Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/771

Rh those who found good employment in textile factories in the ante-war period. In point of fact, the women of native birth who were then so numerous in the textile factories have advanced into employments which are better paid, less arduous and of a more individual quality. Their successors, largely French Canadians, who have taken their places in the factory, might not have been able to operate the machinery of a former day for lack of the individual qualities then called for. The mechanism is now more automatic than ever before. Consequently, those who do the work may be of less intelligence, yet their wages or earnings are now twice as much per day, more than double per hour, as compared to the American factory operatives of a generation since.

Again, the prices of the goods have been much reduced. In the grades of work which still require individual skill and aptitude in directing machinery of the highest type, the competition of employers to secure the services of the workmen of highest skill has advanced their rates of wages in some cases in excessive measure. Thus it happens that while during the last fifty years all wages have advanced, even the earnings of common laborers, there is a greater disparity in the rates at the present time than there ever was before. In this same period, while prices have been reduced, the margin of profits on each unit of product has been diminished yet more; the exceptions being only those products in which the supply of the crude material has been diminished in ratio to the increasing demand. This exception applies especially to the products of the forest.

We therefore find existing conditions to be, in fact, low relative prices, high relative wages, coupled with a lessened margin of profits in ratio to our total product as compared to each decade of the last fifty years. But, on the other hand, our aggregate product has been so vastly increased that even at the lessened margin on each unit the aggregate of profits is greater than ever before. The rich have become richer. The people of moderate fortunes have become much more numerous. The condition of the large proportion of those who do the manual and the mechanical work is better than ever before; and lastly, the submerged tenth are still poor in the ordinary sense in which the word is used, not from any fault in society, but because their own individual capacity has not been developed as rapidly as the opportunity which is offered them. There is probably a less relative demand for mere common and unintelligent labor than ever before. Such poor we shall always have with us and how to deal with that element in every population is not the purpose of this essay. I merely submit the fact that in the economic records of this country, which has enjoyed a continental system of absolute free trade among a greater number of persons spread over a wider area than