456 THE POPULAR SCIEJS^CE MONTHLY. 



perfection of machinery — at that very time the number of women and children 

 employed in factories rapidly increases ; an unprecedented cheapness of all 

 necessaries of life is coincident with an intensification of the bitter struggle for 

 bread and shelter. It is a new form of slavery which, it seems to rue, projects 

 itself into view— universal slavery — not patriarchal, but mercantile. I get yearly 

 more tired of what we call civilization. It seems to me a preposterous fraud. 

 It does not give us leisure ; it does not enable us to be clean except at a mon- 

 strous cost ; it affects us with horrible diseases — like diphtheria and typhoid 

 fever— poisoning our water and the air we breathe ; it fosters the vicious classes 

 — the politicians and the liquor-sellers— so tiiat these grow continually more for- 

 midable, and it compels mankind to a strife for bread, which makes us all meaner 

 than God intended us to be. Do you really think the " game pays for the candle " ? 



A review of the causes of the recent economic disturbances in 

 which sj^rapathetic sentiments are allowed to predominate, is not, 

 however, what is needed for estimating their present and future influ- 

 ence ; but rather a review which will array and consider the facts and 

 the conclusions which can be fairly deduced from them, apart, if pos- 

 sible, from the slightest humanitarian predisposition. The surgeon's 

 probe that trembles in sympathy with the quivering flesh into which 

 it penetrates, is not the instrumentality best adapted for making a 

 correct diagnosis. 



In attempting such a review the first point worthy of attention is, 

 that with the exception of a change unpi'ecedented in modern times 

 — in the relative values of the precious metals — all that has occurred 

 differs from the world's past experience simply in degree and not in 

 Jvind. We have, therefore, no absolutely unknown factors to deal 

 with ; and if the record of the past is not as perfect as could be de- 

 sired — for it is only within a comparatively recent period that those 

 exact statistics which constitute the foundations and absolute essen- 

 tials of all correct economic reasoning have been gathered — it is, 

 nevertheless, suflicicntly so to insure against the commission of any 

 serious errors in forecasting the future, of what in respect to industry 

 and society is clearly a process of evolution. This evolution exists in 

 virtue of a law of constant acceleration of knowledge among men of 

 the forces of Nature, and in acquiring a capacity to use them for in- 

 creasing or supplementing human effort, for the purpose of increasing 

 and cheapening the work of production and distribution. There is, 

 furthermore, no reason for doubting that this evolution is to continue, 

 although no one at any one time can foretell what are to be the next 

 phases of development, or even so much as imagine the ultimate goal 

 to which such progress tends. The ignorance, prejudice, and selfish- 

 ness of man may operate in the future, as in the past and at present, 

 in obstructing this progress ; but to entirely arrest it, or even effect a 

 brief retrogression, would seem to be utterly .impossible.* 



* Those persons whose business renders them most conversant with patents, are the 

 ones most sanguine, that nothinpr is likely to occur to interrupt or even check, in the 

 immediate future, the progress of invention and discovery. 



