[Footnote 50: The well-known journalist of New York; conspicuous for his
many writings on social and political reform, his reminiscences, &c.; a
native of New Hampshire.]
* * * * *
From an Address on Success in Business.
=_165._= THE BENEFICENCE OF LABOR-SAVING INVENTIONS.
There is, if not an ever-increasing need, an ever-increasing
consciousness of need, of labor-saving inventions and machinery. And, if
those inventions should render labor twenty times as productive as it
is to-day, should make this a general rule, that all human labor shall
produce twenty times as much as it does to-day--there would be no glut
of products, as so many mistakenly apprehend. There would only be a
very much fuller and broader satisfaction of human needs. Our wants
are infinite. They expand and dilate on every side, according to our
means--often very much in advance of our means,--of satisfying them. If
labor shall become--as I doubt not it will become at an early day, far
more productive, far more effective, than it is now, we shall hear
nothing like a complaint that there are no more wants to be satisfied,
but the contrary. And yet, we know the fact is deplorably true, that the
time is scarcely yet remote when the laboring class, distinctively so
called, set its face resolutely against new inventions--set to work
deliberately to destroy labor-saving machinery, and so to act as more
and more to throw labor back into the barbaric period when probably
every yard of cloth cost a day's labor, as did every bushel of grain.
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