Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/673

Rh compensation, although the net gain, taking matters strictly, may hardly be appreciable.

The next head of complaint is the increase in the severity of labor and the want of any proportionate remuneration.

On this head it may be admitted, to begin with, that there is apparent foundation for some of the complaints. Workmen in particular employments do not get a reward at all in proportion to the increase of production in those employments. The illustration of a cotton-mill is familiar. A single attendant on a number of machines will "produce" as much in an hour as formerly in a year or two, but his wages are only double—or perhaps not quite double—what they were when the production was so much less. A great steamship supplies another illustration. The ship does many times the work which could have been performed by the sailing ship it has displaced, and with much fewer men in proportion to the tonnage conveyed. But the wages of the average member of the crew are again only double, or not quite double, what they were when the conveyance done was so much less. In these and similar cases, who gets the benefit of all the increase of production? The workmen in the particular employments concerned, receiving only a fraction of the gain, may be excused for suspecting that there is something inexplicable in those social and economic arrangements by which the benefit is spirited away from them.

But, however natural the question, it is not difficult to point out that there is a good reason why workmen in some given employments should only receive a fraction of the benefit from the increased productiveness of those employments, and that this fact is quite consistent with an improvement in the position of workmen all round in proportion to the generally increased productiveness of labor, which is the real question we are now investigating, for the purpose of comparing this increase of productiveness with the increase of the severity of labor throughout society. The short explanation is that the employments in which there is a great increase of production, being mainly the employments in which there are great mechanical improvements from time to time, constitute only a part of the whole employment for labor, and that by a natural law labor in each employment finds its level, the increase of the return arising from an invention in a particular employment resulting in a gain, not to the particular laborers concerned, but to the whole community of laborers. That the gain may be general, it is, in fact, essential that laborers generally should gain as consumers rather than as producers, which implies that in a given employment wages should increase, not in proportion to the increased productiveness of that