nent, lying mostly south of the equator, which has the name "America" on it. It was not until about 1540 that America had been sufficiently circumnavigated to establish the fact that it was a distinct continent. On a map made by Mercator in 1541 both North and South America are distinctly outlined, and the name America placed "Ame" on North and "rica" on South America. Americus Vespucius died in 1512, but it appears that his name was not attached to any known map of America earlier than 1514, and then only to the central portion of South America, and it was not until 1541, twenty-nine years after his death, that the name America was attached to the whole continent.

His widely published letter to Lorenzo de' Medici, describing the newly-discovered region which he had visited south of the equator, no doubt associated his name with the new world, so large a part of which he was the first to visit, but certainly there can be no ground of censure upon the great navigator for this. Nor is it, in fact, of much importance. The matured judgment of the world, with a full knowledge of Icelandic voyages, and the successive steps which brought to Europeans a knowledge of the existence and extent of a previously unknown continent has given to Columbus the fame to which he is justly entitled as the projector and master mind that carried theory into practical and bold action, and demonstrated the existence of lands to be reached by a courageous voyage towards the setting sun. Columbus is rightly recognized as the discoverer of America, and it matters not if another's name has been given to this continent, so long as the rightful claim of Columbus is so fully and everywhere recognized.

Those were days of great achievements in the work of opening up a larger knowledge of our habitable earth. Bartholomew Diaz, in 1486, passed around the Cape of Good Hope and some distance up the eastern coast of Africa and returned, after a voyage of over thirteen hundred miles, a wonderful exploit for that day. De Gama, in 1497, made a voyage from Lisbon to Hindostan, returning in 1499. Cab

ral, in 1497, discovered the coast of South America to the south of the equator, but, being so far east, it was not supposed to have any connection with the countries discovered by Columbus. Americus Vespucius completed the discovery of a large part of the eastern coast of South America in 1501. Balboa first discovered the Pacific ocean from the heights of Panama in 1506, and Magellan, in 1509, discovered and passed through the straits of Magellan, and sailed, more than five thousand miles, to the Phillippine Islands, near the coast of China. These were all great achievements, and the world justly commemorates these great names, for it is no disparagement to the fame of Columbus to give due meed of praise to his contemporaries. Among these Americus Vespucius, the Florentine, Cosmographer and Pilot Major of Spain, deserves recognition, and no opprobrium should rest upon his memory because his name has been accidentally attached to a continent, which he was so greatly instrumental in discovering and making known.

GEO. R. FAIRBANKS.

THE RELATIONS OF LABOR AND CAPITAL.

The immense strides made in productive development in the past hundred years have rendered the problem of the rights and duties of the wage-earner and his employer complex and difficult. The industrial conditions of Adam Smith's period were simple in character. No such corporations controlled manufacturing energies like those of the present day. The skill of the artisan in his special trade was the legacy of his ancestry, and was generally of a secret character, each family having its special patterns and methods, which were guarded with jealous care. Conditions similar to this still exist among the skilled weavers of France and the lacemakers of Belgium, but the industrial organization of the greater part of the world has wonderfully changed.

Improvement in means of transportation has been one of the most potent factors in overturning the old order of things. When we consider that the whole world is in cheaper and closer communication to-day than were the different States of the American Union one hundred years ago, we appreciate the advantages given to productive energies by the new markets thus opened. Adam Smith, for example, told the English farmers that they need never fear the competition of Irish grain, for the cost of transportation would prevent its importation. Now California wheat is sold daily in London, and, unless we stop to think, we find nothing remarkable in the fact.

A century ago famines were of as frequent occurrence even in England as they are now in Russia. But the railroad systems and steamship lines have made such extreme scarcity now well nigh impossible. Invention has displaced rude primitive machinery, and yet this has been done without permanent suffering to the laboring classes. Where one employment has been destroyed by machinery, ten others have been created. The cheapening of products has

caused greater consumption, and a larger proportion of the human family are now engaged in productive enterprises than ever before. Statistics also show a general improvement in the conditions of existence.

The average workingman in England, previous to 1760, could purchase only two-thirds of a peck of wheat with the wages of a day's labor. Since that time his income has more than doubled while the prices of the most important necessaries of life have fallen by nearly one-half. Especially in the last half century have great changes been wrought. Constantly imcreasing proportions of capital and labor have been devoted to the manufacturing branches of production, and the factory system essentially adapted to these industries is the result of this tendency. Production under one management on a large scale has the advantage of an increasing return for the application of additional capital, whereas in agriculture a constantly lessening proportional product is obtained, according as the cultivation is intensified. The great combinations of capital and the large employments of labor have therefore taken place in the former pursuits, and individualistic competition is being gradually eliminated in them by ever increasing coöperation. The result has been the building up of a society very different in aspect from that from which the earlier economists deduced their laws of wages. They had studied the conditions of society existing in France before the Revolution, and their economic theories were consequently narrow in the extreme. They assumed that the rates of profits and wages were fixed by a "natural" law. As Turgot expressed it: "In every occupation it does come to pass that the wages of the artisan are limited to that which is necessary to procure him a subsistence," or, in other words, are fixed at the starvation limit. The reasonings of this school much influenced Adam Smith, but he perceived that in England this "natural" rate was much above the actual cost of living, and therefore he propounded the humanistic doctrine that a high rate of wages "increases the industry of the common people."

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David Ricardo and J. S. Mill were both inclined to hold to what the German school of economists speak of as the "iron" or "brazen" law of wages. Mill fully developed. what is known as the "Wage-fund theory ", and it is chiefly over his exposition that the controversy on that subject has been carried on. Wages", he says, "depend mainly upon the proportion between population and capital", or, as he explains it subsequently, between "the number of the laboring class who work for hire and the aggregate of what may be called the wages-fund which consists of that part of circulating capital which is expended in the direct hire of labor".

This seemed a very simple solution of an extremely concrete and complex problem, and in accordance with it his. suggestions as to the causes of the degradation, and his plans for the amelioration of the condition of the lower classes, recognized the Malthusian theory of population. Although this line of thought still retains a place in the works of some of the most widely studied and respected authorities, it has nevertheless been very vigorously and successfully attacked. The law has been shown to be faulty in its application to so many of the phenomena of the relations between capital and labor, that the tendency of the more recent authorities has been to discard it entirely.

Of modern economists General Francis A. Walker especially has been unremitting in his attacks on the old doctrine, and in controverting it, he and others have been led to an opposite extreme. He claims that wages are not always even paid out of capital, although they are generally advanced by it. "They are finally," he says, "paid out of the product. He [the employer] purchases labor, not because he wishes to keep it employed, but as the means to the production of wealth". The employer expects and takes a risk of the profits of the transaction. It is on this risk that he determines what wages he can pay. Perfect competition will assure that this shall be a just amount. If one employer refuses to pay according to the output, an