Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/460

444 a long time the effect of prevailing high prices for pig-iron, coupled with the influence of high protective duties imposed on the imports of foreign iron, was to maintain a large number of inferior furnaces in operation; but after 1882-'83 the most intelligent American iron-producers were compelled, as it were, to meet the stagnation and absence of profit in their business by effecting improvements in the quality of their furnaces, and undoubtedly also in their management; and with such effect that the average weekly capacity of the "anthracite" furnaces of the United States has been increased since 1883 from 220 to 264 tons, and of "bituminous" from 346 tons to 507, or to the extent of 46 per cent.

In the department of textile manufactures, investigation shows that, owing to the greater effectiveness of cotton-machinery, the manufacture of cotton-goods during recent years has also increased in a greater ratio than the increase of population; and that this increase has been going on at the rate of doubling the production in about twenty years. In the United States the doubling period of population is now about thirty-three years; in Europe, about seventy-five years; and, while in Oriental countries the doubling period is not definitely known, it is unquestionably longer than that of the United States. It would, therefore, seem certain that not only is the present product of manufactured cottons in excess of the world's present exchanging capacity, but also that, without a decrease in machinery product, the world's population must speedily increase their annual per capita consumption, if this state of things is not to continue. The report of the factory inspectors of the textile industries of Great Britain, for 1885, shows the following curious changes, consequent on improvements in machinery, to have taken place in the cotton-manufacture of Great Britain since 1874: A decrease of twenty in the whole number of cotton factories; a small increase in (throwing) spindles of 2,604,679, or 0·7 of 1 per cent (a result doubtless owing to the great improvement in the producing capacity of the spindle); an increase of 6·1 per cent in the number of persons employed; and an increase in the number of looms of 97,000, or 21 per cent. Taking all the textile industries of Great Britain into consideration, the number of hands employed in 1884, as compared with 1874, has not decreased, although the increase, 2·8 per cent, has been small in proportion to the increase in production. The number of children employed in 1884 was 34,000 less than 1874, while the number of male and female adults employed increased about 65,000; a change that implies an improvement in the social condition of the country, as well as an increased production.

The displacement of muscular labor in some of the cotton-mills of the United States, within the last ten years, by improved machinery has been from 33 to 50 per cent; and the average work of one operative working one year, in the best mills of the United States, will now, according to Mr. Atkinson, supply the annual wants of 1,600 fully