ir distrust of
results. Yet so far as they actually introduce improvement in production
so that variety of products is increased and the cost of production
reduced, the whole community gains in large measure the total saving. Any
one can realize the advantage by study of a single article of every-day
use. In the middle ages the cloth in a garment was worth eight times the
wool from which it was made. Now the value is chiefly in the raw product.
The price of iron affects every farmer through the cost of his tools and
implements or the quality of either. Compare the modern steel hoe, first
in quality and then in cost, with the hoe of fifty years since. Then
measure that cost in its relation to a day's work, as compared with the
same measure in 1850. All are in this way benefited by reducing the
exertion needed to procure any one article of use, since more exertion may
be left for meeting other wants. If machinery and improved methods have
entered less into the farmer's home life, he can find his own advantage
from the range of such improvements in other directions by thinking what a
pound of butter will buy for him today as compared with what it would buy
before the period of machinery. (Chart No. XIV, p. 106.)

The introduction of labor-saving machines is a direct addition to human
power and economy of time, and a means of converting useless material to
meet human wants. That a new machine throws out of employment workers in
that particular field brings a hardship which ought to be shared by the
multitude who are benefited; but the probabilities are great that the
improved method of manufacture will so increase the uses for the product
as to bring into employment a far larger number of laborers. The spinning
jenny threw out of employment several thousand spinners in the old way,
but in twenty-five years the cloth-makers in England had increased from
less than eight thousand to three hundred and twenty thousand. The
machines which in 1760 were thought to have ruined some eight thousand
cloth-makers, in 1833 employed two million persons. This is only a
striking illustration of what has happened in every direction. It is
perfectly evident that communities using the most machinery pay larger
wages and far larger welfare to every laborer. It is not too much to say
that the actual comforts within the reach of every laborer have been more
than doubled within the last hundred years.

A few illustrations of the actual saving in c