improvement in the machinery of cloth manufacture, and only three improvements in three centuries. Now invention followed invention until it looked as if human labor would be utterly crowded out by a labor of metal that did all, and much more than all, man's previous work. But the metal cunning created wants faster than it supplied them. It cheapened luxuries until the poor could enjoy the rarities of the rich, and the rich desired rarer luxuries yet. They had more and finer clothes, more and richer food, larger and handsomer houses, with more fantastic and costly furniture; books without end, art of every kind and device, travel every which way, and with greater distances and faster time and for longer periods; quicker changes of fashion to give new reason for new expenditures, fresh notions, fresh tastes, fresh necessities; markets opening in far-off places hitherto thought beyond all thoroughfares or by-paths of trade-markets that planted farms and bred farm hands, and shot railroads further on with other tracks to be laid and cars to be run, and traffic to be transported. All the discoveries of science seemed to be turned at once into machinery, as if science were not sure until demonstrated by steel. Steelit was an age of steel. Nature had grown to steel. Mind had run to steel. For, into this steel Watt had introduced steam, whereby machinery got, as it were, a giant will equal to all its promises, and ready to fulfil them at once. Wonderful! The world had never read a fairy tale more fabulous than this fact. Man rose to a stature that put contempt on all legends of Og and his antediluvian comrades. Man could wade the seas, pitch mountains out of

Prosaic

his path, touch the very stuff of the stars. machinery? Where is the prose in that sonnet of wheels; that ode of piston and crank and cylinder; that drama of machine meeting machine, and working out the plot of the mill; that epic of railways chanting civilization across barbaric continents? Machines are metric ideas, images, symbols, and symbols, too, of a mind-power which they enframe and convey.

Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the song of steam,

To match with Scotia's noblest speech yon orchestra sublime.

Whaurto-uplifted like the just-the tail-rods mark the time,

The crank-throws give the double bass; the feed-pump sobs and heaves;

And now the main eccentrics start their quarrel on the sheaves.

Her time, her own appointed time, the rocking link-head

bides,

Till-hear that note?—the rod's return whings glimmering through the guides.

They 're all awa'! True beat, full power, the clanging

chorus goes

Clear to the tunnel where they sit, my purrin' dynamos. Interdependence, absolute, foreseen, ordained, decreed, To work, ye 'll note, at any tilt, at every rate o' speed.

Now, all this new wealth is due to the inventors, who invented it in devising the machinery that produced it. Labor would have gone on as it had been going for a thousand years, each century much the

same as the century that preceded it. Labor would have wrought no miracle, no epoch of miracles, such as has transformed both earth and man since steam lifted the lid of Watt's kettle. Labor's kettle would be a kettle still-not a transatlantic liner, not a freight train leaping the Rocky Mountains. Would not justice give invention the whole of the wealth it has created? And if labor share that wealth over and above its old-time wage, is not its share the gift of economic Grace?

I say that the whole of this wealth over and above what labor would have produced without machinery, belongs to invention. I am mistaken. Invention never would have created its machinery, or applied its power, or distributed its products, without an ally, and that ally was capital. The genius that plans the machine is seldom the genius that can set it to work, organize its operatives, and convert its wares into utmost profit. Both geniuses are in a sense inventors, but the one invents machinery of iron, and the other invents machinery of men. Watt needed capital. He got it from Roebuck, who became his partner. Roebuck ran out of money, and had to sell a large part of his property, including his interest in the new engine, which interest was valued by his creditors at exactly one farthing. There had to be a different mind from theirs, which was the average mind of the time and country, to enter into and appreciate Watt's ideas. This mind had to have capital enough to enable Watt to work his ideas into fit dynamic form. It had to give this dynamic form adequate action by labor trained to strange skill. It had to publish this

action, draw public attention to it, prove its efficiency by permitting all manner of experiments with it,-in a word, commercialize it,—before it could really go. And so with every invention. Capital, not mere money, but the money of characters alert and strong and bold, must adopt it, apply it, develop it, market it, and keep it well on the market, in order to make it of any proportional worth to the world.

No doubt labor co-operates, but labor as so much muscular exertion or finger craft continues precisely what it was, and earns of itself no more reward. Capitalized invention cannot do without it; neither could the organist do without the bellows-boy. Still, the bellows-boy was but a bellows-boy, and the organist was Handel. Millet must have a bit of canvas for his picture, and some paint to paint it with, but the canvas and paint will cost less than $10, and the picture, if it be the Angelus, will bring thirteen thousand times that much. Are the canvasweaver and paintmaker cheated by Millet's price? Would they get more if he got less? Is genius overpaid by the wealth that loves art? Is labor, or trade, or the world poorer because the rich man's money passes through Millet's hands for other uses than the rich man might make of it? enriched by every use of it that wholesome and beautiful and broadly human import? Certainly of all the beneficiaries of this new industrial era, labor has least right to complain. It has had more than its share, more than it could have ventured to hope for, more than it could have dreamed as its most communistic award. A hundred years ago labor, assisted by all the capital in

Are they not rather gives it diverse and

England, could only produce $70 a head; now it produces $175, which difference means that capital pays it twice as much as it makes. Fifty years ago the entire wealth of the British realm was $200,000,000 less than the laboring classes now receive alone; and this sum makes allowance for all increase of population, so that it may be said without exaggeration that in fifty years the nation's wealth has been more generously communized than if all the rent of squirearchic land, all the interest on capital, all the profits of commerce and manufacture, had been added to the income of labor itself, leaving not so much as one laborer's share for duke, or lord, or railway king, or any magnate of leisure or money. Universal confiscation could not have done more. And still the State stands. And still trade pursues its civic course, and not a breath of bluster forebodes "whirlwinds of rebellion.'

so bad, after all. His money may

The reign of the plutocrat is not He need not be a Nero of finance. have some other mission than to crush or corrupt. Money is what money wants and does. Its character is in its ideals. If the money of a people or epoch is bad, it is because bad ideals prompt its acquisition and expenditure. Such were the ideals of Judea in Herod's day, when Jesus warned it of its moral woes. But Herod's day is not ours, nor is broken-down Judaism Christian England or America; and the moneys of the different times and peoples differ as widely as Herod differs from George Peabody. Money means satisfaction of wants, and the wants vary with civilization as well as with individual character. I want command; money gives