788 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ancient historians, tbat tlie Aryans sojourned first in the region of the 

 Danube, and that Thrace was civilized before Greece. Notwithstand- 

 ing this example, agriculture seems to have been generally more an- 

 cient in the temperate part of Europe than we would be ready to 

 believe from the accounts of the Greeks, who were disposed, like some 

 modern peoples, to make all progress appear to start from their nation. 

 In America, if we may judge from the civilizations of Mexico and 

 Peru, which do not go back even to the first centuries of the Christian 

 era, agriculture was not, probably, as ancient as in Asia and Egypt. 

 But the immense dispersion of certain kinds of cultivation — as that of 

 maize, of tobacco, and of the yam — leads us to assign an antiquity of 

 nearly or about two thousand years to it. History fails us in this case, 

 and we have no resource for ascertaining anything about it, except 

 from discoveries in archaeology and geology. 



WAGES, CAPITAL AND EICH MEK* 



By the Author of "Conflict in Nature and Life." 



IT is no marvel that labor and capital are in conflict ; and yet they 

 are necessarily co-operative factors to the same end. What benefits 

 capital should also benefit labor, and vice verba, and there is essential 

 harmony between them, as Bastiat, Carey, Perry, and other economists 

 insist ; but the theoretical harmony thus so obvious fails in practice, 

 and we are compelled to acknowledge the fact of actual discordance. 

 The interests of labor are in the hands of one class, and the interests of 

 capital in the hands of a very different class, and they naturally enough 

 contend about a certain margin of profit, since what one class gets of 

 this the other must necessarily do without. The war is really between 

 laborers and the employers of laborers ; and it is quite likely in the 

 course of events that this war will become a source of anxiety and suf- 

 fering far beyond what one would expect from such apparently peace- 

 able forces. There is hardly any doubt that, if the wealthy classes in 

 this country could have their unrestrained way in all things, they 

 would build up an aristocracy as oppressive and disdainful as ever ex- 

 isted anywhere. If the so-called working-classes (not embracing those 

 who are their own employers) could have their way, they would do 

 even worse by precipitating the conditions of universal poverty. 



I speak of labor and capital as antagonists ; and this is true, though 

 the owner of capital is not always a party to the conflict ; he is so only 

 when he uses his own capital in the employment of labor. Very large- 

 ly the employer of labor is a borrower of capital, paying for the use of 



* From " Reforms : their Difficulties and Possibilities." New York : D. Appleton & 

 Co., 1884. 



