rent in progress in the economic arts, and
must we justify the movement only on the ground of utility, though
knowing that a moralist would condemn it? These are some of the
general questions that are to be decided by a study of this phase of
economic dynamics. We need to know both what the movement will in the
end do for humanity and what it will at once do for particular
workmen.[2] In addition to ascertaining what the ultimate results of
the movement will be, we need to trace, with as much accuracy as is
possible, the effects of the disturbances that are involved in
generally beneficent changes.

[2] Our study may lead to a moral verdict without being
itself an ethical study; we limit the inquiry to questions of
fact, but perceive that some of the facts are of such a kind
that they must lead a reader to condemn or approve the social
economic system.

CHAPTER XVI

EFFECT OF IMPROVEMENTS IN METHODS OF PRODUCTION

_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