September 13, 1895.] 



SCIENCE. 



333 



number of the very poor. The poor are 

 growing poorer, say the agitators. Whom 

 do you mean by the poor ? Is it a family 

 that has only $100 in the savings banks ? 

 Next year it will have $200 and five years 

 thence $1,000. 



Do you mean, then, we ask the agitator, 

 the man who has not a dollar in any bank, 

 who has not enough ahead to keep him 

 from starvation a week ? If he is the man 

 whom you call poor, and whom you have 

 been saying for the last 20 years that he is 

 growing poorer, how much poorer is he go- 

 ing to get ? How many such men are there 

 in the United States ? Let them stand up 

 and be counted. 



We have seen that engineering is the 

 chief factor in the production of wealth; 

 that wealth has enormously increased in 

 the past few years, and that it is being well 

 distributed, although perhaps not as well 

 as it ought to be, among the common people. 

 What of the future? Engineering has 

 caused men to leave the farm and seek the 

 cities, because in the cities they can grow 

 rich faster. Engineering, again, through 

 rapid transit, electric cars and the like, is 

 making it possible for these men who work 

 in the city to sleep in the suburbs, and 

 bring up their families in a place which has 

 all the advantages of city and country com- 

 bined. One of the triumphs of the iron- 

 making engineer has been the construction 

 of a hollow steel tube of great lightness 

 and strength. The mechanical engineer 

 has found out how to make ball bearings, 

 and lo! we have the bicycle of 1895, 400,000 

 of them to be made in this year. Who can 

 estimate the value to the people of this new 

 industry, building up an athletic and health j^ 

 race of men and women, and causing good 

 roads to be built from one end of the coun- 

 try to the other, another work of engineer- 

 ing by which the farmer may move his 

 crops more cheaply and the cost of food be 

 correspondingly decreased. What next? As 



Mr. Hewitt has foreseen, the wage-earner 

 will become a stockholder in the corpora- 

 tions for which he works, and labor will 

 hire capital, instead of capital hiring labor. 

 Then what Mr. Zahm calls the fourth estate, 

 the proletariat, will cease to exist. It will 

 be merged into the third estate, the common 

 people, who are at the same time wage- 

 earners and capitalists. The proletariat, or 

 fourth estate, as a separate element in so- 

 ciety, antagonistic to the third estate, is al- 

 ready a vanishing quantity. We who are 

 old enough remember the alarm created 

 throughout the world in the years 1867, 

 1868 and 1869 when the dreaded ' Interna- 

 tional ' held its congresses in Europe. Who 

 now dreads the International. True, it 

 may be strong enough some day in some 

 one or more places to repeat the terror of 

 the Paris Commune in 1871, but the upris- 

 ing will end as the uprising of the Commune 

 did, and it will not take two months to end 

 it, as it then did. 



" The Empire is peace," said Napoleon 

 III. just before the Franco-Prussian War. 

 He was mistaken. The war took place, 

 causing vast loss and suffering, followed by 

 the terrible agony of the Commune. But 

 how nobly France recovered from the shock, 

 how quickly she paid the indemnity to Ger- 

 many out of the actual stored savings of her 

 common people. No revolution in the social 

 order took place, only a change in govern- 

 ment, then everything went on as before. 

 So it will be if the International should 

 arise, as is predicted by the alarmists, and 

 reproduce the horrors of the French Revo- 

 lution. The world will live through it; the 

 social order, as of old, will be restored, and 

 the present relations of capital and labor 

 will not be changed, except as by gradual 

 and necessary evolution, due to engineering 

 more largely than to any other one cause, 

 capital and labor becoming merged by the 

 laborers becoming capitalists. This will 

 be the crowning triumph of engineering. 



