THIRD DISTRICT AGRICULTURAL ASSOCIATION. 551 



Now, in the great New England factories, a girl sits at a machine that 

 spins two thousand one hundred miles of thread per day, and she earns 

 $6 to $9 per week, while her mother could only earn from 80 cents to $1 

 per week at the hand-loom; just as one woman can make as much lace in 

 a day now as one hundred could then, and wear it too. Formerly it took 

 six months to refine sugar, now it is done in forty minutes; and one man 

 can make as much flour in a day as could one hundred and fifty fifty 

 years ago. In the old days when the formula for fever was, " Let a pint 

 of blood and give a quart of medicine," they used to destroy sensation in 

 a limb to be amputated by immersing it in boiling oil. I should suppose 

 that amputation would be rather a pleasant sensation after all. Now our 

 surgeons freeze the part to be operated upon with ether spray, and saw off 

 an arm or leg while you are reading the morning paper. By and by per- 

 haps they will administer anaesthetics when they present their bills. That 

 would, indeed, be a sweet boom to suffering humanity. 



It is the use of machinery that has decreased the cost of staple goods 

 and placed them within easy reach of all. Prints can be purchased now 

 for 5 cents a yard that cost 20 to 30 cents fifty years ago; and woolens that 

 then cost $1 per yard are dear now at 50 cents. From 1860 to 1880 the 

 cost of living in this country increased 14 per cent, but in the same period 

 the average compensation of laborers advanced 30 per cent. In the same 

 period the manufactures of this country increased 350 per cent, and the 

 population increased 75 per cent, showing that the use of machinery so 

 enlarges the field of and increases the demand for labor as to be a stim- 

 ulus to immigration. The truth is, necessity is the mother of invention. 

 This country could not produce one tenth of what it does without the aid 

 of modern machinery; and if our products were ten times scarcer they 

 would be ten times dearer, the price always being in an inverse ratio to the 

 production. Two thousand five hundred million pounds of cotton were 

 produced in the South in 1881, and marketed at a cost of $500,000. But 

 without the cotton gin it would have cost one hundred times that much to 

 put it in the market. Last year five hundred million bushels of wheat 

 were produced in this country, and we received $180,000,000 for bread- 

 stuffs from England alone. Now all the available muscle of this country 

 could not have harvested one fourth of that crop without the aid of machin- 

 ery, though every man. woman, and child in the Union had gone into the 

 harvest field. Now, if our grain product were diminished fourfold, what 

 would become of us? Why, in this country alone, steam did last year the 

 work of four hundred million men — more than exist upon the face of the 

 globe. Our railroad engines alone did the work of thirty million men, 

 and there are only ten million in the United States. The inevitable con- 

 clusion then is that intelligent labor does not dig its own grave nor cut its 

 own throat when it slips its neck out of the yoke of toil and gives place to 

 the blind giant steam. Every labor-saving appliance enlarges the field of 

 industry, and without them the race could not continue to exist, so that 

 necessity is the fruitful parent of invention. 



Man received his commission, his letters patent as viceroy of nature, at 

 creation, but he is only just coming into his kingdom now. " God gave 

 the earth to the children of men," as He gave Canaan to Israel. He 

 deeded the land to them, but they had to conquer it. And as that ancient 

 people were six hundred years conquering and subduing their inheritance, 

 because their vices and their ignorance so weakened and enervated them, 

 so man has been nearly six thousand years achieving the conquest of 

 nature and learning to wield the scepter God placed in his hand. In fact, 

 he has not subdued it yet — the subjugation of the material world has only 



