620 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



recent years accounted worthless, does tlie Soiitliern planter de- 

 rive a goodly proportion of his gains ; and while increase of mag- 

 nitude in industrial concerns tends to minimize the cost of man- 

 agement and to promote the economies due to the division of 

 labor, we see a constantly growing specialization of industry. A 

 few years ago combs formed part of a general variety of goods 

 turned out by an India-rubber factory ; now two large concerns 

 exclusively devoted to comb-manufacture supply nearly the whole 

 American demand. Immense factories of wooden-ware and tin- 

 ware, fitted up with costly and ingenious machinery, have obliter- 

 ated the small local shops which used to flourish a generation ago, 

 and custom shoemakers and tailors are suffering from the con- 

 stant encroachments of manufacturers whose wares are made 

 wholesale at the lowest limit of cost. Low prices, due to cheap- 

 ened production, have created large new home markets, as, for 

 example, in the inexpensive pianos and reed-organs to be found 

 to-day in the homes of all but the poorest. 



Every commercial traveler's trim sample-case bears witness to 

 the progress of a hundred arts and sciences employed to increase 

 the supply of a luxury, to make articles of every-day use better 

 and cheaper. Every can of peaches, every quire of paper, every 

 yard of cassimere, testifies to some new achievement of ingenuity 

 and skill. Does some alert mind in the great army of those who 

 earn by serving devise some new and better way of manufacture, 

 transportation, distribution ? Rivalry quickly imitates it through- 

 out the length and breadth of the land, to the general profit. In 

 this unceasing economization of human effort the railroads have 

 borne a leading part. Markets no longer mean those furnished by 

 groups of States ; the whole Union is now opened up to the enter- 

 prising manufacturer, no matter where he establishes himself ; 

 and the steadily decreasing freight-tariffs of the railroads are due 

 not only to the growth of their business and to applied science in 

 the details of construction and operation, but also to the economy 

 which attends the unification of great systems. A closely printed 

 page scarcely suffices to enumerate the lines operated by the Penn- 

 sylvania Company. From Vancouver to Montreal, a single man- 

 agement extends for twenty -nine hundred miles, and will soon, in 

 reaching the Atlantic seaboard, span the continent. 



The benefits of competition in manufacture and trade are so 

 many and conspicuous that its losses and burdens are very apt to 

 be disregarded ; yet they are neither few nor insignificant. One 

 class of them is the creature of steam, which, applied within re- 

 cent decades to transportation and manufacture, has in the main 

 been so great a source of public advantage. Forty or fifty years 

 ago a weaver made cloth and a shoemaker boots for customers 

 within a short distance of loom or shop, so that they could pretty 



