Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/52

42 The earlier days of the factory system, while an improvement upon what had preceded, were not particularly promising, as viewed from this latter-day standpoint. The manners and morals of the time were necessarily imported into the factory, and, while the working men and women and children soon gained a higher plane of comfort, that level would seem to us an exceedingly small advance upon the conditions of the Middle Ages. The hours were long, the wages low, the social conditions in all respects still unsatisfactory. Women and children were flogged for actual or imputed idleness, for incompetence, or even for lack of endurance and of strength. But the output soon filled the markets of a then poor and moneyless people, and wages and prices began to readjust themselves, as always, to the new commercial conditions, and the end of the century has found the operatives organized and powerful, knowing and compelling fair treatment, sometimes even tyrannizing over the employer, indeed, but usually simply securing by force what is fairly theirs and can not be otherwise obtained. "Wages have risen and prices fallen, until the day's "work earns several times as much as a century ago. Moral tone has improved as social conditions have thus been improved, and comfortable houses, plenty of good food and many of the luxuries of the beginning of the century are taken as ordinary comforts by the operatives of to-day. Then the wealth of the country was $320 per capita, to-day $1,350; then it aggregated seven and a half millions, to-day its total is about a hundred billions, increasing thirteen times, while the per capita account has risen to four times its initial figure. In a half-century these workers have increased their per capita account as depositors in the savings banks from about $175 to about $400; the total deposits growing from something over forty millions to about twenty-five hundred millions. The factory system is also the source of all labor legislation, and this, on the whole, splendidly beneficent code is thus due to the perfection of the methods of mechanical engineering. Society is advantaged from top to bottom and in every class, most of all in the humblest.

While it is true, as I have sometimes asserted, that "great movements, whether of mind or matter, of nations or of plants, of civilization or of comets, have definable rate and path," and while it is the fact that, as I have put it, 'Nature turns no sharp corners' in such mighty fluxes of energies, it is nevertheless true that some of her movements have paths of considerable deviation from the right line, and some of the motions illustrated are occasionally almost as tremendous accelerations as is the irruption of the volcano after its long period of preliminary development and storage of energy. The process of evolution is continuous; but its action involves every variety of acceleration and visible change, even though the evolution is itself a steady operation. We see only portions of its action and lose sight of its continuity and