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450 which has been suggested by M. Laveleye, editor of the "Moniteur des Intéréts Matériels," at Brussels, that the industrial activity of the greater part of this century has been devoted to equipping fully the civilized countries of the world with economic tools, and that the work of the future, in this same sphere, must be necessarily that of repair and replacements rather than of new constructions. But a more important inference from this same idea, and one that fully harmonizes with and rationally explains the phenomena of the existing situation is, that the equipment having at last been made ready, the work of using it for production has in turn begun, and has been prosecuted so efficiently, that the world has within recent years, and for the first time, become saturated, as it were, under existing conditions for use and consumption, with the results of these modern improvements. Again, although the great natural labor-saving agencies had been recognized and brought into use many years prior to 1870, their powers were long kept, as it were, in abeyance; because it required time for the instrumentalities or methods by which the world's work of production and distribution was carried on to adjust themselves to new conditions; and until this was accomplished, an almost infinite number and variety of inventions which genius had produced for facilitating and accelerating industrial evolution were matters of promise, rather than of consummation. But with the extension of popular education and the rapid diffusion of intelligence, all new achievements in science and art have been brought in recent years so much more rapidly "within the sphere of the every-day activity of the people"—as the noted German inventor, Dr. Werner Siemens, has expressed it—"that stages of development, which ages ago required centuries for their consummation, and which at the beginning of our times required decades, now complete themselves in years, and not unfrequently present themselves at once in a state of completeness."

An influence which has been more potent in recent years than ever before in stimulating the invention and use of labor-saving machinery, and one which should not be overlooked in reasoning upon this subject, has been undoubtedly the increasing frequency of strikes and industrial revolts on the part of the large proportion of the population of all civilized countries engaged in the so-called mechanical occupations, which actions in turn on the part of such classes have been certainly largely prompted by the changes in the conditions of production resulting from prior labor-saving inventions and discoveries. As the London "Engineer" has already pointed out (see page 291, article No. 1), the remedy that at once suggests itself to every employer of labor on the occasion of such trouble with his employés is "to use a tool wherever it is possible instead of a man." A significant illustration of the quickness with with employers carry out this suggestion, is afforded by the well-authenticated fact that the strike among the boot and shoe factories of one county in the State of