A few years since, when the balance of tradit had first turned in favor of the -United States, and shipments to foreign ports, already enormous, were increasing^ in a ratio quite. unexampled, Mr. Edward Atkinson, an acknowledged authority, expressed himself as. follows: " The alleged abundance of money consists of loanable capital in cotton, corn, coal, and the like, seeking use. It finds its first expre,ssion in the attempt to open for, eign markets, aml the stra nye picture of an excessive shipment to foreign lands, while thou. sands in this country are insufficientl,y supplied. The normal condition has to be reached, in which process the exports in ratio to numbers now excessive may again decline, and the exports and imports become nearly equal—a condition far more consistent with true welfare." The situation as here pictured, and which is certainly the direct result of the appli c,ation of comprehensive mechanical power, will be seen to be analogous to that indicated in the passage heretofore quoted from Thomas Carlyle. Ag,ain, the multiplication of the possibilities of machinery is claimed, and justly, to have cheapened the cost of manufactured goods, and it is contended that this result is beneficent. An editorial writer in the New York Tribune, Aug. 7, 1878, attacked this question after the follow ing fashion: " Go down the streets where cheap shops abound in any American city, and you will see these girls by the hundred flaunting along the sidewalk, with their sleazy dresses made tip in the last fashion, their voices loud and defiant, their whole manlier drunken with silliness and vanity. It iS time w e spoke the truth about this class, for it is from among them that the lowest of all classes is recruited every year. The majority of fallen women in this or any American city are not tbose who have sold their birthright for love, or who have been tempted to their undoing, but these vain, ignorant girls to whom dress and adventure are the wine of life." Even the manufacture anti use of the sewing-machine have not been without their opponents, prominent among these being Thurlow Weed, who allegos that these have resulted " in throwing tens of thousands of poor women out of employment, and affect ing the morals of the country alarmingly.' A writer in the New -1 ork Times, a few years since, made the following extraordinary statement: " The use of machinery not only is a fixed fact, but that use is constantly increasing; every person concerned witb it, from the inventor who shapes the machine, to the user of it, acts for his own immediate benefit, and never troubles himself about the conununity; on the other hand, labor is superabundant, and the question of social order and progress is really the question of the real elect of tnaehinery on labor." This, again, was more than paralleled by an utterance of ex-secretary Boutwell, to the following effect: " Thus faculty, which is a systetnatic expression of intellectual power, is recompensed, while mere persons are becoming less important in the economy of labor." And the followine., translated from an article entitled La Orise, published in a French paper, the Globe Illustre, in Philadelphia, in 1877, is still more significant: " An English manufacturer has said and written: The insubordination of our working people has caused us to dream of the possibility of doing without them. We have made and encouraged all imaginable efforts of intelligence to fill the places of men by more docile. instruments, aud we are almost at the end. :Mechanics has delivered capital from the oppression of labor. In fact, where we still employ a inan, it is only provisionally; 1.vaiting the hour when there shall be invented for us the means of performing his duty without him." Of course the bearing of all of this on the question of the value of machinery as a cause of positive displacement is obvious. The editor of the French paper quoted above thus expresses his view of the probable result of a. condition such as that suggested: " What kind of a system is this which suggests delight to the manufacturer in the hope that society can presently dispense with men. Fool! If your workmen cost you something, are they not also your buyers? What will you do with your products, when, disabled by you, these workingmen no longer consume them?" The ultimate object of an investio.ation like the one here undertaken is to discern, if possible, whether tho net result oestlie constant increase in the use of machinery bo or be not beneficial to the race. The antagonists to this increase, which, as they con tend, has arrived long since at a point where it has become hurtful, respond to the prop ositions in favor of it, already given, as follows: 1st. That experience shows that there is no time gained to the laborer by the intervention of machinery; while on the contrary its employment is such a strain upon the physical and moral nature of those crigac,,,ed running it, ex necessitate rei, that so far front being enabled to " improve his mind," the machine-worker depraves both body and mind in the mere struggle for existence, It is claimed by those who make this assertion that " the larize manufacturing centers are. vortices of vice; and that the lives of those who are appendages to mechanism are not only of less duration than the lives of hand-workers, but that such are forced by the nature of their employment to sustain themselves by the free use of stimulants. The. drunkenness, immorality, and general degradation of the slaves of the 'labor-saving' machine, as it is employed in manufactures, is patent in every manufacturing. town from Manchester and Sheffield to Lowell and Pittsburg." 2d. They allege that while machinery "lowers the price of luxuries," what were formerly necessities have now become luxuries to thousands by the operation of the salve means, and it is manifest that the reduction of the cost of luxuries through the means of machinery to a price almost within the reach of the poor, must breed extravagance through added tempta tion. To that pleasant thing which is quite beyond our reach, we do not aspire; while for that which seems almost within our grasp, we have an insatiable longing. 3d. As to the displacement of human labor tbrouzli the employment of machinery being apparent, and not real, they point to the constantly increasing prevalence of " trampino." as a business; to the low rate of wages; to the increased employment of prisons and :11ms-houses; and to the facts as to the capacity for displacement of the mechanical power in use, mathematically presented; and which must be real and not merely apparent in its application, since• the means for restoring the balance must needs work so much more slowly. The number of persons in the United States engaged in manufactures by the use of machinery increased between 1850 and 1860, by 37 per cent, and between 1860 and 1870 by 56 per cent, an increase of 93 per cent in twenty years; of course representing,' in combination with the quantity of mechanical power applied by each added individual, an amount of displacement quite incalculable. Mean while, the application of machinery to agricultural work caused a falling off of the per centage of increase in the number of hands employed, as between the same two decades, of 30 per cent. An illustration of the working of the application of machinery to farm labor in the matter of displacement occurs in the case of the Dalrymple farm in Dakotah, where, the harvest of 1880—cutting 25,000 acres of wheat, employing 20 steam threshing-machines, each with a man and a team, gotten out at the rate of 30 Car-loads a day—returned a profit of $250,000, the yield being 35 bushels to the acre. A little reflection on these figures, as to the number of laborers that could be supported from this farm alone, were it worked by hand-labor, will leave a vivid impression as to the. displacement in this direction. It is a fact that farmim, on this scale has not been found profitable in the long run. According to ex-secretaly Boutwell, "the tools upon a farm of any given capacity cost at least four thues as much as the tools then in use. would have cost in 1840." The subject of displacement is entertained by the same. authority, in general terms, as follows: " The steam power of England represents,. stands for, is equal to, the muscular force of a hundred million full-grown men." It is further contended for this side of the argument, that the tendency of the use of machinery is to the displacement of intelligent and skilled hand-labor, and that its employment involves a comparatively unintelligent and monotonous application to a purely mechanical vocation. As was said in an editorial article upon this snbject in a. leading New York journal, speaking for machinery, and on the labor-saving nature of its work, "I will do this for you and save your muscles; do you wait on me, make ine, and carry what I produce.' But the press has not infrequently reached conclusions adverse to the doctrines held by the advocates of the largest possible use of inachinery_ An editorial article in the New York Herald thus expressed such an opinion: " Ninety per cent of our people can, with the machinery we Americans use, produce all that the whole people can consume. That means that 36,000,000 can produce all that
40,000,000 can use, and that, unless we re-establish our foreign commerce, 4,000,000 at least must remain idle, and are condemned to beggary or starvation." This was written when the balance of trade was against the United States: a reference to the citation from Mr. Atkinson heretofore given will show that an extension of foreign commerce did not remedy the evil. But the chief significance of the Herald statement rests in its presentation of the percentage of displacement. Thurlow Weed is respon sible for the assertion that the increase ha the use of machinery in the prosecution of farm-work " has thrown hundreds of thousands of men out of their ordinary employ ment." The N. Y . Evening Post of April 29, 1878, said, "The average daily wages earned by 2,042,209 working-men, as shown by the last census of 100 cities of America, was only 97 cents, and each had an average of only 180 days' employ ment a year." In 1850 the average annual wag-es of operatives in all manufactures, including mining and fishing, in the United States was $247, the net average product per capita $230, and the ratio of wages to gross product 22+ per cent. In 1860 these relations hacl changed to the following,: average wages $288; average product $308; ratio of wames to gross product 20} per cent. In 1870 the decline of wages in these relations aiii continued, the average wages being $383, the average product, $392; ratio of wages to gross product 191 per cent. Now, while the average wages in these industries combined was iu 1870 $383 per annum, in manufactures alone it was $288, and in alone $482; while the ratio of wages to gross product in the latter industry- was 48.75-per cent. And this clearly shows that as the laboring man avoids connection with machinery his waires increase: the pay of hands engnged in copper-mining in the United States in 18t was 67 per cent greater than that of operatives in the manufacturino. industries. Carroll D. Wright, chief of the Massa chusetts bureau of statistics, preserTted in his annual report for 1875 the figures resulting from an examination into the condition of 397 families of working-men in that state. By these it is shown that the wages (earnings) of these working-men varied between $221 for a day laborer, and $980 for an iron-roller per annum. Of these the highest earnings were those of blacksmiths, brick-layers, teamsters, carriage-smiths, etc., those who worked without the aid of machinery.
It is interesting to note by' the foregoing statistics that with the increased use of machinery between 1850 and 1870 there was a steady relative decrease in the receipts of manufacturing operatives in relation to the net product per capita. Yet, as will be :shown hereafter, while the operator lost, the capitalist did uot gain. The same differ ence between the amount of wages of manufacturing operatives and those engaged in minhag is found existing in Great Britain as in the United States. There mining wages i average $375 per head, while those in manufacturing industries vary between $175 and 14200. A further example of this relation is found in the fact that 167,000 persons employed in manufacturitig machinery' in English factories receive only an average of $4 per capita per week, while men engaged in ship-building get $1 per day. Again, in 1870 there WC1'C 5,404 hands employed in copper-mining in the United States, of whom 3,247 worked under ground; the average vvages of these hands was $5 per capita. With regard to this whole matter of wages, however, it is only fair to take into considera tion the purchasing power of money at different times. The authoritative statement of the superintendent of the census (1870) concerning this subject should certainly be received with respect. Bearing in mind that the estimates of wages given in this paper reach no later than 1870, attention is requested to the following: " After much thought, .and extensive inquiry on the subject, the superintendent is disposed to regard 56 per cent as a just statement of the increase in price for all classes of mechanical and manu factured productions between 186G and 1870." And while prices increased 56 per cent
These figures, it is contended by those whose argument we are now presenting, tend to show that the over-use of machinery in manufactures reduces wages. Of course, gene ral high wages cannot occur during a period of displacement. 3Ir. David A. Wells has stated that "the labor of 225 persons (with the aid of the improved machinery in use) is 4„, as effective in 1876, in meeting the demands of the country for cloth and food products, .- -as was the labor of 691 persons in effecting similar results in 1838; and as a consequence cf this change in the power of production, the labor of 466 other persons has within this time aria within the special industries under investigation, been rendered unneces sary; and they have been compelled to enter into relations with new wants and new capabilities of purchase in order to find employment." But, on examining other spheres of employment, we are met by the same state of things, with the ratio against the laboring-man, if anything, enhanced. Thus, we learn from Mr. Wells, that, in the stove manufacture, "3 men can TIONV, with the aid of machinery, produce as many stoves as 6 men unaided could have done iv 1860;" also, that in the manufacture of straw goods, through the sewing-machine, 300 hands do more than 1000 could have clone a few years ago. Again, Mr. Wells says: " In the manufacture of boots and shoes, 3 men working with machinery can do at present what, prior to 1860, required the labor of 6 men to effect, 'while the individual or per capita consumption of boots and shoes in the United States has probably been nzore uniform during the same period than is the ease with any other commodity." This last statement is important in showing that there is no abnormal or even healthy increase in the demand for boots and shoes, to compensate for the displacement effected by machinery; this, too, being one of the largest and most important of our inanufacttning industries. 31r. Wells further states