6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



expressed the results of his own observation: "Traveling," he 

 says, " makes men wiser, but less happy. When men of sober 

 age travel they gather knowledge, but they are, after all, subject 

 to recollections mixed with regret ; their affections are weakened 

 by being extended over more objects, and they learn new habits 

 which can not be gratified when they return home." Again, as 

 the former few and simple requirements of the masses have be- 

 come more varied and costly, the individual effort necessary for 

 the satisfaction of the latter is not relatively less, even under the 

 new conditions of production, than before, and in many instances 

 is possibly greater. Hence, notwithstanding the large advance 

 in recent years in the average rates of wages, and their increased 

 purchasing power, there is no less complaint than formerly of 

 the cost of living ; when (as M. Leroy-Beaulieu has pointed out 

 in the case of France *) the foundation for the complaint is for 

 the most part to be found in the circumstance that a totally dif- 

 ferent style of living has been adopted, and that society makes 

 conformity with such different style a standard of family re- 

 spectability. 



There is, therefore, unquestionably in these facts an explana- 

 tion of what to many has seemed one of the greatest puzzles of 

 the times, namely, that with greater and increasing abundance 

 and cheapness of most desirable things, popular discontent with 

 the existing economic condition of affairs does not seem to dimin- 

 ish, but rather to greatly increase. And out of such discontent, 

 which is not based on anything akin to actual and unavoidable 

 poverty, has originated a feeling that the new conditions of 

 abundance should be further equalized by some other methods 

 than intelligent individual effort, self-denial, and a natural, pro- 

 gressive material and social development,! and that the state 



stitutions undrf which they live with those which their expatriated fellow-countrymen en- 

 joy elsewhere. 



* " The Fall in the Price of Commodities : its Cause and Effect," by Leroy-Beau- 

 lieu. Economiste franfais, April, 1887. 



f As it is important to make clear the full force and meaning of the term " self- 

 denial" and " natural progressive material and social development," as above used, atten- 

 tion is asked to the following considerations : The investigations of Mr. Atkinson show 

 that an increase of five cents' worth of material comfort per day, for every day in the 

 year, to each inhabitant of the United States, would require the annual production and 

 equitable distribution of more than $1,000,000,000 worth of commodities ! In the last 

 analysis, therefore, national prosperity and adversity are measurable by a difference which 

 is not in excess of the price of a daily glass of beer; or, if five cents' worth of product 

 for each inhabitant could be added to the capital of the country in excess of the average 

 for each day in the year, such a year, by reason of its increased exchanges and sum of 

 individual satisfactions, could not be other than most prosperous. 



Again, the extraordinary and comparatively recent reductions iu the cost of transpor- 

 tation of commodities by land and water (in the case of the New York Central and Hudson 

 River Railroad, for example, from an average of 3-45 cents per ton per mile in 1865 to 



