42 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 neces- 

 sarily 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, know- 

 ing 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 im- 

 proved, 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 en- 

 gineering. 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 move- 

 ments, whether of mind or matter, of nations or of plants, of civiliza- 

 tion 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 accelera- 

 tions as is the irruption of the volcano after its long period of prelim- 

 inary 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 



