stands out brightly beside the dull and meaningless
toil of his descendant.

The picture must not be drawn in colors too sinister. In the dullest
work and in the meanest lives in the new world to-day there are elements
that were lacking in the work of the old world. The universal spread of
elementary education, the universal access to the printed page, and the
universal hope of better things, if not for oneself, at least for one's
children, and even the universal restlessness that the industrialism of
to-day have brought are better things than the dull plodding passivity
of the older world. Only a false mediaevalism can paint the past in
colors superior to the present. The haze of distance that dims the
mountains with purple, shifts also the crude colors of the past into the
soft glory of retrospect. Misled by these, the sentimentalist may often
sigh for an age that in a nearer view would be seen filled with cruelty
and suffering. But even when we have made every allowance for the all
too human tendency to soften down the past, it remains true that in many
senses the processes of industry for the worker have lost in
attractiveness and power of absorption of the mind during the very
period when they have gained so enormously in effectiveness and in power
of production.

The essential contrast lies between the vastly increased power of
production and its apparent inability to satisfy for all humanity the
most elementary human wants; between the immeasurable saving of labor
effected by machinery and the brute fact of the continuance of
hard-driven, unceasing toil.

Of the extent of this increased power of production we can only speak in
general terms. No one, as far as I am aware, has yet essayed to measure
it. Nor have we any form of calculus or computation that can easily be
applied. If we wish to compare the gross total of production effected
to-day with that accomplished a hundred and fifty years ago, the means,
the basis of calculation, is lacking. Vast numbers of the things
produced now were not then in existence. A great part of our production
of to-day culminates not in productive goods, but in services, as in
forms of motion, or in ability to talk across a distance.

It is true that statistics that deal with the world's production of
cotton, or of oil, or of iron and steel present stupendous results. But
even these do not go far enough. For the basic raw materials are worked
into finer and finer forms to suppl