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wages, fuel, and other requirements may be largely increased, nevertheless, as machinery is improved and perfected, the average cost of its products will be constantly diminished. In this way, while human labor will advance, machinery will nevertheless cheapen production.

It is true, invention will supplant human labor more and more; but still the constant expansion of consumption will give full scope to the faculties of man in newer and wider avenues. A large remuneration will increase his ability to purchase these cheapened products of machinery; and so the comforts, refinements, and embellishments of a higher civilization will be widely diffused, and down-trodden humanity will be more and more elevated. Sir John Barnard Byles says of the results of invention and improvement: "Men do not dream of prosperity which is in store for all orders of the people. The riches of nature will yet rain into the laps of the starving poor."

Co-operation of all Labor Essential.

The industries which are every year more banding together, scarcely yet comprehend the magnitude of their mission. Employer and employed array themselves in needless opposition, weakening the force of both, and diverting their common strength from the common enemy.

In the contests where the employers "lock out," or where combined labor asserts itself in "strikes," the true issue of the battle is not understood. Both "strikes" and "lock-outs," by lessening production, are enemies to civilization. Employers and employed should sympathize together more sincerely. With less distrust, they would comprehend that the real enemy of both is the unjust standard of money, which, through unfair interest, is constantly swallowing the fruit of labor.

The employer is only the middleman between labor and consumers; and the competition between all middlemen to secure business, generally guarantees as fair an equivalent for labor as can be afforded. All middlemen alike, those who buy, sell, or advance on products, are forced, by competition, to moderate profits for services, but all alike are victims to the demands of capital -- in rents, in bank interest, in usury, which in the end must be charged to producers. The difficulty is not with the excessive charges for services of middlemen, but in the absurd scarcity of money, which thereby keeps industry and production in the power of higher interest than it can earn.