paupers. A description of the miserable living standards of the mill workers in England in 1844 was given by Fredrick Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. In the preface to the 1892 edition, Engels noted that the extreme poverty he had written about in 1844 had largely disappeared. David Ames Wells also noted that living conditions in England had improved near the end of the 19th century and that unemployment was low. The scarcity and the high price of labor in the US in the 19th century was well documented by contemporary accounts, as in the following: Scarcity of labor was a factor in the economics of slavery in the United States. As new territories were opened and federal land sales were conducted, land had to be cleared and new homesteads established. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants annually came to the US and found jobs digging canals and building railroads. Almost all work during most of the 19th century was done by hand or with horses, mules, or oxen since there was very little mechanization. The workweek during most of the 19th century was 60 hours. Unemployment at times was between one and two percent. The tight labor market was a factor in productivity gains by allowing workers to maintain or to increase their nominal wages during the secular deflation that caused real wages to rise at various times in the 19th century, especially in its final decades. 20th century There were labor shortages during World War I. Ford Motor Co. doubled wages to reduce turnover. After 1925, unemployment gradually began to rise. The 1930s saw the Great Depression impact unemployment across the globe. In Germany and the United States, the unemployment rate reached about 25% in 1932. In some towns and cities in the northeast of England, unemployment reached as high as 70%; the national unemployment level peaked at more than 22% in 1932. Unemployment in Canada reached 27% at the depth of the Depression in 1933. In 1929, the U.S. unemployment rate averaged 3%. In the US, the Works Progress Administration (1935–43) was the largest make-work program. It hired men (and some women) off the relief roles ("dole") typically for unskilled labor. During the New Deal, over three million unemployed young men were taken out of their homes and placed for six months into more than 2600 work camps managed by the