818 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



as well as in the broad popular strata, respecting the influence which 

 the rapid advance of science and art is exercising upon the character of 

 popular life, and respecting the end to which that advance is tending. 



The questions have been raised and discussed whether man is really 

 better and happier for all these achievements of science and art, or 

 whether they do not rather lead to the destruction of all ideal quali- 

 ties of good, and to a coarse pleasure-seeking ; whether the inequality 

 in the division of the goods and pleasures of life will not be magnified 

 through them ; and whether the opportunities for work of individuals 

 will not be diminished through the growth of machine-industry and 

 the division of labor resulting from it, and the laborer himself be 

 brought into a more restrained, dependent condition than before ; or, 

 in short, whether, instead of the lordship of birth and the sword, there 

 will not prevail the still more oppressive rule of inherited or acquired 

 wealth. 



It can not be denied that there is now some show of justification 

 for these gloomy anticipations. The rapid and continuous advance of 

 scientific technics must necessarily, as it goes on, have a disturbing 

 effect on many branches of industry. Better working methods may in 

 many ways cause production to rise faster than consumption, and reduce 

 the demand for labor, while manual labor, which formerly employed a 

 much larger number of workmen to produce the same results, will no 

 longer be able to compete with special machines. The like may be 

 observed in the production of food-materials. Cheaper means of trans- 

 portation are bringing to the old civilized lands the products in masses 

 of thinly inhabited regions, whose virgin soils are not yet in need of 

 artificial fertilization, but in which the scarcity of labor has led to the 

 perfection of mechanical processes. It is true that scientific art pro- 

 vides means of equalizing these disadvantages by more rational meth- 

 ods of fertilizing and working ; yet it is very hard to replace old 

 accustomed but untenable conditions by better ones. Complaints are 

 multiplying over the general depression in prices, and the falling off 

 of the demand for labor, and the strangest theories are proposed for 

 curing these evils by the isolation of certain lands against the products 

 of others, and by forced limitations of production. The adherents of 

 such theories go so far as to deny all utility to mankind of the scien- 

 tific tendency, and to dream of a return to the methods of former pre- 

 sumed happier days. They do not recollect that, in this case, the 

 number of men would also have to be brought back to the old figure. 

 The number of happy shepherds and huntsmen is very small, and yet 

 it must enter as an essential factor into the estimation of the greater 

 or less prosperity of any period. It is a very hard but at the same 

 time an unalterable social law, that all transitions to other, even if they 

 be better, conditions, are connected with suffering. It is, therefore, 

 certainly a humane proceeding to alleviate these Bufferings to the pres- 

 ent generation by a careful direction and partial limitation of the new, 



