that such would truly be the result has led many honest and simple-minded persons to view with misgivings, if not with aversion and condemnation, most innovations and improvements; they not seeing their way to the avoidance of the catastrophe aforesaid. Their misgivings, however, do more honour to their hearts than to their heads. We, with feeling certainly not less sympathetic towards our fellow-men, know that the evil is exceptional and transient, while the benefit is universal and permanent, and that it would be a miserable weakness, not to say an unpardonable crime, to reject the latter in order to avoid the former. It is perfectly clear to all who reflect that the sum which would have been paid in wages to the 90,000 miners, and was not so paid, will, just the same, be expended in wages for labour in some other form; and that the general demand for labour which will re-absorb the 90,000 miners, will at once be at least as great as before, and eventually be much greater than before, although it may be for labour of a different kind. The only evil, therefore, that can result from the new discovery is the partial and temporary displacement of labour and capital.

5. Let us now look at the benefits which it confers. Through this cheap heat-supplying discovery, the labour of 10,000 men supplies the world with the same quantity of heat which it required 100,000 men to supply before; and, in addition, the world. gains all the increased wealth which the labour of the 90,000 disengaged miners will now create by devoting that labour to the production of other commodities. This large addition to the store of

DISPLACED LABOUR SOON RE-ABSORBED. 53

"such objects of human desire as are obtained or produced by human exertions" is all profit. It is the difference between what the same aggregate quantity of labour produced before and what it produces now. It is a gratuitous boon to mankind.

It may be objected by some that it is harsh and unjust to the working men to adopt processes that shall throw any of them out of work, that it is our duty to find them employment, not to deprive them of it, and that we ought thus to afford "protection to native industry." The fallacy which underlies this argument against all improvement is simply this. It is therein assumed that the labour-sellers, who, whether by novel mechanical appliances, or by fresh scientific discoveries, or by changes in fashion, or by the repeal of protective duties, are once thrown out of work, are condemned to remain permanently unemployed, to cease to earn a living, and to become unproductive consumers evermore, until they die off in misery and destitution. Now no such thing ever does occur. Both experience and reason show the absurdity of such an assumption. The stage-coachmen, stablemen, ostlers, &c., who were "disestablished" by the railway system, did not perish as paupers, but found other channels for honest employment.

Year after year new processes to abridge labour are adopted in every branch of trade, which, provisionally, throw a certain number of men out of employment, but it is only for a short time that their labour is lost to themselves and to the community. It is soon shifted into another groove, and continues its contributions to the national store.

We trust that we have succeeded in demonstrating that the ultimate and permanent issue of all laboursaving improvements is largely to increase the general demand for labour. As we showed at page 32, "the whole of the earnings of fixed capital are, directly or indirectly, appropriated to the remuneration of labour, that is, to the payment of wages." Whatever portion of the wage-fund might not be wanted for the payment of one kind of labour will be expended on some other kind of labour. All that portion of wealth which is created by the capital and labour set free in consequence of new discoveries or of improved processes is so much added to the world's previous wealth, so much to the good, so much more to distribute towards the supply of man's wants.

Whenever masses of industrious workers have been permanently deprived of work, it has not been in consequence of improved processes creating the same amount of wealth with the employment of less labour. On the contrary, it has occurred when production, instead of being expanded, has been abridged, when mills, furnaces, and workshops stood idle, when capital, crippled by commercial failures, or paralysed by panic, had withdrawn from its co-operation with labour. Those are the circumstances under which labour-sellers are exposed to prolonged suffering. On the other hand, the happy days of active production and of general prosperity have usually been those immediately following the vigorous impulse to trade given by the adoption of some important discovery tending to save labour. Even the most antiquated advo

EDUCATION AND MORALITY.

55

cate for "protection to native industry" would ridicule and ignore a discovery that tended not to save but to increase the labour requisite to produce a given result! The very men who went about in 1776 breaking up machinery lived to see that same machinery generally adopted, and joyfully to find that four times as many men were employed at good wages on those machine-worked manufactures as when hand-labour alone was used.

It must not be said that we dwell too persistently on this point. The erroneous assumption that, by labour-saving processes or by cheaper production in other ways, labour is not only displaced but destroyed-that the labour-seller once thrown out of work remains for ever out of work, and ceases henceforth to be an agent of production, -is at the root of many economic fallacies, and cannot be too forcibly exposed.

To sum up, we must enrol scientific discoveries among the most powerful auxiliaries in the noble and beneficent work of wealth-creation.

CHAPTER V.

Education and Morality promote, and are promoted by, the Creation of Wealth-Erroneous Notions concerning the Virtues of Industry and Frugality.

A 7. EDUCATION AND MORALITY.—It will hardly be required of us to do much more than simply enunciate the following proposition, viz.: The universal diffusion of sound knowledge tends to

develop all those qualities in man which most efficiently promote the creation of wealth, and to correct and abate those social evils which notably impede it. The idle, the improvident, the intemperate, and the lawless, are mainly recruited from among those whom no education has rescued from the baneful influence of bad surroundings, or from the mental torpidity of sheer ignorance. This is not the place for referring to the distinction between the preparatory education that teaches the pupil how to think, and leaves his mind open to future inquiries and convictions, and the dogmatic education that teaches the pupil what to think, and grafts on his mind convictions ready-made. We hail with a hearty welcome all work and all workers in the cause of education. Only let the thinking faculty that resides in every human breast be quickened into active life, it will soon find the food on which to grow, and may eventually expand into a vigorous individuality. Education gives every man his chance, and that chance society is bound to afford to him.

A notion once prevailed among many people, and may still be found lingering in sequestered nooks, that education would turn the heads of the working people and deprive the world of housemaids and cooks, of navigators and scavengers. The schoolmaster has been busy for some years, but no such result has occurred, and the more highly educated the people, the less likely we think it is to occur. On the contrary, the prevailing and very proper tendency is to recognise the dignity of all honest labour. No kind of useful