Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/428

414 advance of the last thirty years has been little short of revolutionary. Science applied to field and farm, mill and factory, ship and railroad, has enormously increased the efficiency of labor. Hence the remarkable rise in wages, and the correlative fact of the fall of prices which makes a dollar exchangeable for more food and clothing than ever. Although the fortunes of men have been steadily improving, heightened sensibility, progress in social ambition, all that goes to raise the standard of living, have kept pace with the increase of popular luxury and refinement. Then, too, the blessings of industrial evolution, though general, have not been universal; and in considering its incidental pains and penalties Mr. Wells is both candid and sympathetic. He notes how handicraft skill is rendered valueless as machinery supersedes trade after trade. Old-time shoemakers now only get cobbling to do, and the tinsmith who once made all the paraphernalia of the kitchen is to-day no more than a tinker. Minute subdivision of labor reduces an operative to a mere tooth on a wheel; disrupted from it by an untoward accident of trade, he is of little more worth than a bit of scrap-metal. In manufactures and commerce modern exigencies demand a discipline which almost completely effaces individuality: both employers and workmen are subordinated as parts of a vast and complex enginery. In undergoing the painful and costly readjustments enforced by new economies, capital and labor have been partners in distress, and labor has not suffered more than capital. The increase in the average man's wealth has been partly at the expense of certain unfortunate classes of capitalists. While one set of farmers are being enriched by the rise in the value of Dakota lands, another set in France and England are being impoverished by the cheapness of Dakota wheat. The Suez Canal, in shortening the route between Europe and the East, effected a saving in freights greatly to the advantage of consumers of tea, silk, cotton, and spices: it also threw into idleness a vast fleet of ships adapted to the voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, and ruined a lengthy chain of interests vested in things as they were. The discovery of excellent coal and iron-ore near together in Alabama cheapens iron, but it extinguishes furnaces in the Northern States built at enormous outlay, and leads to the abandonment of large foundry properties in New York and New England. Every new machine and process, while it enriches the community, entails loss on individuals for expensive plant which must go to the scrap-heap.

While Fortune in the economic world has in the main been prodigal of her gifts, those upon whom her lash has fallen very naturally demean themselves differently from those upon whom she has smiled. While the cultivation of inconspicuousness on the part of millionaires is far from uncommon, those who have seen their possessions melt away in the discarding of old machinery, old methods, and old routes, make loud complaint. Of equal loudness is the alarm vented by those who have reason to fear loss through the supersedure of their property as Science marches on. This complaint and this alarm have been so sustained as to create an exaggerated impression of the evils economic progress brings in its train. Left to themselves, economic forces would merge the world into a single competitive field, the markets of which would be supplied only from the sources where capital and labor could work to most advantage. The redistribution of populations and employments which this would entail is a price a majority of civilized nations refuse to pay: its incidental loss and misery impress their imagination too deeply. Yet the choice is between this shunned evil and a greater. Vastly more is lost by declining to enjoy the gifts new knowledge stands ready to confer, in declining the harvests labor can reap when free to sow and till where natural conditions most favor it. Nothing in Mr. Wells's book is more impressive than the picture he draws of European nations severally striving by force of law to overcome some defect in soil, climate, position, or skill. France, for example, excludes American wheat as far as she can by a high duty. Does she not thereby injure the population of bread-eaters more than she eases the lot of a few wheat-growers? The vanity of attempts to juggle with inexorable Nature has imperiled interests higher than those of wealth; these attempts have checked the good-will which was springing up as trade united international interests and foreigners were ceasing