portion of the column balked by turns, and kept waiting for long periods in that most wearing expectation of instant movement. Now, this is not an extreme contrast as regards military movements; nor need any thing be taken from its extent when we come to apply it to the operations of industry. In an establishment where each person has his place and perfectly knows his duty, where work never chokes its channels and never runs low, where nothing ever comes out wrong end foremost, where there is no fretting or chafing, where there are no blunders and no catastrophes, where there is no clamor and no fuss, a pace may be maintained which would kill outright the operatives of a noisy, ill-disciplined, badly-organized shop. For, as was said in opening this subject of the efficiency of labor, there is in all industry a positive and a negative element. Waste is inseparable from work; but the proportions in which the two shall appear may be made to vary greatly. It is only when we see a perfectly-trained operative performing his task that we realize how much of what the undisciplined and ignorant call their work is merely waste; how little of their expenditure of muscular and nervous force really goes to the object; how much of it is aside from, or in opposition to, that object. And the remark applies not alone to the exertions of the individual but, in a still higher degree, to the operations of bodies of men.

"It is not," says Mr. Laing, "the expertness, dispatch, and skill of the operative himself that are concerned in the prodigious amount of his production in a given time, but the laborer who wheels coals to his fire, the girl who makes ready his breakfast, the whole population, in short, from the pot-boy who brings his beer, to the banker who keeps his employer's cash, are in fact working to his hand with the same quickness and punctuality that he works with himself."

We have some interesting instances in proof that such

1 Notes of a Traveller, p. 290.

industrial superiority as has been described is not due alone to differences of stock and breeding or of general intelligence, but that strangers placed within the same industrial environment, and afforded opportunities of like technical education, tend steadily, and it may be rapidly, to advance towards the efficiency of the native laborer. Thus Mr. Brassey, after dwelling on the advantages of carrying out English navvies, at vast expense, even to Canada or to Queensland, adds significantly: "The superiority of the English workmen was most conspicuous when they first commenced work in a country in which no railways had been previously constructed."

2

The Commissioners (1867) on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture, in their second report, 1869, give the results of a very considerable experiment in draining in Northumberland, extended over a series of years, in which large numbers both of English and Irish were employed, from which it appears that "whereas the English beginner earns an average of four shillings a week more than the Irish beginner, better food and about ten years' practice reduce the difference to 1s. 4d." And Mr. Chadwick states "that agricultural laborers who have joined gangs of navvies and have been drilled, with them, into their energetic piece-work habits, on returning to farm labor will do their tasks of work in half the time of the common day-laborers. Examples," he adds, "of the highest order of agricultural piece-work, with increased wages closely approaching manufacturing wages, are presented in the market-garden culture near the metropolis."

VI. The last reason which I shall assign for the superior efficiency of individual laborers, classes of laborers, or nations of laborers, is cheerfulness and hopefulness in labor, growing out of self-respect and social ambition and the laborer's personal interest in the result of his work.

1 Work and Wages, p. 117.

3 Statistical Journal, xxviii., p. 307.

2 P. 104.

I have spoken of causes which affect the laborer's bone and sinew, his physical integrity and his muscular activity.

I have spoken also of causes which affect his intellectual qualification for his work, the intelligence which shall direct his bodily powers to the end of production. The causes now in view are moral, affecting the will.

After all, it is in the moral elements of industry that we find the most potent cause of differences in efficiency. If it constitutes one a sentimentalist to recognize the power of sentiment in human action, whether in politics or in economics, the writer gladly accepts the appellation. Cheerfulness and hopefulness in the laborer are the spring of exertions in comparison with which the brute strength of the slave or the eye-server is but weakness.

2

The inferiority of the labor of the slave' to that of the freeman, even of the lowest industrial grade, is proverbial. Slave labor is always and everywhere ineffective and wasteful because it has not its reward. No matter how complete the authority of the master over the person and the life, he cannot command all the faculties of his slave. The slave may be made to work, but he can not be made to think; he may be made to work, but he can not be kept from waste; to work, indeed, but not with energy. Energy is not to be commanded, it must be called forth by hope, ambition, and aspiration. The whip only stimulates the flesh on which it is laid. It does not reach the parts of the man where lie the springs of action. No brutality of rule can evoke even the whole physical power of a human being. The man himself, even if he would, can not

1 Prof. Cairnes, in his able work on "The Slave Power," sums up the economical defects of slave labor under three heads: " "It is given reluctantly; it is unskilful; it is wanting in versatility." (P. 44.)

2 « The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is, in the end, the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property can have no other interest but to eat as much and to labor as little as possible."-Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, i. 390, 391.

render his own best service unless some passion of the higher nature, love, gratitude, or hope, be awakened. The nervous force, which is to the muscular what the steam is to the parts of the engine, is only in a small degree under the control of the conscious will. It is a little fire only that fear kindles, and it is a little force only that is generated thereby to move the frame. I speak of fear alone, that is, mere fear of evil. When love of life and home and friends are present and give meaning to fear, the utmost energies may be evoked; but not by fear alone, which is, the rather, paralyzing in its effect.

Were it not for this impotence of the lash, the nations would either not have risen from the once almost universal condition of servitude, or would have risen far more slowly. The slave has always been able to make it for his master's interest to sell him freedom. He could always afford to pay more than could be made out of him. This is a wellrecognized principle, and hence the former slave States of the American Union, building their political and social institutions on slavery as the corner-stone, had to forbid entirely or to put under serious disabilities the exercise of manumission. Even with the little the brutalized black could apprehend of the privileges of freedom, even with his feeble hopes and aspirations, condemned, as he knew, by his color to perpetual exclusion, he could always buy himself if permitted. This unprofitableness of slave or bond labor1 has prepared the way for those great changes, generally, it is true, effected immediately under the pressure of political necessities, which have transformed whole populations of slaves or serfs into nations of freemen.

2

1 Mr. Turnbull, in his work on Austria, says: "A large Bohemian proprietor, who with his brothers counted on their estates 18,000 subjects, has frequently observed to me that he found it usually more advantageous to accept even a very small part of the legal commutation-money, and to hire labor from others, than to take it in kind from those who were bound to yield it."

2 Instance the action of the nobles of Hungary, at the outbreak of

But great as is the superiority, arising from this cause alone, of free over serf or slave labor, the difference is yet not so great as exists between grades of free labor, as cheerfulness and hopefulness in labor, due to self-respect and social ambition, are found, in greater or in less degree, animating classes and communities of laborers.

It is in the proprietor of land under equal laws that we find the moral qualities which are the incentive of industry most highly developed. Arthur Young's saying has become proverbial: "Give a man the secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden;"" as also his other saying, "The magic of property turns sand into gold." The energy which fear and pain can not command, joy and hope call forth in its utmost possibilities. The man not only will, he can. The waste of muscular force is perhaps not half as great in toil which is taken up freely and gladly. Nervous exhaustion comes late and comes slowly when the laborer sees his reward manifestly growing before his eyes.

It is the fulness and the directness of this relation of labor to its reward which, without bell or whip, drives the peasant proprietor afield, and,

"From the rising of the lark to the lodging of the lamb,"

the revolution of 1848, in transmuting the urbarial tenure of lands into unrestricted tenure by freehold. "By this great and voluntary concession," says Alison," the property of 500,000 families, consisting of little estates from 30 to 60 acres each, and comprehending nearly half a kingdom, was at once converted from a feudal tenure, burdened with numerous duties, into absolute property."-History of Europe, xxii. 612.

1 "An activity has been here that has swept away all difficulties before it, and has clothed the very rocks with verdure. It would be a disgrace to common-sense to ask the cause: the enjoyment of property must have done it. Give a man the secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine years lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert."—Travels in France, Pinkerton, iv. 122.

2 How the magic of property turns sand into mold, a truer source of wealth than placers or auriferous quartz, has been shown in the maritime districts of Belgium.