The general rise of wages may at first bring economical disturbance and pressure on certain classes, but, in the end, it brings general prosperity, diffused civilization, public happiness, security to society, which can never be secure while the few are feasting and the many are starving. In the end, also, it brings an increase of production, and greater plenty. Not that we can assent, without reserve, to the pleasant aphorism, that increase of wages, in itself, makes a better workman, which is probably true only where the workman has been under-fed, as in the case of the farm labourers of England. But the dearness of labour leads to the adoption of improved methods of production, and especially to the invention of machinery, which gives back to the community what it has paid in increased wages a hundred or a thousand fold. In Illinois, towards the close of the war, a large proportion of the male population had been drafted or volunteered, labour had become scarce and wages had risen, but the invention of machinery had been so much stimulated that the harvest that year was greater than it had ever been before. Machinery will now be used to a greater extent on the English farms; more will be produced by fewer hands, labourers will be set free for the production of other kinds, perhaps for the cultivation of our North-West, and the British peasant will rise from the industrial and intellectual level of a mere labourer to that of the guider of a machine. Machinery worked by relays of men is, no doubt, one of the principal solutions of our industrial problems, and of the social problems connected with them. Some seem to fancy that it is the universal solution; but we cannot run reaping machines in the winter or in the dark.