September 13, 1895.] 



SCIENCE. 



329 



increase will follow the completion of the 

 Mcaragua Canal ! 



Improvements in engineering methods 

 often cause the destruction of vast amounts 

 of fixed capital by the substitution of new 

 appliances for the old. The British govern- 

 ment expended in 1864-'70 £20,000,000 on 

 a class of armored gunboats, which, before 

 any use was made of them, were condemned 

 as worthless, owing to the improvements in 

 the construction of guns. It expended large 

 sums on iron guns, which became useless by 

 the substitution of steel guns, etc. 



A telegraph company expended large 

 sums of money in constructing a line 

 through Siberia and Alaska, whereby to get 

 telegraphic communication between New 

 York and London via San Francisco and 

 Behring Straits, which was made totally 

 worthless by the laying of the first Atlantic 

 Cable (Denslow, p. 81). Numerous canals 

 and canal boats have been thrown out of 

 use and allowed to fall into decay on ac- 

 count of the competition of railroads. 



Between 1872 and 1880 a revolution 

 took place in the construction and in the 

 method of driving blast furnaces for mak- 

 ing iron, so that of 700 blast furnaces run- 

 ning or in condition to run in 1872, proba- 

 bly not 50 are now on the active list, and 

 although the production of iron has more 

 than quadrupled since that date, only 480 

 furnaces are now on the list of existing fur- 

 naces, and more than half of these are out 

 of blast. The destruction of capital in- 

 volved in the abandonment of old furnaces 

 is probably over $100,000,000. A similar 

 destruction of fixed capital has followed 

 the substitution of Bessemer steel for pud- 

 dled iron, and the introduction of improved 

 forms of rolling mills. A great decrease in 

 the value of the iron mines of New Jersey, 

 New York and Pennsylvania has followed 

 the opening of better mines in Lake 

 Superior. 



One of the great achievements of engi- 



neering is the substitution of the factory 

 system of labor for the old domestic sys- 

 tem. The beginning of the factory system 

 was in the decade of 1760-1770, when the 

 spinning jenny, the spinning frame and the 

 spinning mule were introduced into the 

 textile industry, but it did not begin its 

 full career of development until after 

 Watt had perfected his steam engine about 

 thirty years later. Has the factory sys- 

 tem been a benefit to civilization? There 

 is no better authority on this question 

 than Mr. Carroll D. "Wright, formerly 

 United States Commissioner of Labor, and 

 now Commissioner of the Census of 1890. 

 He says : (Johnson's Cyclopaedia, Vol. 

 III., p. 265): "The factory system is in 

 every respect vastly superior to the domes- 

 tic system as an element of civilization, 

 although this is contrary to popular im- 

 pression and largely against popular senti- 

 ment. * * * Under the domestic system the 

 home of the worker was the workshop 

 also, and the wheels or looms disputed with 

 the inmates for the room and the conven- 

 iences for house work. Small, close crowded, 

 with bad air and bad surroundings, the hut 

 of the domestic worker was occupied by a 

 class which had not found, and cannot find, 

 its like under the factory system, for, as a 

 rule, the operative of to-day occupies a home 

 even in the factory tenement or boarding 

 house superior in every sense to the home 

 of the domestic worker. 



" Under the domestic system of industry 

 grew up that great pauper class in Great 

 Britain which was a disgrace to civilization. 

 It continued to grow, until one-fourth of 

 the annual budget was for the support of 

 paupers. * * * The domestic labor's home 

 was far from having the chai-acter poetry has 

 given it. Huddled together in what poetry 

 calls a cottage and history a hut, the 

 weaver's family lived and worked without 

 comfort, conveniences, good food, good air, 

 and without much intelligence. Drunken- 



