Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/676

658 least proportionate increase of the remuneration of labor. The strain upon the nervous system, through the combined monotony of the employment and the constant vigilance required, are no doubt very often most severe, and are perhaps felt the more because the present generation is comparatively untrained. But the increased severity of toil, without proportionate remuneration, might be admitted in those special employments without altering the fact that remuneration has increased generally. What seems to have happened in these cases is, that the development of society imposes a heavy burden on a special class, involving rapid change in the quality of its labor, to which it is hardly equal, but that the improvement in quality is part of the general improvement in society. The nervous power to stand monotony and supply the necessary vigilance and other moral qualities necessary for the supervision of machines may exist in greater abundance in the next generation, along with a continued improvement in the quality of labor in non-mechanical employments.

It will, perhaps, be urged that the workman does not get a proportionate remuneration because the capitalist obtains for himself the increased product—the socialist argument. But the facts are all against this explanation. One of the most remarkable facts of recent years is the general decline in the return to capital. Capitalists from year to year have been willing to invest for a smaller and smaller return. We must assume, then, that if they have gained at all it has only been by the immense cheapening of commodities, and labor has gained more than in proportion. This would appear to be the case: only the laborers who have gained, as we have seen, are. not specially those who are occupied about machines. The gain is generally diffused, and is received by laborers generally in proportion to the relative values of their work. Apparently the greatest gain has been among the higher artisan and lower professional classes—the very classes, it may be remarked, by whom the strain of modern life is felt the most intensely.

The conclusion, then, is, that if the return to labor generally is not proportionate to the increase of the severity of toil itself, the reason must be that people are working for inadequate objects. The game, in one sense, may not be worth the candle. The problem is another form of the very same problem that has been considered with reference to the payment of monopoly rents. On the whole, notwithstanding all the drawbacks of city life, there is some improvement which makes the payment of monopoly rents worth while. People would not change back to the former conditions. So, on the whole, notwithstanding all the drawbacks of really severer toil, and the inadequacy of the