5 8o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



manual laborers of the world has not advanced concurrently, in recent 

 years, with the increased and cheapened production of such articles. 

 Many things, consequently, have been, as it were, showered upon these 

 classes, which they do not know how to use, and do not feel that they 

 need, and for which, therefore, they can create no market. A man 

 who has long been contented with one shirt a week, is not likely to 

 wish to use seven immediately, even if he can buy seven for the price 

 that he formerly paid for one, and his wife takes pleasure in doing 

 his washing. But the most remarkable example of this nature is to be 

 found in the case of sugar, which takes precedence over most of the 

 articles which enter largely into the world's commerce and consump- 

 tion in respect to extraordinary increase of product, and equally ex- 

 traordinary decline in price within recent years, and mainly (as will 

 be hereafter shown) by reason of wholly artificial agencies bounties 

 rather than from improvements in machinery and processes, or in- 

 creased facilities for distribution. 



One of the inevitable results of a supply of product or service 

 in excess of remunerative demand (i. e., over-production) is a decline 

 of price ; and as the power of production and distribution has been 

 increased in an unexampled degree since 1873 (as has been already 

 shown), the piices of nearly all the great staple commodities of com- 

 merce and consumption have declined within the same period (as will 

 be hereafter shown), in manner altogether without precedent in all 

 former commercial history. That this experience has been altogether 

 natural, and what might have been expected under the circumstances, 

 will appear from the following considerations : 



If production exceeds, by even a very small percentage, what is 

 required to meet every current demand for consumption, the price 

 which the surplus will command in the open market will govern and 

 control the price of the whole ; and if it can not be sold at all, or with 

 difficulty, an intense competition on the part of the owners of accu- 

 mulated stocks to sell will be engendered, with a great reduction or 

 annihilation of all profit. Mr. John Bright, of England, in one of his 

 recent speeches, relates the following incident of personal experience : 

 " I know," he said, " a company manufacturing chemicals of some 

 kind extensively, and one of the principal persons in it told me that in 

 one of those high years, 1872, 1873, and 1874, the profits of that con- 

 cern were 80,000, and he added that when the stock-taking and its 

 results were communicated to the leading owner in the business, he 

 made this very wise observation : ' I am very sorry to hear it, for you 

 may depend upon it in the years that are to come we shall have to pay 

 the whole of it back ' ; and in speaking to me of it he said, ' It is quite 

 true, because for several years we have been able to make no divi- 

 dend at all.' Well, why was that ? The men who were making so 

 large incomes at that time reinvested their money in increasing their 

 business. Many of the concerns in this trade doubled their establish- 



