Bad as things are, when regarded from the standpoint of a human ideal, they are better for the majority of the workers in this and in other advanced industrial countries than ever in the past, so far as we can reconstruct and understand that past.Machinery has rendered a great human service by taking over large masses of heavy, dull, and degrading work.When fully developed and harnessed to the social service of man, it should prove to be the great liberator of his free productive tastes and faculties, performing for him the routine processes of industry so that he may have time and energy to devote himself to activities more interesting and varied.
The uniqueness of the individual consumer has only begun to make its impression upon industry.For it needs liberty and education for a man to recognise this property of organic uniqueness and to insist on realising it.The first movements of conscious tastes in a nation or a class are largely imitative, taking shape in fashions sufficiently wide-spread and uniform to lend themselves to routine mechanical production.The self-assertion of the individual is a slower fruit of culture.But, as it grows, it will offer a continually stronger opposition to the dominion of mechanical production.
It will do this in two ways.In the first place, it will cause a larger proportion of demand to be directed to the classes of products, such as intellectual, aesthetic, and personal services, which are by their nature less susceptible of mechanical production.In the second place, weakening the traditional and the imitative factors in taste and demand, it will cause consumption, even of the higher forms of material commodities, to be a more accurate expression of the changing needs and tastes of the individual, stamping upon the processes of production the same impress of individuality.
But though the direct control of machinery over human labour is obstructed in the earlier extractive processes by the refractory uneven nature of materials, and in the final processes by the nature and particular requirements of consumers, its influence extends far beyond the middle processes of manufacture where its prominence is greatest.Power-driven machinery plays a larger part in agriculture every year: mining is the first of machine industries in the sense that it employs the largest amount of horsepower per man; the transport trade by sea and land is mechanised even in its minor local branches; the great public services, supplying light, water, and other common wants, are among the largest users of power-driven machinery;the greatest of our material industries which still depends mainly upon hand labour, the building and road-making group, is constantly increasing its dependence on machinery for its heavier carrying work and for the preparation of the metal, stone and woodwork it employs.When we add the growth of new large manufactures, such as chemicals and electrical apparatus, the enormous expansion of the paper and printing trades under the new mechanical conditions, the recent transference of the processes of the preparation of foods and drinks and laundry work from the private house to the factory, we shall recognise that the net influence of machinery, as determining the character of human labour, is still advancing with considerable rapidity.
§4.It is not easy to answer the two related questions, 'How far is machinery the master, how far the servant, of the workers who cooperate with it?' 'How far does machinery aggravate, how far lighten the human costs of labour?' Even when we compare the work of the classes most subservient to machinery, the feeders and tenders in our factories, with the domestic or earlier factory processes under hand labour, it is by no means self-evident that the net burden of the human costs has been enhanced.For, though the spinning and weaving work before the industrial revolution had certain slight elements of freedom and variety now absent, many of the hygienic conditions were far worse, the hours of labour were usually longer, and the large employment of old folk and tender children, in work nearly as unvaried as that enjoined by modern machinery, enslaved the entire life of the home and family to the narrow and precarious conditions of a small local trade.The real liberty of the worker, as regards his work, or its disposal in the market, was hardly greater than in the modern factory.
In most of the great branches of production, machinery is rather an adjunct to labour than a director.The labourer in charge of the machine tends more to the type of the engineer than to that of the feeder or mere minder.Though the mining, metal, chemical, paper, food and drink manufactures contain large quantities of machinery, a large proportion of those who have to deal with the machines are skilled manual labourers.So in the transport trade, though the displacement of the old-time sailor by the engineer and stoker, of the horse-driver by the engine-driver and the motor-man, sometimes appears to involve a degradation of labour, the issue is a doubtful one, if all the pros and cons are taken into due account.As regards the employment of machinery in the building and contracting trades, as in the mining, its first and obvious effect has been to relieve human labour from much of the heaviest muscular toil.Though most of such labour involves too slight elements of interest or skill greatly to alleviate the physical fatigue, it cannot be said that machinery has increased the burden.
