DISTRESS OF NATIONS WITH PERPLEXITY.
Mr. Gladstone said, but a few years ago, that “the productive capacity of the world doubled every seven years,—but population does not double in four times seven years, and our consumptive capacity does not more than double in twice seven years. He estimated the machinery of England, worked to its capacity, as able to produce as much as 600,000,000 men, or half the adult population of the globe, could have done at the beginning of this century, with the tools and machinery of that time. The productive capacity of the machines of Massachusetts is estimated as equivalent to the productive capacity of 50,000,000 workmen sixty years ago. The labor-saving machinery in the shoe industry, employing 215,000 operatives, men, women, and children, will produce as much as 2,500,000 men working by hand. In the steel industry, three men now turn out as many steel billets as 115 men did in 1892. In boiler making, thirty men do the work of 500 but a few years ago. The new typesetting machine threw 15,000 printers out of employment in five years. A modern spinning machine can be handled by a child, and will turn out more and better work than 45,000 spinning wheels, such as our grandmothers used to make cloth with. One boy now attends enough stocking knitting machines to turn out 5,000 pairs a week. The pneumatic atomizer enables one unskilled laborer to paint more freight cars than can fifteen skilled hands. Twenty-four out of twenty-five men have been displaced in the manufacture of musical instruments. The new machinery for handling coal from piers to vessels does what it formerly required thousands of men to do, and the steam shovel mines and loads ore for a few cents which was formerly handled at an average cost of one dollar per ton. With the new Diamond-match machines 300 girls can turn out as many matches as 8,000 workmen by former methods. From 1856 to 1861, 146,000 embroidery workers were displaced by machinery in Ireland and Scotland, and in 1856 the power loom took the bread from 250,000 hand workers in Flanders. To-day one man and two boys can spin as much cotton as 1,100 could do in 1800, and one weaver can do as much now as fifty-four could seventy-five years ago. One man with one nail machine does the work of 1,000 by hand; eighty-five per cent of the hand labor has been displaced in the manufacture of watches. In 1891, 2,739,743 tons of coal were mined by the use of machinery; in 1896, 12,553,522 tons. One boy now does the work of eighty men with a machine for making tin cans, etc. All inventions that enable one man to do the work of 100 men, throw at least ninety out of employment, and, probably out of bread for themselves and families. At present the 215,000 shoe operators, working ten hours a day with the modern machines, can produce in four months the shoes that we consume in twelve months; and yet, in the presence of all these facts, you hear men, with a persistency of proclamation, and a pretense of patriotism worthy of a cause commendable, spouting and sputtering around, that all can be comfortably well off if they will only work, and that all can get work if they want it. But it is not true. When the shoemakers of the country can make all the shoes in four months that the people furnishing a market consume in twelve months, is it not evident that there must be idle shoemakers? And when the few that do get work receive only twenty-five per cent, as Carroll D. Wright says they do, of the wealth they daily create, must they not continue to be poor? These are the main causes for the increase of poverty. There are other minor causes of poverty and crime, or sin, but not worthy of mention in contrast with compulsory idleness because of rapid means and processes of production, and the exploitation of much the larger part of the new wealth which the toiler daily creates. This deprives millions of employment, throws them on the charity of the uncharitable and the mercy of the merciless, and leaves other millions who do work, so small a part of their daily product that they can scarcely live.—Selected.