Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/467

Rh in the year 1885, resulted in the capacity for producing by the same factories during the succeeding year of a fully equal product, with reduction of at least fifteen hundred operatives; one machine improvement for effecting an operation called "lasting" having been introduced, which is capable of doing the former work of from two hundred to two hundred and fifty men with a force not exceeding fifty men.

Another fact confirmatory of the above conclusions, is that all investigators seem to be agreed that the depression of industry in recent years has been experienced with the greatest severity in those countries where machinery has been most largely adopted, and least, or almost not at all, in those countries and in those occupations where hand-labor and hand-labor products have not been materially interfered with or supplanted. There is no evidence that the mass of the people of any country removed from the great lines of the world's commerce, as in China, India, Turkey, Mexico, and the states of Northern Africa, have experienced any economic disturbance prior to 1883, except from variations in crops, or civil commotions; and if the experience of a few of such countries has been different since 1883, the causes may undoubtedly be referred to the final influence of long-delayed extraneous disturbances, as has been the case in Mexico, in respect to the universal depreciation of silver, and in Japan, from an apparent culmination of a long series of changes in the civilization and economy of that country. There have, moreover, been no displacements of labor or reduction in the cost of labor or product in all those industries in civilized countries, where machinery has not been increased; as, for example, in domestic service, in such departments of agriculture as the raising and care of stock, the growing of cotton, of flax, hemp, and of tropical fibers of like character, or in such mechanical occupations as masonry, painting, upholstering, plastering, and cigar-making, or those of engineers, firemen, teamsters, watchmen, and the like.

Finally, it is of the first importance to note how all the other causes which have been popularly regarded as having directly occasioned, or essentially contributed to, the recent depression of trade and industry—with the exception of such as are in the nature of natural phenomena, as bad seasons and harvests, diseases of plants and animals, disappearance of fish, and the like, and such as are due to excessive taxation, consequent on war expenditures, all of which are local, and the first temporary in character—naturally group themselves about the one great cause that has been suggested, as sequences or derivatives, and as secondary rather than primary in their influence; and to the facts and deductions that are confirmatory of this conclusion attention will be next invited.