OCR Text |
Show LABOR-SAVING DEVICES. Somebody with a turn for statistics has compiled a few sets of figures to prove that the world at least a large part of it would starve to death if it had to rely for its food and clothing supplies upon hand labor. The author of the compilation says that all the manual labor of tho globe, under old conditions, could not feed, clothe and shelter the present millions of the earth's population. In working out this conclusion, it is pointed out that in tho United States alone the railroads perform the work of 17,500,000 men and 67,000,000 horses. It is also asserted that enough wheat could not be harvested with the sickle and threshed with the flail to feed the inhabitants of our country, and that were it not for the efficiency of the reaper, binder and thresher, the wheat crops that could be garnered would be wholly inadequate to meet the demand. When the tractor shall have been fully developed, it is estimated, 100,-000,000 100,-000,000 acres of land will be released for the growing of crops for use of the human family. This view is based upon the calculation that it now requires tho acreage mentioned to supply corn, oats and hay and to provide pasturage for horses on the farms. Just what is going go-ing to happen to the horses for whose food supply it now requires a hundred million acres, does not appear. Possibly they will be sent to lands where the tractor is not yet, or they may meet the fate of the horses in cities which the motor transport has supplanted. In 1916 more than 42,000,000 tons of steel were produced in the United States. Not all the manual labor in the country, that on farms included, could have provided this output had it not .been for labor-saving devices. In the textile industry, in the packing business busi-ness and in many other lines of activity activ-ity it has been possible to draw out the yields only by the installation of machines. ma-chines. Very often almost invariably, in fact the introduction of machinery j;:.:o ti-:s or that branch t: iii'i'i'iisJ if nco'.:ntcrs titter ': '-:. .:' iocioe the ' a.ac :.: r.e? .lis'. la 'e Wor-lmen. r.x: er.onee ihas aa-i'.v I -'ove 1 that, while incon- vcriieie-e a:: 1 sometimes actual har-1-hirt r.ot injreer.eLt'y follow the Setting Set-ting i:;. of ti:ne-s.i'. :z:: a: ; aratu. on the jw'i''ie the 'j-e cf n:uc':.i:ie-y is l.iitltiy ibencfi-ial to ail. This is demon-trated by the fact thst there are more workers employed in the L'nited States to.lay, and that, too, at higher wau'es, than ; ever before. A case in point is the j printing trade. The introduction of the typesetting machines at first perhaps dislocated several printers, but as it was i possible to enlarge the newspapers to i many times their former sizes, the old- : time hand compositors, becoming expert on the linotypes, quickly found themselves them-selves earning mure wages than they had before. Today there are more printers employed than at r.ny time in the history of the art. Since the demand for production is an ever-increasing one, manual labor-eliminating labor-eliminating contrivances will continue to become more numerous in type and more extensive in capacity. The greater the production, the higher will be the standard of living. If suddenly we should be obliged to revert to individual muscular effort to supply the worlu with necessaries, widespread suffering would follow. Labor-saving machines are mankind's best friends. |