_Displacement of Labor and Capital by Inventions._--Inventions are "labor-saving." Employers are engaged in a race with each other in reducing the outlays involved in producing goods, and a common way of doing this is to devise machinery that will do what laborers have heretofore done. The same thing is accomplished by developing cheap sources of motive power or introducing new commodities which are good substitutes for dearer ones. Mechanical automata have at a thousand points taken labor out of human hands; electricity, which is "harnessing Niagara," may at some time harness waves and winds and make them turn the literal wheels of mechanical progress. Such things, by causing a given amount of labor to produce a larger amount of consumers' wealth, are product multipliers; but this is the same thing as saying that they yield a given product at the cost of less labor, and as we more commonly see their effect in this light, we call them labor savers. _Why Labor Saving is not always and everywhere Welcomed._--To an offhand view it would seem that product multiplying is the greatest blessing that, in an economic way, can come to humanity; and if general and permanent effects be considered, it is so. The solitary hunter who has to catch and club his game would get unqualified benefit from the possession of a bow and arrows; the fisherman would get the same benefit from a canoe, the cultivator of the soil from a spade, etc. Society in its entirety is an isolated being and derives similar gains from engines, looms, furnaces, steamships, railroads, telegraphs, etc. Yet there are persons within the great social organism to whom the benefit _from one special improvement_ may be small and the cost great. There are none who are not better off because of _all improvements_ past and present. _The General Demand for Labor not Lessened._--It is a matter of common experience that new machines are labor displacers. At its introduction an economical device often forces some men to seek new occupations, but it never reduces the general demand for labor. As progress closes one field of employment it opens others, and it has come about that after a century and a quarter of brilliant invention and of rapid and general substitution of machine work for hand work, there is no larger proportion of the laboring population in idleness now than there was at the beginning of the period.