Exhaustion of certain natural resources
1. Present industrial progress is largely due to material conditions, temporarily favorable. Many of the materials now being destroyed in immense quantities have been slowly stored up through the ages and are not renewable.[4] Till modern times man knew little of the world beneath its crust. Living, he scratched the earth's surface, and dying, left his bones to fertilize the soil. But to-day, man exhausts the stores in the interior of the earth, burns the treasures of the carboniferous age, casts the fertilizing elements into the ocean, and leaves the world an empty shell. Forests are being so rapidly cut off that the price of fuel-wood and lumber in many parts of the United States has, within twenty years, been multiplied by three. The world's store of iron ore is not yet fully known, but much of it has been measured, and of the deposits known to be within the United States over one half are said to be owned by one corporation, and they are enough to continue its present output no more than sixty years. Many other natural products are in like manner gathered by civilized man from a stock created long ago. While the supply of vegetable food promises to be ample, the supply of meat will be maintained with difficulty as population becomes denser.
Possibilities of other resources
2. Many other inexhaustible sources of essential materials have not yet been developed. What has just been said is the darker side. The coal-mines can be emptied, but so long as the sun shines and the rains fall, Niagara will remain as a source of light, heat, and power. The tides flow on forever. In every thunder-storm enough force is dissipated to run thousands of factories. The heat in the center of the globe, though not inexhaustible, would suffice for man's needs for many centuries. The force in Mount Pelée, if chained and utilized, would run a million factories a million years. It is not too much to hope that engineering skill will some day reach and utilize these sources. Such a cheapening and diffusion of power would put a new face on many of the problems of industry. New sources of materials undoubtedly will be developed. It is reasonable to hope that before iron ore has become extremely scarce, a cheap and practicable method of extracting aluminium from clay will have been perfected. Secure of these permanent sources, civilization will stand on a firmer foundation.
Effect on values of shifting centers of power and materials
A great displacement of local values must accompany this shifting of the centers of power and materials. When the coal districts are heaps of slag and cinders, industry will be found near the water-power. Because of distance from raw materials, New England even now finds herself hard pushed in her rivalry with the Southern states in the manufacture of textiles. The industrial map of our country will be greatly altered a hundred years hence. The possession of rich natural resources to-day does not insure a community enduring prosperity.
Effect of accumulating wealth
3. The mass and quality of wealth will increase rapidly if social and political conditions remain stable. The main method of increasing wealth must be the putting of energies and resources into more abiding forms. In order that a motive for saving may be present, there must be stable conditions. Increasing subordination of present to future will be accompanied by a fall in the rate of interest. The growth of wealth means a higher quality of all artificial productive agents. A larger part of the energies of men will then be directed merely to supervising the developed machinery. Man will live in a better environment, in a better and richer world. Wages must rise as the quality of tools and machinery improves. Population most probably will not increase proportionately and the relation of the labor-supply to the resources with which it works should be more and more in favor of the laboring classes. The difficult problems of the concentrated control of industry and of the control of wealth must be solved in the interests of all.
Social progress vs. race progress
4. Improvement of the race biologically, through selection of the ablest individuals, has been a great factor in human progress. Social progress is not necessarily the steady biological betterment of the native ability of men. The education of the average member of society is becoming yearly better; it is doubtful whether the innate capacity of a new-born babe in Europe and America to-day is greater than it was among our Germanic ancestors in Roman times. Indeed, the progress of the past two thousand years has been in social organization, in the enlargement and simplifying of the mass of knowledge which has to be reappropriated by each new individual, rather than in race-breeding and in quality.