We were compelled last week to hold over a very
interesting quotation from the speech of Sir Hallowell Rogers, of the Bir- mingham Small Arms Company. It is one which deserves very close attention by the manual workers and also by the general public:
" That men of any perception should seriously believe that all wealth is created by labour and by labour only, when the facts that prove the contrary are so many and so obvious, is one of the psychological wonders of the day. For, to take ono example only, every labouring man knows that to a great extent labour is embodied power only ; how otherwise could we have seen the most striking of all industrial phenomena, namely, the continuous supersession of human labour by the almost human labour-saving device ? Indeed one of the greatest difficulties of British industry is, that the worker does not recognize the advantages to himself or to his class of this labour-saumg machinery, just as it is perhaps the chief ad- vantage that the United States have over this country, both in agriculture and in industry, that Americans are enabled, by the advantages of their soil and climate in the first .place, and thanks to the enlightenment of their working men in the second, to obtain their products with a far smaller expenditure of human energy than IS possible in this country. It has been well said that the greatest labour-saving device in America is the American working man, for he has had the brains to see that power and machinery increase his ability to produce, and that with increased production—and therefore cheaper products —must come higher individual wages."
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