimum average that can be accepted for the period above specified. Other authorities are inclined to assign a considerably higher average. The deductions of Mr. William Fowler, Fellow of University College, London, are to the effect that the saving of labor since 1850 in the production of any given article amounts to forty per cent; and the British Royal Commission (minority report, 1886) characterizes the amount of labor required to accomplish a given amount of production and transport at the present time as "incomparably less" than was requisite forty years ago, and as "being constantly reduced."

But be this as it may, out of such results as are definitely known and accepted have come tremendous industrial and social disturbances, the extent and effect of which—and more especially of the disturbances which have culminated, as it were, in later years—it is not easy to appreciate without the presentation and consideration of certain typical and specific examples. To a selection of such examples, out of a large number that are available, attention is accordingly next invited.

Let us go back, in the first instance, to the year 1869, when an event occurred which was probably productive of more immediate and serious economic—industrial, commercial, and financial—changes than any other event of this century, a period of extensive war excepted. That was the opening of the Suez Canal. Before that time, and since the discovery by Vasco da Gama, in 1498, of the route to India by the Cape of Good Hope, all the trade of the Western hemisphere with the Indies and the East toiled slowly and uncertainly around the Cape, at an expenditure in time of from six to eight months for the