Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/642

624 were created out of nothing. To say that many other ways might be found to serve our fellow-beings and get pay for it, would be to venture into the realm of prophecy. But, if the past is any sign of the future, it is not wholly unwarranted prophecy.

We should say that in this direction there is probably work for every one of those unemployed laborers of whom we have lately heard so much. If they, or some capitalist for them, would forsake the old ruts of specialization, and, seeking some unsatisfied want of humanity, set about to satisfy it; or if, finding no such want realized, they would set about to arouse and cultivate it, they might multiply their own opportunities, increase their pay, and by relieving the labor market in the old, overcrowded specialties, increase also the pay of their fellow-workmen remaining in those old specialties.

It is often said that there is no such thing as general over-production. I am not so sure of it. I am not sure that all existing occupations may not be overcrowded, and that what is needed may not sometimes be the creation of new ones. The creation of these new ones may be the very thing that will restore equilibrium to the old ones.

A certain amount of ingenuity is, in fact, every year expended in this direction. But might not more be profitably expended? There is a limit to the fertility of the soil, and to the stores of mineral wealth; but what limit is there to the diversification of human wants? We know by the experience of all history that these wants arise and multiply naturally. We know that they may be artificially tempted into being.

Some of these unborn or unsatisfied wants might furnish profitable employments for which women would be especially fitted, and in which they could command large pay. I have no doubt the field is rich. So were the deposits of coal, iron, petroleum, and natural gas, which humanity needed so long before it had sense enough to want them or to find them. So were chemistry and mechanics as rich fields, before they were cultivated, as now.

We have to look upon humanity as a race half blindly, but with slowly opening eyes, groping after the opportunities which lie all around it. These opportunities are of two kinds. They consist not only in Nature's undiscovered resources for making us happy, but in our own ever-multiplying ways of being made happy. We have done with the old quarrel as to what is and what is not "productive" labor. We are familiar with the fine reasoning by which it is proved that the family doctor is a productive laborer because he increases our own working days and working capacity. This reasoning was needed to make him a place in the old narrow field of political economy, which included only the manipulation and valuation of material wealth.

In our wider economic field we find a place for every task by which our fellow-beings make us happy—by which they ease or amplify our lives. There is a place in it for the art, the music, the