Simple, and, generally speaking, convenient, as the dress of our day is, the fabrics of which it is composed are in greater variety than at any former time, and draw more largely upon activity and ingenuity in man ufacture. Linen and wool were formerly the two main materials for ordi nary use, and neither of them admitted, upon the wheel and the hand loom, of any great complexity of structure. The introduction of cotton and its combination with these and with silk have brought into being a list longer than any one but an expert could name of webs infinite in variety of. pattern and texture. The supply of textile products for clothing and other purposes is a leading feature of the manufacturing movement of the period. The power-loom and spinning-jenny came in, so far as Europe's acquaintance with the fibre is concerned, with cotton and with the era proper of machinery. The steam-engine, too, was just at hand to supply the motive-power for the inanimate spinsters and websters. The hands of man and the strength of all his water-mills and wind-mills were at once endued with thousand-fold effectiveness. The engines of Watt, dating, like Napoleon, Ney, Wellington, Humboldt, and Mehemet Ali, from 1769, built themselves with smelted iron and fed themselves with coal from sub terranean veins. They then went to work at the spindle and the loom, adding to their first a thousand other fields of labor, and gathering to their iron grasp every form of mechanical effort, until the cylinder of the Glas gow clockmaker may be—and, in fact, among the heraldically-inclined frequently is—employed as the emblem of the age. Heat, say physicists, is a mode of motion. Through the steam-engine it is retranslated into motion from the buried sunlight of geologic time.
It is more difficult to say what the steam-engine has not done in the work of progress than what it has. We commonly say that it lacks the intelligent touch of the human hand. It will never design, model, or compose. It does not think. Yet, though it has not band, eye, and brain, it holds, stored in its infinity of wheels and shafts, a library of thought that constantly increases in bulk, variety, and usefulness. It embodies in experiment, reflection, and comparison the work of hundreds of humble but patient and genuine thinkers—men who have, often with more of lofty purpose than usually actuates sovereigns and statesmen, lightened the burdens and increased the happiness of their kind. Sys tematized industry, on the scale now witnessed, calls into action a higher grade of faculties and more thorough training than sufficed for the hand icrafts of old. Many establishments in America, England, France, and Germany are little empires in themselves, requiring much administrative and financial talent in addition to technical knowledge. As to the work men, the effect of machinery in blunting the faculties, by confining them to a single simple operation endlessly repeated, has been overrated. There is no reason to suppose that any class of artisans is inferior in intelligence to the same class in the days when everything was hand-work. And the higher classes are incontestably superior, while the rewards of success ful invention stand temptingly before all of them. Employers have an interest in encouraging ambition in that direction. The skilled operative is now measurably protected against what he formerly felt as a great injustice—the over-employment of apprentices. The power of combining with his fellows for effectual protest against this and other measures deemed prejudicial to his interests is far more at his command than for merly; and lie has recently been showing very clearly his appreciation of the fact. The tendency to concentration of modern industries and the
growth of large cities assemble labor in greater masses and endow it with improved facilities of union and consultation. The march of education joins in promoting its ability to act in behalf of its own interests; and a secondary yet important result of the training in debate and organization thus acquired by the artisans is their enhanced value and efficiency as citizens. The excesses which we have seen are unfortunate incidents in the process of self-discipline. Socialism and Communism need not here be taken into account. When they flame into violence they will meet the ordinary treatment of crime. Society must live, and anarchy is death.
Our cities, populous beyond all former example, often present deplor able scenes of poverty, discomfort, and suffering among what are loosely termed the laboring classes. But these evils do not exist in a degree com parable to that which obtained in the towns of even a century ago. A city of to-day is in all sanitary appliances a very different thing from its predecessor. Light, fuel, food, air, water are all in better supply. It is difficult, without close investigation, to realize the gain that has been made in this regard; and the gain enures chiefly to the masses. Those who had wealth could always command luxuries; those who have not are the beneficiaries of modern improvements. Reference is not here made to benevolent institutions, which exist on a larger scale than ever before, without being, so much as they once were, incentives to pauperism, but only to the provision of a more liberal and healthful way of living among the poorer classes. These have wider choice of means for physical and mental development.
Crime, the old trouble, is still with us. The whitening of the criminal record does not progress as could be desired or even justly expected. The prisons remain well filled. The results so glowingly anticipated from the penitentiary system are not yet discernible. Improvement there has been, but the State prisons of the United States contain one convict for each thir ty-five hundred of the population. For much of this state of things the condition of the law and its administration is answerable. In a country where written constitutions and statutes are the basis of everything, law should approach perfection and act almost automatically. Certainty should be a leading attribute of justice, as it is far from being in this country. Improvement has been more marked, probably, in Europe, where there was more room for and need of it. The English criminal code, which became in the course of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth cen tury nearly as savage as that of Draco, has undergone tolerably thorough reformation. The shooting of a hare or the stealing of a hat is no longer death, and the criminal is allowed the full defence of counsel. On the Continent the prisons are no longer crowded with political prisoners, and an editor who has not been in jail has ceased to be a phenomenon. But all this is due less to the progress of law as a science or a useful art than to the action of the people, whom growing enlightenment, activity, and self-respect have encouraged to exact their political rights.