Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/597

of human nature under the new conditions. The machinery which thus cheapens and increases product is, as a rule, most costly, and entails a like burden of interest, insurance, and care, whether it is at work or idle; and the possessor of it, recognizing this fact, naturally desires to convert outlay into income by utilizing it to the greatest extent possible. Again, a man who has learned by experience that he can dispose of a certain amount of product or service at a profit, naturally reasons that a larger amount will give him, if not a proportionally greater, at least a larger aggregate profit; and as the conditions determining demand are not only imperfectly known, but to a certain extent incapable of exact determination, he discards the idea of any risk, even if he for a moment entertains it, and pushes industrial effort to its maximum. And as this process is general, and, as a rule, involves a steady increase in the improved and constantly improving instrumentalities of production and distribution, the period at length arrives when the industrial and commercial world awakens to the fact that there is a product disproportionate to any current remunerative demand. In this way only is it possible to account for the circumstance that the supply of the great articles and instrumentalities of the world's use and commerce has increased, during the last ten or fifteen years, in a far greater ratio than the contemporaneous increase in the world's population, or of its immediate consuming capacity. But although such is substantially a correct general exposition of the recent course of industrial events, and although all the agencies concerned in reducing the time and labor necessary to effect a given result in the world's work have undoubtedly acted to a certain extent and in all cases in unison, the diversity of method, under which the supply in excess of remunerative demand, or the so-called over-production has been specially effected, is not a little curious. Thus, in the case of crude iron and steel, cotton fabrics and textiles generally, coal, most articles of metal fabrication, ships, and the like, the increase and cheapened supply have been brought about mainly through improvements in the machinery and economy of production; while in the case of wheat, rice, and other cereals, wool, cotton-fibers, meats, and petroleum, like results have been mainly occasioned by improvements in the machinery and economy of distribution. On the other hand, in the case of copper, tin, nickel, silver, quicksilver, quinine, and some important chemicals, over-production, in the sense as above defined, has been almost entirely due to the discovery of new and abundant natural sources of supply. It is also not to be over-looked that other factors, which can not properly be included within the sphere of the influence of recent discoveries and inventions, have also powerfully contributed to bring about the so-called phenomenon of over-production. The increase in the consumption of some commodities is entirely dependent upon the increase in the tastes and intelligence of the masses; and it is undeniable that the culture of the