in a sober and practical mood.  His very exaltation, now past, has rendered him more keenly susceptible to the deficiencies and impediments which hem him in:  his house seems narrow, his food coarse, his furniture scanty, his prospects gloomy, and those of his children more sombre, if possible; and as he hurries off to the day’s task which he has too long neglected, and for which he has little heart, he too falls into that train of thought which is beginning to encircle the globe, and of which the burden may be freely rendered thus:  “Why should those by whose toil all comforts and luxuries are produced, or made available, enjoy so scanty a share of them?  Why should a man able and eager to work, ever stand idle for want of employment in a world where so much needful work impatiently awaits the doing?  Why should a man be required to surrender something of his independence, in accepting the employment which will enable him to earn by honest effort the bread of his family?  Why should the man who 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