Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/461

Rh clothed Chinese, or 3,000 partially clothed East Indians. In 1840 an operative in the cotton-mills of Rhode Island, working thirteen to fourteen hours a day, turned off 9,600 yards of standard sheeting in a year; in 1886 an operative in the same mill made about 30,000 yards, working ten hours a day. In 1840 the wages were $176 a year; in 1886 the wages were $285 a year.

The United States census returns for 1880, report a very large increase in the amount of coal and copper produced during the ten previous years in this country, with a very large comparative diminution in the number of hands employed in these two great mining industries; in anthracite coal the increase in the number of hands employed having been 33·2 per cent, as compared with an increase of product of 82·7; while in the case of copper the ratios were 15·8 and 70·8, respectively. For such results, the use of cheaper and more powerful blasting agents (dynamite), and of the steam-drill, furnish an explanation. And, in the way of further illustration, it may be stated that a car-load of coal, in the principal mining districts of the United States, can now (1887) be mined, hoisted, screened, cleaned, and loaded in one half the time that it required ten years previously.

The report of the United States Commissioner of Labor for 1886 furnishes the following additional illustrations:

"In the manufacture of agricultural implements, specific evidence is submitted, showing that six hundred men now do the work that, fifteen or twenty years ago, would have required 2,145 men, a displacement of 1,545.

"The manufacture of boots and shoes offers some very wonderful facts in this connection. In one large and long-established manufactory, the proprietors testify that it would require five hundred persons working by hand processes to make as many women's boots and shoes as a hundred persons now make with the aid of machinery; a displacement of eighty per cent."

"Another firm, engaged in the manufacture of children's shoes, states that the introduction of new machinery within the past thirty years has displaced about six times the amount of hand-labor required, and that the cost of the product has been reduced one half."

"On another grade of goods, the facts collected by the agents of the Bureau show that one man can now do the work which twenty years ago required ten men."

"In the manufacture of flour there has been a displacement of nearly three fourths of the manual labor necessary to produce the same product. In the manufacture of furniture, from one half to three fourths only of the old number of persons is now required. In the manufacture of wall-paper, the best evidence puts the displacement in the proportion of one hundred to one. In the manufacture of metals and metallic goods, long established firms testify that machinery has decreased manual labor 33 per cent."