Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/48

38 kings and warriors, and through the arts of times of peace, or through revolutions which have been effective protests against the infringement of liberty and the restriction of the worker. Science, applied science, invention and the industrial army have done the work.

With the opening of the twentieth century we are indeed arrived at a Day of Great Things, the fruition of all those forces and movements and evolutions which have been the characteristic features of the history of the nineteenth century. All great works are performed on a mighty scale, and the advances of the industrial army are now made through wide-spread and far-reaching movements of army corps, instead of, as but two or three generations ago, in a thin and straggling line of individual skirmishers. All the world is falling into line, and the whole world-wide army is moving in concert if not under a single generalship. In the industries, the captains of industry, once commanding squads and companies, now are become majors with their battalions, colonels with their regiments, generals with their brigades, their army corps, with mighty armies overspreading all the fields of production of a whole country, even of many countries. Where the single worker labored hour by hour through the long day, from sun to sun,' in the days of our grandparents, companies of workers now cooperate, by subdivided and wonderfully trained tactile talent, in a single multiplex task; the squad of workers in the little factory or mill has grown into an organized body numbering regiments. A whole industry is organized and supplies an enormously expanding market with continually improving product, at steadily declining costs and prices, while, at the same time, giving its armies of workmen and workwomen steadier work, at better wages, under more reasonable and comfortable conditions, day by day and year by year. The higher the wages paid and the shorter the working hours, the less the cost and the lower the price of the product, the greater is the purchasing power of the day's work and of the dollar paid the worker. This is the nineteenth century statement of the Law of Supply and Demand.

Goethe, poet, man of science and seer, prophesied that the nineteenth century would solve the problems of organization of the industries and the great social and economic problems of an industrial epoch. Carlyle saw the same problems in progress of solution, and his disquisition on the organization of labor as the problem of the coming days shows that great men here thought alike. Hitze defines the standing problem of our time, the problem of the nineteenth century, particularly—already partly, yet not wholly, solved—to be that of finding a social organization corresponding to the modern conditions of