CHAPTER VI MAN AND SOCIETY VERSUS MACHINERY I IF only the material elements of the problem are considered, socialism is so largely a conflict over the ownership of machinery that little headway can be made until its difficulties have been faced. That the world's inventions should have become a private possession is to the socialist the tragedy of modern industry. In the exclusive power which this ownership gives, the socialist sees the intensifying of every cruelty in the industrial struggle for existence. Largely to this ownership he attributes the slavish dependence of the workman, the panting scramble of competition with its chaotic production and waste of human life. Let this ownership, together with the earth's area, pass again to the people, and a swarm of evils under which we now stagger shall fall from us. That these 'means of production" should be taken from the control of the few and given into the control of all, is to pass from slavery to a free and self-directed life. It is of course true that socialism does not trust alone to the mere material fact of this transfer of possession. It has its own ethical idealism and a very noble appreciation of a more prolonged and thorough train In the part Caber ing for every child. Socialism sees that these spiritual values are to be counted in, if men are to enter into its new brotherhood. The economic side of this endeavor turns, however, on the machine and the "footing on which it rests." It is to be noted that there is in this view no objec tion to machinery as machinery. The objection is against its individual ownership. Generations of workmen have objected to the machine as such, while other objectors, who cannot be classified, show a keen antipathy because of its effects upon the man or upon society. Emerson says manhood has been shrunk and belittled by machinery. "The robust rural Saxon degenerates in the mills to the Leicester stockinger, to the imbecile Manchester spinner - far on the way to be spiders and needles. The incessant repetition of the same hand-work dwarfs the man, robs him of his strength, wit, and versatility, to make a pin-polisher, a buckle-maker, or any other speciality;" Ruskin, in a style brilliant as fire, preached against the "wheels" of progress for forty years. Morris begins the prologue to the "Earthly Paradise" with the words: Forget six counties overhung with smoke, Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke, In one of his art lectures he speaks of machines that "have been so used that they have driven all men into mere frantic haste and hurry, thereby destroying pleasure, that is life, on all hands; they have, instead of lightening the labor of the workmen, intensified it, and thereby added more weariness yet to the burden which the poor have to carry." Nor is it alone the poet and seer who see the ugly side of all this cunning artifice. I once asked an engineer to whom great honor has been given, why so many men of high intelligence felt this disapproval. He replied: "Their instinct is as right about it, as the suspicion of the workman. I have grown up with machinery, have watched its effect for years in shops of every description. I say Zola's phrase, 'La Bête Humaine,' is an exact description. The great machine is a beast and claims its victims as constantly as any monster in the old fables." He had no illusions about "throwing more men out than are set to work." His censure was because so much of this power has to be worked in places and under conditions that slowly dehumanize a great multitude of men, women, and youth. President Hadley, in a chapter on Machinery admirable for discrimination, admits that, "The charge that the factory system tends to deprive the laborer of independence, and reduce him to the position of a machine, is not so easily set aside.) The substitution. of mechanical for intelligent labor is often a very serious evil in modern manufacturing, . . . large classes of men who were most useful citizens in the past are being driven out of existence by the stress. of modern competition." John Stuart Mill was as severe in his upbraiding as the poets when he expressed the conviction that machinery has not even lightened the toil of the race. The sewing-machine does twenty times the work of the unaided needlewoman. As a consequence, cloaks, with more than one hundred thousand stitches, are now made. Here is no lessening of toil, but only heavy accumulation of useless and stuffy ornament. At this point many of the artists cry out against machinery. They insist that although it gives us mountainous piles of objects; gives us infinite quantity of things, it deprives us of beauty and delicacy. The nobler object of life is certainly not first quantity, but quality. Quantity as such does not necessarily represent any good whatsoever. The newspaper is called the educator of the democracy. It is an educator in a good sense to the extent that it has excellence of quality. But presses in a single office may turn out half a million of yellow journals in a day. They make a Sunday edition of thirty-two pages, some of it good, some of it rubbish, and a part merely despicable. The opinions just quoted are a challenge to the frisky optimism of this machine age. The engineer spoke from experience, Mill from a singularly cool judgment. Morris, printer, designer, weaver, dyer, working half his life as a practical craftsman, yet like his master, Ruskin, never lost his hatred of most machinery as now used. Even if these critics do not exaggerate the evil side of machine influence, it is evident from the extracts given that they ignore the immense service of the thing they blame. Mechanical invention represents in point of magnitude the all-dominating force of our time.) It would leave no human experience uncontradicted if an energy so stupendous did not, like the whole world of force, have its pain and shadow side. James Nasmith, in his Autobiography, after rejoicing in the triumph of his Bridgewater foundry, -- increasing the skilled workmen and raising their wages, adds, that habits of steady application among large numbers of men showed a tendency to lessen as the machinery grew more perfect. This is the spirit of a fairer attempt to balance evenly the gain and loss. Since Emerson's imprecation, we have learned to connect some unexpected virtues with machinery. It has become so interwoven with our entire social being that it reflects our common character. If machinery symbolizes greed, it also symbolizes many forms of improved conduct and activity. The requirements, especially of the great public machinery like the railroad, make for better manners as well as for temperance, promptness, and accuracy. What railroad could to-day hold its own in competition, if it tolerated the brusque and boorish ways common among its employees less than a generation ago? Whatever lack of civility remains, the change on many lines has been prodigious. The neat uniform that has replaced the slouchy and indistinguishable dress, is a change no more marked than the deportment toward passengers. The superintendent of the Chicago Telephone Company told me: "Politeness, of course, we will have, but we demand much more. If we can't bring a girl to talk in pleasant tones, we don't keep her. Neither is extreme discourtesy tolerated from those who hire our telephones. We take them out of a man's house or office if he talks brutally or coarsely to our employees." The electric street car is now a part of the great machinery. As the new improvements have come, a far higher grade of men is employed upon it. Upon |