faithfully labors for another, and receives therefor less than the product of his labor, be currently held the obliged party, rather than he who buys the work and makes a good bargain of it? In short, why should Speculation and Scheming ride so jauntily in their carriages, splashing honest Work as it trudges humbly and wearily by on foot?" Such, as I interpret it, is the problem which occupies and puzzles the knotted brain of Toil in our day. [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. England herself, it is computed now does the work, by means of steam and machinery, of eight hundred millions of men. And yet English wants are no more satisfied to-day than they were a thousand years ago. I do not say they are altogether unsatisfied; but I say that the consciousness of want, the demand for products, is just as keen to-day; and I have not a doubt that if inventions could be introduced into China whereby the labor of her people should be rendered fifty times as effective as it is to-day, you would find not a dearth of employment as a consequence, but rather an increase of activity and an increased demand for labor. To-day British capital and British talent are fairly grid-ironing the ancient plains and slopes of Hindostan with British canals, irrigating, and railroads. It is their _gold_ they say; but it is not British capital, so much as British genius and British confidence, that are required.