furnish the capital, an entirely different set the labor, and still a third the land. Under such conditions, the organizer, the entrepreneur, receives a new importance, and captains of industry are made possible.

There was at the same time a great change in men's ideas as to the duties of the state toward industry. Non-interference became the watchword, and the abuses that resulted in the English factories from this unregulated competition were truly appalling. In America, the evils were not so great. Chevalier, writing in 1834, testifies on this point as follows: "The cotton manufacture alone employs six thousand persons in Lowell; of this number nearly five thousand are young women from seventeen to twenty-four years of age. On seeing them pass through the streets in the morning and evening and at their meal hours, neatly dressed; on finding their scarfs and shawls and green silk hoods, which they wore as a shelter from the sun and dust (for Lowell is not yet paved), hanging up in the factories amidst the flowers and shrubs, which they cultivate, I said to myself, 'This, then, is not like Manchester;' and when I was informed of the rate of their wages, I understood that it was not at all like Manchester. ... After spending four years in the factories, they may have a little fortune of $250 or $300, when they often quit work and marry." And yet the evils

1 "Society, Manners, and Politics in the United States," Boston, ed. 1839, p. 137.

have been great here, also. At about the time when the foregoing was written, Seth Luther, a mechanic, published a pamphlet in which he sets forth the conditions in the factories as he found them.1 The New England mills generally ran thirteen hours a day the year round, while one in Connecticut ran fifteen hours and ten minutes. At Paterson, New Jersey, the women and children had to be at work at half-past four, and sometimes were urged on by the use of the cowhide. At Mendon, Massachusetts, a boy of twelve drowned himself in a pond to escape factory labor. The United Hand Loom Weavers' Trade Association reported, in 1835, that they could earn in twelve hours but from sixty-five to seventy-one cents a day.

The reason that the evils of the change were not so great in this country was partly in the fact that there was a great supply of free land to which any who were dissatisfied with the changing conditions could turn, and partly in the fact that we had as yet not established a great economic system of any kind that could be overthrown. With us the change was an evolution rather than a revolution. The existence of a great body of unoccupied land has, indeed, been one of the most characteristic facts of our economic development. It has served as a constant force tending to keep up wages in the older regions and to furnish an outlet for the discontented element. Timothy Dwight speaks of this fact in his "Travels in New England and New

1 See the author's "Labor Movement in America," Ch. III.

York in 1821." They had many troubles in the older regions, he says, but they would have had many more if this discontented element had remained at home. Our free land has almost disappeared, and we shall in the future have to find a new way to deal with those who are dissatisfied. That this will be no easy matter is evident when we consider that if the mainland of the United States were only half as densely populated as the German Empire is to-day, we should have over four hundred millions of people under one govern

ment.

The abuses that appeared with the factory system led, in both England and America, to a twofold reaction against the laissez-faire policy. Competition has been regulated by a series of factory acts and other legislation, and workmen. have been stimulated to more thorough organization to secure for themselves, in the shape of higher wages, a part of the increasing wealth. But at best, a change from one stage to another must always mean loss and suffering to a part of society. The methods which were compatible with success in the slow-going handicraft stage became inappropriate in a more strenuous competitive period; and those who could not make the change lingered behind, and became what has been expressively called "the rubbish heap of the competitive system." There was once a strong feeling that those who had learned a trade had a sort of vested interest in it, and ought not to be turned out immedi

The

ately when some other man could be found who might do the work more cheaply. Custom protected the incompetent to some extent from the ruthless force of competition, but later they were turned adrift to shift for themselves. In many ways, too, our habits of thought have to be changed as we pass from one stage to another. This is irksome, and we resist it for a time. idea that a business is a man's own and ought not to be interfered with by the public is one that belongs to this early part of the industrial stage, and it has been only with extreme slowness and obstinacy that it is coming to be recognized by business men that such an attitude is an anachronism. Unquestionably the dispute between labor and capital has been aggravated by this fact. Education can do much here to make the transitions easier, because when men recognize the inevitableness of a change, they are much less apt to resist it. The necessity of discarding one's old habits of thought under new conditions can be illustrated in another way. The farmers brought up in the traditions of the individualism of New England and of the South, where individualism is far more pronounced, on going to the far West, where close association and coöperation were required to carry on irrigated agriculture, found that it took a long time and involved a good deal of waste to learn how to act together.

This thought has an important application at the present time. We are coming to deal more with

peoples of a lower civilization, and we have to ask the question, How rapidly can they move forward to a stage of industrial civilization which is removed from them by hundreds and perhaps thousands of years? It has been necessary to modify our system of land tenure more or less in the case of the North American Indians, to assist them to make the transition from common or tribal property in land to individual property in severalty as we understand it. The question may indeed be asked if we are not expecting them to travel too rapidly. It is interesting to note that Professor J. W. Jenks, in his report upon the Philippines, does not hold that the natives are ripe for individual property in land, but recommends public ownership with leases. This illustrates very important principles of special significance to us now. For a long time in this country, under the influence of eighteenth-century philosophy, we were inclined to regard men as substantially equal, and to suppose that all could live under the same economic and political institutions. It now becomes plain that this is a theory which works disaster, and is, indeed, cruel to those who are in the lower stages, resulting in their exploitation and degradation.

Returning again to the early industrial stage, we find that, even after the idea of a regulated competition had made its way, the ideal which we attempted to follow was that the competitive struggle, even though regulated, should be maintained in every branch of production. Competition