It seems at first sight
therefore strange to find so reasonable a writer as John Stuart Mill
declaring, "It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made
have lightened the day's toil of any human being." Yet if we confine our
attention to the direct effects of machinery, we shall acknowledge that
Mill's doubt is, upon the whole, a well founded one.
According to the evidence of existing poverty adduced in the last
chapter, it would appear that the lowest classes of workers have not
shared to any considerable degree the enormous gain of wealth-producing
power bestowed by machinery. It is not our object here to discuss the
right of the poorer workers to profit by inventions due to others, but
merely to indicate the effects which the growth of machinery actually
produce in this economic condition. Let us examine the industrial
effects of the growth of machinery, so as to understand how they affect
the social and economic welfare of the working-classes.
Sec. 2. Class Separation of Employer and Workmen.--The first effect of
machinery is to give a new and powerful impulse to the centralizing
tendency in industry. "Civilization is economy of power, and English
power is coal," said the materialistic Baron Liebig. Coal as a generator
of steam-power demands that manufactures shall be conducted on a large
scale in particular localities. Before the day of large, expensive
steam-driven machinery, manufacture was done in scattered houses by
workers who were the owners of their simple tools, and often of the
material on which they worked; or in small workshops, where a master
worked with a few journeymen and apprentices.
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