THE ECONOMIC DISTURBANCES SINCE 1873. 451 



sachusetts in the year 1885, resulted in the capacity for producing by 

 the same factories during the succeeding year of a fully equal prod- 

 uct, with reduction of at least fifteen hundred operatives ; one machine 

 improvement for effecting an operation called " lasting " having been 

 introduced, which is capable of doing the former work of from two 

 hundred to two hundred and fifty men with a force not exceeding 

 fifty men. 



Another fact confirmatory of the above conclusions, is that all 

 investigators seem to be agreed that the depression of industry 

 in recent years has been experienced with the greatest severity in 

 those countries where machinery has been most largely adopted, and 

 least, or almost not at all, in those countries and in those occupations 

 where hand-labor and handdabor products have not been materially 

 interfered with or supplanted. There is no evidence that the mass of 

 the people of any country removed from the great lines of the world's 

 commerce, as in China, India, Turkey, Mexico, and the states of North- 

 ern Africa, have experienced any economic disturbance prior to 

 1883, except from variations in crops, or civil commotions ; and if the 

 experience of a few of such countries has been different since 1883, the 

 causes may undoubtedly be referred to the final influence of long-de- 

 layed extraneous disturbances, as has been the case in Mexico, in re- 

 spect to the universal depreciation of silver,* and in Japan, from an 

 apparent culmination of a long series of changes in the civilization and 

 economy of that country. There have, moreover, been no displace- 

 ments of labor or reduction in the cost of labor or product in all those 

 industries in civilized countries, where machinery has not been in- 

 creased ; as, for example, in domestic service, in such departments of 

 agriculture as the raising and care of stock, the growing of cotton, of 

 flax, hemp, and of tropical fibers of like character, or in such mechanical 

 occupations as masonry, painting, upholstering, plastering, and cigar- 

 making, or those of engineers, firemen, teamsters, watchmen, and 

 the like. 



Finally, it is of the first importance to note how all the other causes 

 which have been popularly regarded as having directly occasioned, or 

 essentially contributed to, the recent depression of trade and industry 

 with the exception of such as are in the nature of natural phenom- 

 ena, as bad seasons and harvests, diseases of plants and animals, disap- 

 pearance of fish, and the like, and such as are due to excessive taxa- 

 tion, consequent on war expenditures, all of which are local, and the 

 first temporary in character naturally group themselves about the 

 one great cause that has been suggested, as sequences or derivatives, 

 and as secondary rather than primary in their influence ; and to the 

 facts and deductions that are confirmatory of this conclusion atten- 

 tion will be next invited. 



* The average rate of exchange in Mexico on London fell frem 41 to 46 per dollar in 

 the early months of 1885 to 38 to *76 in the spring of 1886. 



