made this matter a special study, considers one third as the minimum average that can be accepted for the period above specified.[1] Other authorities are inclined to assign a considerably higher average. The deductions of Mr. William Fowler, Fellow of University College, London, are to the effect that the saving of labor since 1850 in the production of any given article amounts to forty per cent;[2] and the British Royal Commission (minority report, 1886) characterizes the amount of labor required to accomplish a given amount of production and transport at the present time as "incomparably less" than was requisite forty years ago, and as "being constantly reduced."
But be this as it may, out of such results as are definitely known and accepted have come tremendous industrial and social disturbances, the extent and effect of which—and more especially of the disturbances which have culminated, as it were, in later years—it is not easy to appreciate without the presentation and consideration of certain typical and specific examples. To a selection of such examples, out of a large number that are available, attention is accordingly next invited.
Let us go back, in the first instance, to the year 1869, when an event occurred which was probably productive of more immediate and serious economic—industrial, commercial, and financial—changes than any other event of this century, a period of extensive war excepted. That was the opening of the Suez Canal. Before that time, and since the discovery by Vasco da Gama, in 1498, of the route to India by the Cape of Good Hope, all the trade of the Western hemisphere with the Indies and the East toiled slowly and uncertainly around the Cape, at an expenditure in time of from six to eight months for the
- ↑ In a print-cloth factory in New England, in which the conditions of production were analyzed by Mr. Atkinson, the product per hand was found by him to have advanced from 26,531 yards, representing 3,382 hours' work in 1871, to 32,391 yards, representing 2,695 hours' work in 1884—an increase of 22 per cent in product, and a decrease of 20 per cent in hours of labor. Converted into cloth of their own product, the wages of the operatives in this same mill would have yielded them 6,205 yards in 1871, as compared with 9,737 yards in 1884—an increase of 5632⁄100 per cent. During the same period of years the prices of beef, pork, flour, oats, butter, lard, cheese, and wool in the United States declined more than 25 per cent. A like investigation by the same authority of an iron-furnace in Pennsylvania showed that, comparing the results of the five years from 1860 to 1864 with the five years from 1875 to 1879, the product per hand advanced from 776 tons to 1,219 tons; that the gross value of the product remained about the same; that the number of hands was reduced from 76 to 71; and that consumers gained a benefit of reduction in price from $27.95 per ton to $19.08.
- ↑ Wages have greatly increased, but the cost of doing a given amount of work has greatly decreased, so that five men can now do the work which would have demanded the labor of eight men in 1850. If this be correct, the saving of labor is 40 per cent in producing any given article."—Appreciation of Gold, William Fowler, Fellow of University College, London, 1886.
manufacture of machines and machinery, 40 per cent; in the silk-manufacture, 50 per cent, and so on.
