Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/465

Rh which mankind has acquired over the forces of Nature, and in the increased utilization of such control—mainly through machinery—for the work of production and distribution, is to be found a cause amply sufficient to account for the economic disturbance, which, since the year 1873, has been certainly universal in its influence over the domain of civilization, abnormal to the extent of justifying the claim of having been unprecedented in character, and which bids fair in a greater or less degree to continue indefinitely. Other causes may and doubtless have contributed to such a condition of affairs, but in this one cause alone (if the influences referred to can be properly considered as a unity) there has been sufficentsufficient [sic] of potentiality to account not only for all the economic phenomena that are under discussion, but to occasion a feeling of wonder that the world has accommodated itself so readily to the extent that it has to its new conditions, and that the disturbances have not been very much greater and more disastrous.

A question which these conclusions will naturally suggest may at once be anticipated. Have not these same influences, it may be asked, been exerted during the whole of the present century, and in fact ever since the inception of civilization; and are there any reasons for supposing that this influence has been different during recent years in kind and degree from what has been heretofore experienced? The answer is, Certainly in kind, but not in degree. The world has never seen anything comparable to the results of the recent system of transportation by land and water, never experienced in so short a time such an expansion of all that pertains to what is called business, and has never before, as was premised at the outset of this argument, been able to accomplish so much in the way of production with a given amount of labor in a given time. Thus it is claimed in respect to the German Empire, where the statistics of production and distribution have doubtless been more carefully studied by experts than elsewhere, that during the period from 1872 to 1885 there was an expansion in the railroad traffic of the empire of ninety per cent; in maritime tonnage, of about a hundred and twenty per cent; in the general mercantile or commercial movement, of sixty-seven per cent; in postal matter carried, of a hundred and eight per cent; in telegraphic dispatches, of sixty-one per cent; and in bank discounts, of two hundred and forty per cent. During the same period population increased about eleven and a half per cent; and from such data there has been a general deduction that, "if one unit of trade was the ratio to one unit of population in Germany in 1872, the proportion in 1885 was more than ten units of trade to one of population." But, be this as it may, it can not be doubted that whatever has been the industrial expansion of Germany in recent years, it has been at least equaled by England, approximated to by France, and certainly surpassed by the United States.

There is very much that contributes to the support of the idea