38 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 his- 

 tory 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 com- 

 manding squads and companies, now are become majors with their bat- 

 talions, colonels with their regiments, generals with their brigades, their 

 army corps, with mighty armies overspreading all the fields of produc- 

 tion of a whole country, even of many countries. Where the single 

 worker labored hour bv 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 multi- 

 plex 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 continu- 

 ally 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 condi- 

 tions, 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 state- 

 ment of the Law of Supply and Demand.* 



Goethe, poet, man of science and seer, prophesied that the nine- 

 teenth century would solve the problems of organization of the indus- 

 tries and the great social and economic problems of an industrial epoch. 

 Carlyle saw the same problems in progress of solution, and his disquisi- 

 tion 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, particu- 

 larly — already partly, yet not wholly, solved — to be that of finding a 

 social organization corresponding to the modern conditions of produc- 



* The Modern Version of the Law of Supply and Demand. — R. H. T. — Science, 

 1898. 



