September 13, 1895.] 



SCIENCE. 



327 



The increased productiveness of the 

 farmer, due to his use of machinery, is 

 shown as follows : 



"An ordinary farm hand in the United 

 States raises as much grain as three in 

 England, four in France, five in Germany 

 and six in Austria, which shows what an 

 enormous waste of labor occurs in Europe 

 because farmers are not possessed of the 

 same mechanical appliances as in the United 

 States. 



" In the United States one man can feed 

 250, whei-eas in Europe one man feeds only 

 30 persons. N"or can we hope for a better 

 state of things in Europe soon. So dense 

 is the ignorance of most men, even among 

 the educated classes, that they are con- 

 vinced that all labor-saving appliances are 

 an evil, and that the more persons there 

 are employed to do any given work the 

 better." 



During a visit to Germany three months 

 ago I learned of an instance of this igno- 

 rance among the laboring classes . My trav- 

 eling companion saw three men cutting 

 grass on a lawn with ordinary scythes and 

 sickles. " Why don't you use a lawn 

 mower?" said he, " then one man could do 

 as much as three are now doing." " Don't 

 talk to us about lawn mowers," said one of 

 the men, "it is all we can do now to find 

 work enough to earn our bread. If we 

 had a lawn mower two of us would starve." 

 They did not think that if their employer 

 saved the wages of two men, the money 

 would burn a hole in his pocket until he 

 either employed it for some useful purpose, 

 by giving employment to either the same 

 two men or two others, or loaned it to some 

 one who would employ it. 



In the United States, however, the old- 

 time opposition to the introduction of labor 

 saving machinery as a harm to the laboring 

 man, throwing him out of employment, has 

 now almost died out among reasoning men, 

 and it is generally acknowledged by men 



who have studied the subject that the 

 steam engine and labor-saving machinery 

 in general are the chief agents of the civili- 

 zation of the latter half of the nineteenth 

 century, and that they have increased the 

 productiveness of man's labor, increased 

 his wages, shortened his hours of labor, 

 cheapened his food and clothing and given 

 the average man comforts and luxuries 

 which a century ago not even kings would 

 have commanded. 



Mulhall's ' Dictionary of Statistics ' 

 (1892) gives the following facts concerning 

 the agriculture of the world. " Capital and 

 product have more than doubled since 

 1840, but the number of hands has not 

 risen 50 per cent. 



Agricultural Capital of the World JliUions of Dollars. 



Land. Cattle. Sundries. Total. 



1840 3.5,475 4,970 4,735 45,180 



1860 59,310 7,810 7,495 74,615 



1887 88,880 13,505 12,645 115,030 



Agricultural Capital in the United States. 

 Millions of Dollars. 



Land. Cattle. Sundries. Tot.il. 



1840 2,000 480 500 2,9.80 



1860 6,910 1,130 1,185 9,225 



1887 12,800 2,506 3,175 18,480 



"In the United States 9,000,000 hands 

 raise nearly half as much grain as 66,000,- 

 000 hands in Europe. Thus it appears that 

 for want of implements and of proper ma- 

 chinery there is a waste of labor equal to 

 48,000,000 of peasants." 



The census returns of the manufacturers 

 of the United States, 1880 and 1890, show 

 the following: 



Increase 

 1880. 1890. per cent, 

 ^o. of establishments re- 

 porting 253,502 322,624 27.27 



Capital $2,780,766,895 S6,138',716,604 120.76 



Av. No. of employees 2,700,732 4,476,094 6.5.74 



Total wages $939,462,252 82,171,356,919 130.13 



Cost of materials used 3,395,925,123 5,018,277,603 47.77 



Value of products 5,349,191,458 9,054,191,468 69.27 



Vast economic changes throughout the 

 world have recently taken place as the re- 

 sult of the development of engineering. Mr. 

 Edgerton E. Williams in his article on 

 ' Thirty Years in the Grain Trade ' {North 

 American Review, July, 1895), says: 



