small market for farm products would be for the time reduced; but it would not take very long to find other and perhaps better occupation for the resident population of the State; the cotton factories being mainly operated by foreigners, mostly French Canadians. This marks the delusion of the Southern people, whose efforts might well be directed to the development of all the lesser arts in which a very small capital serves as the basis of a very large product, in place of attempting an art on which the margin of profit is very small and which takes a thousand ($1,000) to fifteen hundred dollars ($1,500) to start one operative, and which belongs rather in a cold or temperate climate where indoor work is comfortable throughout the year, than to a warm or hot climate where indoor work for ten or eleven hours a day is during the large part of the year almost unbearable. The development of the Southern cotton manufacture has been to a large extent promoted by methods very similar to those which first led to the boom in Southern town lots and hotels; next to the boom in isolated and misplaced iron furnaces, many of which have never been put in blast, and which has taken its last form in a misdirected effort to do that part of the cotton manufacture for which the Southern States are as yet the least prepared, to the neglect of that part which must of necessity be conducted on or near the cotton fields. Such are the conditions which I have ventured to present to my Southern friends from time to time during the last twenty years, warning them of the dangers of an excessive production and low price of cotton and an excessive production of cotton fabrics beyond the necessities of the country itself, for which as yet no sufficient outlet for export to other countries has been opened. It is to be expected that under the present conditions there will be a survival of the fittest, distressing in many of its phases. A considerable number of cotton factories in the North which have not been kept up by changes and additions of new machinery have been or will be stopped and perhaps never started again. On the other hand, there are many of the new isolated mills in the South which have been promoted by contractors and the vendors of machinery, especially those under the corporation system for which many of them are too small, in which the stockholders will get the experience and their successors will get the mills at a low cost. We are in a transition period in the production and treatment of the cotton fibre and in the manufacture and disposal of the cotton fabrics, which to the best of my ability I have attempted to trace in this paper, in which there are doubtless many mistakes, but in which I think is more truth than error. The number of cotton spindles in the whole country is now a little over nineteen million (19,000,000). Many of these are old and out of date. Many, as I have stated, are out of place and in excess of present wants; but we are constantly gaining in the amount and diversity of our exports and shall gain yet more when we remove the heavy fines which under the name of duties on imports are imposed on the goods for which we might exchange more and more cotton fabrics. Again: The population and purchasing power of this country is becoming augmented rapidly. Yet even that may have a cause of depression in some of the branches of the cotton industry. With the increasing welfare of the people the average demand is for a much higher class of cotton fabrics than were formerly suited to the markets. Many Northern mills have lost their markets, not only because these low grades of goods have been successfully manufactured in the South, but because the demand for them within the United States is very much lessened. Again: In the matter of printed calicoes. The old-fashioned common print has become so low in price and relatively so unattractive as compared to the wider, finer and better goods that great masses of people will not expend their time in making cheap prints into garments. Hence the necessity of an adjustment, especially of looms, to new conditions. The general progress of the manufacture of cotton has been marked by the same incidents which govern progress in all arts. I have repeatedly called attention to the fact that sixty years ago it was a step in advance for the daughters of the farmers of New England to go into the cotton factories, where they worked fourteen hours by the bell, twelve and a half hours of actual work, in a low studded, badly lighted and ill ventilated building and upon machinery far from automatic. Under those conditions they earned less than half the wages per year and much less than half per hour for their work, compared to the wages of the foreign, mostly French Canadian operatives in the New England factories, who now work in high studded, well lighted and well ventilated factories less than ten hours' work per day. In the same period through the application of science and invention, which have assured to the working men and women in every art an increasing share or proportion of a constantly increasing product while the margin of profits has been vastly reduced, the average product of a given cotton fabric for one year's work of the average operative is now thirty-two thousand (32,000) yards a year where it was less than five thousand (5,000) yards fifty years ago. Yet as I have said, the whole process of converting the fibre into the fabric is a series of compromises in which quality is sacrificed to quantity of product. The improvements which have now fairly begun by almost the first application of scientific methods to the production of the fibre from the field to the cloth, will increase the average product per operative in each year on the given fabric which has been dealt with from thirty-two thousand (32,000) probably to forty thousand (40,000) yards a year within the next decade, and as these improvements work with accelerated speed and the margin of strength and quality to be saved is very large, it is not improbable that those who will enter into this branch of industry, will within twenty years witness the average product per year of each individual hand of fifty thousand (50,000) yards against five thousand (5,000) fifty years ago. What is true in this art is true in all arts which are left free in their development from legislative interference, high wages or earnings in money or what money will buy being the necessary correlative, complement or resultant of the lessened cost of production, warranting the truth of the economic axiom laid down by Bastiat that "In proportion to the increase of capital the absolute share (of a given product) falling to capital is augmented, but the relative share is diminished; on the other hand, the share falling to labor is increased both absolutely and relatively." Boston, July 22, 1898. EDWARD ATKINSON. THE ESSAY OF MALTHUS: A CENTENNIAL REVIEW. ONE hundred years ago appeared the first edition of the Essay on the Principle of Population, by Thomas Robert Malthus. It attracted immediate attention and has been the subject of almost continuous discussion ever since both in economic and popular circles. It has been answered or defended elaborately many times, not to mention the multitude of briefer expositions and criticisms. One is tempted to think that in this centennial year of its publication the time has come to pass final judgment on the work, and to close the controversy. Such is not, however, the task that is here undertaken. The occasion and the circumstances of the appearance of this book, the interests and cherished opinions which it affected either favorably or unfavorably, the manner of its thought and mode of its expression, all predestined for it stormy discussion rather than calm and scientific study. Such a controversy can not be brought to a close by any magazine article, for it does not arise merely from differences of judgment on a formal proposition and the questions connected with it. It arises also from differences in temperament, in sympathies, and in the general attitude toward social questions. It may, however, be of interest and of service to point out the occasions for these misunderstandings, and the nature of the differences; and to indicate the trend of scientific judgment on the Essay of Malthus and the doctrine of population. One need only refer to the oft noted circumstances of the time in which the Essay was written. The industral revolution was in full course. The growth of factory centers, of population in general and especially of city population, the heavy taxation and the high price of grain caused by the war with France, the radical political and socialistic ideas of the time, are all facts which help to account for the book and many of the ideas in it. These facts were all present in the author's mind as he wrote, but it was the political and social discussion ensue. * * * embodied in the writings of Godwin which gave to the Essay its first form. Godwin, infected with the enthusiasm of the French Revolution, had preached a doctrine of equality, not only in political rights, but in material goods as well, and had pictured the era of happiness and perfection which would then The objection had been urged against communism of goods many years before (by Wallace in 1761,) that the growth of population would destroy any such society, reducing its members from a condition of plenty, brought about by the equal division of goods, to want and suffering. Godwin, in his book on Political Justice, published in 1793, had referred to this objection, and had given what he calls "the obvious answer" to it, "that to reason thus is to forsee difficulties at a great distance. Myriads of centuries of still increasing population may pass away, and the earth be still found sufficient for the subsistence of its inhabitants."1 Again in 1797 Godwin dealt with the same subject in an essay entitled Avarice and Profusion, one of the series called the Enquirer. Daniel Malthus, Robert's father, a country gentleman of literary tastes, was strongly attracted by these pictures of equality and universal happiness. Robert, a young man of thirty years of age, had taken his master's degree at Cambridge the year before. He had read Adam Smith and was inclined good-naturedly to oppose the sanguine social opinions of his father. He chose as his chief, indeed almost his sole, weapon against the system of equality or community of goods, that which Godwin himself calls in the title of his chapter the "Objection to this system from the principle of population." The phrase is apparently Godwin's; the argument is Wallace's. It needed only that Malthus should develop, illustrate, and apply the thought to this political speculation and to various practical questions, to attain fame. We shall refer again to the use made by Malthus of "the principle of population" in his argument against communism, but let us now first inquire what the principle is of which he writes. A century later, after all that Malthus and others have written about it, there still remains some doubt as to just what 1 Political Justice Book, VIII, ch. 9. 2 Idem. |