AMERICAN P RE FACE.
xii
all tliat European governments are doing for tlie education of
artisans. Science and machinery, to take an Illustration, have
alrearly greatly diminished, and will continue to diminish, tlie
comparative number of persons required to supply those things,
in way of food, raiment, and shelter, whicli we must liav'e in Order
to exj^t at all. 1 What follows? The comparative number of
persons employed in the production of objects calculated tö malte
existence more tolerable, and to embellish life, not only bas
greatly increased within tlie last fifty years, but must continue to
increase. Therefore it is that every where we find the town and
city, or artisan and commercial, population gaining upon the coun-
try population. Whether we like it or not, such is the fact; and
there is nothing to reverse this tendency of modern civilization ex-
cept to prohibit the employment of Science and labor-saving ma-
chinery in the cultivation of the soil. Make it tenfold more difficult;
to produce the staple articles of food, and you will at once empty
the cities, putting an end to manufactures, to trade and trans-
portation. But tlie ehange is all in the opposite direction, except
so far as ignorant tillage impoverishes the soil; lience manufac
tures, especially artistic manufactures, together with trade and
1 “What is yet to he aecomplished in the way of increasing the Proportion
of prodnct to inannal lahor, time alone can show; but t-liere is no evidence at
present to indicate that we are approaching any limitation to further progress
in tliis direction. A writer in “ Tlie London Economist,” in 1873, evidently
most conversant with bis subject, claimed that the industry of the population
of Great Britain at that time, taking man for man, was uearly twice as pro
ductive as it was in 1850; and I do not think any one can review the industrial
experience of the United States, as a whole, since 1800, and not feel satisfied
that our average gain to the power of production during that time, and in spite
of the war, has not heen less than from fifteen to twenty per cent. And, if this
Statement should seem to any to he exaggerated, it is well to call to mind that
it is mainly within the last fifteen years that the very great improvemeuts in
machinery adapted to agriculture liave eome into general use; that whereas,
a few years ago, men on the great plains of the West ent grain with the cradle
and sichle, toiling front early morn to dewy eve, in the hottest period of the
year, the same work may be done now ahnost as a matter of recreation, — the
director of a mechanical reaper entering the tield behind a pair of horses, with
gloves on his hands and an umbrella over his head, and in this style tinishing
the work in one-tenth of the time which twenty men wonld formerly have
required, and in a manner inuch more satisfactory.” — From an address by
David A. Wells, before the American Social Science Association, at Detroit, May
11, 1875.
