two hundred millions of adults, the new mechanical powers of production obtained by great Britain during the last century, are not extravagantly rated.

Yet, for the present purpose, even such an admission admission is unnecessary. Suppose these powers equal to the labor of a single hundred millions only but one-fourth more than the power known to be gained in cotton factories alone-how passing marvellous, in connection with the present condition of labor, are the corollaries from that fact! The proportion of families wholly unemployed in Great Britain, is estimated at over one-fifth of the entire population; and if to this we add the distributors of wealth, it will leave but twothirds of the inhabitants, say eighteen millions of men, women and children.* Of these little more than one-third are actual laborers; say, however, seven millions. Now, in aid of the manual labor of these seven millions of human workmen, Great Britain may be said to have imported from the vast regions of invention, a hundred millions of powerful and passive slaves; slaves that consume neither food nor clothing; slaves that sleep not, weary not; sicken not; gigantic slaves that drain subterranean lakes, in their master's service; or set in motion, at a touch from his hand, machinery, under which the huge and solid buildings that contain it groan and shake; ingenious slaves, that outrival, in the delicacy of their operations, the touch of man, and put to shame the best exertions of his steadiness and accuracy. Yet slaves patient, obedient, submissive; from whom no rebellion need be feared; who cannot suffer cruelty or experience pain.

These unwearying and inanimate slaves outnumber the human laborers who direct their operations, on the average at least fourteen to one. What has been the result of this importation?

If we shut our closet doors, and refuse to take the answer from the state of things as it actually exists, we shall say, that aid thus sent down as it were from Heaven to stand by and assist

man in his severest toils, must have rendered him easy in his circumstances, rich in all the necessaries and comforts of life, a master instead of a slave, a being with leisure for enjoyment and improvement, a freeman delivered from the original curse which declared that in the sweat of his brow should man eat bread all the days of his life. But if, rejecting mere inference, we should step out into the world, with our eyes open and our sympathies awake, then we may begin to feel with the peasant when he burns up threshing machines, and to comprehend why the barber of Preston was driven from Lancashire by fear of violence from those who earned a living by the old mode of spinning.

We shall see the new servants competing with those they might be made to serve. We shall see a contest going on in the market of labor between wood and iron on the one hand and human thews and sinews on the other; a dreadful contest, at which humanity shudders and reason turns, astonished, away.

We shall see masters engaging, as the cheapest, most docile and least troublesome help, the machine instead of the man.† And we shall see the man, thus denied even the privilege to toil, shrink home, with sickening heart, to the cellar where his wife and children herd, and sink down, on its damp floor, to ask of his despair, where these things shall end? whether the soulless slaves, bred year by year from the teeming womb of science, shall, in very deed, surely and silently thrust aside, into idleness and starvation, their human competitors, until, like other extinct races of animals, the laborer perish from the earth?

Here, then, is another phase of the mysterious anomaly of our day. Mechanical improvements, inevitable even if they were mischievous, and in themselves a rich blessing as surely as they are inevitable-are becoming, by some strange perversion of their use, a cruel and deadly curse. They stand in array over against the laborer, instead of toiling by his side. They overstock

the market; prices decline; that lowers profits; and these, in their fall, bring down wages with them.

And yet, will any man, who stands on his reputation for sanity, affirm that the necessary result from over-production is famine? that because labor produces more than even luxury can waste, labor shall not have bread to eat? If we can imagine a point in the progress of improvement, at which ALL the necessaries and comforts of life shall be produced without human labor, are we to suppose, that the human laborer, when that point is reached, is to be dismissed by his masters, from their employment? to be told that he is now a useless incumbrance which they cannot afford to hire? But no such point can ever be reached. Very true. Yet, as the asymptote to the hyperbola, we are ever approaching it. And if such a result seem flagrantly absurd in the extreme, it is actually experienced in the degree. Men are told that machines have filled their places, and that their services are no longer required.

For a time, indeed, even the vast machinery of England increased, instead of diminishing the demands for labor. Rapidly as accumulated the supply, more rapidly still increased the demand. England manufactured for half the world, and thus employed both the living laborer and the inanimate slave. But other countries-our own especially-have learned to manufacture for themselves; England's market is curtailed; the English employer must abridge his production by hiring less labor. The living laborer-the expensive one, who eats and drinks and wears--is dismissed. Unemployed operatives crowd the market places, and swarm in the streets. And, as it will not do, now-a-days, to put these superfluous vagrants to death, as the Spartans did their Helots when they became inconveniently numerous; and as gradual starvation is very horrible, besides being slow in its effects; it has occurred to British statesmen

to propose, as a last resort, a premium on emigration. The men cannot be used, therefore they must be got rid of.* To send off the machines might equally answer the case. But what business man would think of such a proceeding? The cheaper and more manageable agent must of course be retained.

If this seem exaggerated irony, let us peruse the following, from the writings of one who seems, more than any other of England's modern economists, to have written in favor of the people :

"There is truly no commodity—if so disparaging an epithet may be applied to nature's noblest production-so precious as man. Even an untutored Indian from the plains of Africa will fetch a hundred pounds in the slave market of America; but how much more valuable were a civilized, instructed and indefatigable EuroWe give nothing for an article with which pean! Yet see how he is depreciated! air and water, though indispensable to we are abundantly supplied, not even for support life. But an Englishman has become less valuable than either element; he is not only without price, but is actually become what algebraists call a negative quantity, that is, something worth less than nothing; and a premium has positively been offered for his expatriation!"†

Now, in these United States, there is no such condition of things at present. In this new country we have not yet reached, nor closely approached, that point. We are in what Adam Smith calls the progressive state. Labor is a commodity for which the demand, as a general rule, still exceeds the supply. An American, to employ the language of the British author, is still a positive quantity. But are not the same causes at work here, that have produced so fatal a result in the older country? Is not the laborer here, as in Great Britain, a (6 commodity," bid for in the market as wheat or cotton is; of much value, if very

scarce; commanding less wages, as population gradually fills up the market of labor; and liable to become, as in England, a negative quantity, a wanderer, begging for toil, whenever any causes combine to surfeit the markets that are open to the produce of his labor? If his exertions increase, may not the reward of that increased exertion be an amount of production that will deprive him of employment? If he obey the command to increase and multiply, does not growing population tend to the same result? If the inventive genius of America, no whit behind that of Europe, brings into being machine after machine, to perform the labor, and to take the place of man, is not the laborer, here as in England, thereby liable to be crowded out of the permission to work for his daily bread? Is it not here as in older States, a condition under which alone labor is assured of a fair reward, that there shall not be too much labor? And is it not the direct tendency of invention and of population to violate that condition? But is there any reason, in the nature of things, why its violation should produce other than the most cheering and desirable results; leisure, comfort, assured competence, independence and equality? Can there be any reason, other than one artificial and arbitrary, why the producers of the necessaries and comforts of life should then only be secure of their portion of those necessaries and comforts, when the world is not overstocked with these? As rationally might we decide, that when a huge goblet of water stands before a man fainting with thirst, he shall not be suffered to put his parched lips to the crystal liquid at all, because he cannot drain the vessel of its contents to the last drop.

Do we thank God that such reasoning applies not to our case? That we are not as other nations, or even as king-ridden England? Do we point to our sparse population, to our widespreading domain? These assure us that the evil day is not yet upon us, not that time will fail to bring it at last. Take New England, with her busy operatives and her splendid machinery.

but

Close to her population the safetyvalve of the public lands. Decree that when her workpeople feel the iron hand of competition pressing too harshly upon them, they shall not be allowed to escape to the free woods and rich lands of the Far West. And what assurance should we have that in Lowell, and Lynn, and Salem, the same scenes would not soon be re-produced that now win our sympathy for the oppressed laborer of Britain? In point of fact, do we not find, even now, that the continual tendency of wages in New England is to decline?

Our peculiar situation, then, postpones, not avoids, for us, the fate that now imminently threatens England. When the land of refuge in the West is reclaimed and occupied, our laborers too may become the victims of machinery and of over-production.

Alchymists used to expend their lives in search of the philosopher's stone, which was to turn all baser metals into gold. Statesmen, in these modern days, have a different task before them; it is to detect that bad and fatal element in the politico-economical systems of the age, that turns all good into evil; that renders plenty a curse; that changes the means of creating wealth into prolific sources of poverty; that makes peace a scourge, and war almost a blessing.

In the prosecution of that task, what vital questions cross the inquirer's path! Must the workingman continue a commodity in the market, underbid by machinery, and crushed down even by the best improvements of the age? For every one that is benefited by these, must tens of thousands be destroyed? Must civilisation have her few selected sons of preference, and her millions of step-children, outcast and forsaken? Must labor, the only creator of wealth, lose, from age to age and from century to century, one portion after another of its just and fitting reward?

And if not, what is the remedy? When that question is answered, then will One of the PROBLEMS OF THE AGE be solved.