Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/598

580 manual laborers of the world has not advanced concurrently, in recent years, with the increased and cheapened production of such articles. Many things, consequently, have been, as it were, showered upon these classes, which they do not know how to use, and do not feel that they need, and for which, therefore, they can create no market. A man who has long been contented with one shirt a week, is not likely to wish to use seven immediately, even if he can buy seven for the price that he formerly paid for one, and his wife takes pleasure in doing his washing. But the most remarkable example of this nature is to be found in the case of sugar, which takes precedence over most of the articles which enter largely into the world's commerce and consumption in respect to extraordinary increase of product, and equally extraordinary decline in price within recent years, and mainly (as will be hereafter shown) by reason of wholly artificial agencies—bounties—rather than from improvements in machinery and processes, or increased facilities for distribution.

One of the inevitable results of a supply of product or service in excess of remunerative demand (i. e., over-production) is a decline of price; and as the power of production and distribution has been increased in an unexampled degree since 1873 (as has been already shown), the prices of nearly all the great staple commodities of commerce and consumption have declined within the same period (as will be hereafter shown), in manner altogether without precedent in all former commercial history. That this experience has been altogether natural, and what might have been expected under the circumstances, will appear from the following considerations:

If production exceeds, by even a very small percentage, what is required to meet every current demand for consumption, the price which the surplus will command in the open market will govern and control the price of the whole; and if it can not be sold at all, or with difficulty, an intense competition on the part of the owners of accumulated stocks to sell will be engendered, with a great reduction or annihilation of all profit. Mr. John Bright, of England, in one of his recent speeches, relates the following incident of personal experience: "I know," he said, "a company manufacturing chemicals of some kind extensively, and one of the principal persons in it told me that in one of those high years, 1872, 1873, and 1874, the profits of that concern were £80,000, and he added that when the stock-taking and its results were communicated to the leading owner in the business, he made this very wise observation: 'I am very sorry to hear it, for you may depend upon it in the years that are to come we shall have to pay the whole of it back'; and in speaking to me of it he said, 'It is quite true, because for several years we have been able to make no dividend at all.' Well, why was that? The men who were making so large incomes at that time reinvested their money in increasing their business. Many of the concerns in this trade doubled their