the nation, was lost in the general cohesion in which the
whole industrial world merged into one.
The life of the individual changed accordingly. In the old world his
little sphere was allotted to him and there he stayed. His village was his
horizon. The son of the weaver wove and the smith reared his children
to his trade. Each did his duty, or was adjured to do it, in the "state of
life to which it had pleased God to call him." Migration to distant
occupations or to foreign lands was but for the adventurous few. The
ne'er-do-well blew, like seed before the wind, to distant places, but
mankind at large stayed at home. Here and there exceptional industry
or extraordinary capacity raised the artisan to wealth and turned the
"man" into the "master." But for the most part even industry and
endowment were powerless against the inertia of custom and the
dead-weight of environment. The universal ignorance of the working
class broke down the aspiring force of genius. Mute inglorious Miltons
were buried in country churchyards.
In the new world all this changed. The individual became but a shifting
atom in the vast complex, moving from place to place, from occupation
to occupation and from gradation to gradation of material fortune.
The process went further and further. The machine penetrated
everywhere, thrusting aside with its gigantic arm the feeble efforts of
handicraft. It laid its hold upon agriculture, sowing and reaping the
grain and transporting it to the ends of the earth. Then as the nineteenth
century drew towards its close, even the age of steam power was made
commonplace by achievements of the era of electricity.
All this is familiar enough. The record of the age of machinery is
known to all. But the strange mystery, the secret that lies concealed
within its organization, is realized by but few. It offers, to those who
see it aright, the most perplexing industrial paradox ever presented in
the history of mankind. With all our wealth, we are still poor. After a
century and a half of labor-saving machinery, we work about as hard as
ever. With a power over nature multiplied a hundred fold, nature still
conquers us. And more than this. There are many senses in which the
machine age seems to leave the great bulk of civilized humanity, the
working part of it, worse off instead of better. The nature of our work
has changed. No man now makes anything. He makes only a part of
something, feeding and tending a machine that moves with relentless
monotony in the routine of which both the machine and its tender are
only a fractional part.
For the great majority of the workers, the interest of work as such is
gone. It is a task done consciously for a wage, one eye upon the clock.
The brave independence of the keeper of the little shop contrasts
favorably with the mock dignity of a floor walker in an
"establishment." The varied craftsmanship of the artisan had in it
something of the creative element that was the parent motive of
sustained industry. The dull routine of the factory hand in a cotton mill
has gone. The life of a pioneer settler in America two hundred years
ago, penurious and dangerous as it was, stands out brightly beside the
dull and meaningless toil of his descendant.
The picture must not be drawn in colors too sinister. In the dullest work
and in the meanest lives in the new world to-day there are elements that
were lacking in the work of the old world. The universal spread of
elementary education, the universal access to the printed page, and the
universal hope of better things, if not for oneself, at least for one's
children, and even the universal restlessness that the industrialism of
to-day have brought are better things than the dull plodding passivity of
the older world. Only a false mediævalism can paint the past in colors
superior to the present. The haze of distance that dims the mountains
with purple, shifts also the crude colors of the past into the soft glory of
retrospect. Misled by these, the sentimentalist may often sigh for an age
that in a nearer view would be seen filled with cruelty and suffering.
But even when we have made every allowance for the all too human
tendency to soften down the past, it remains true that in many senses
the processes of industry for the worker have lost in attractiveness and
power of absorption of the mind during the very period when they have
gained so enormously in effectiveness and in power of production.
The essential contrast lies between the vastly increased power of
production and its apparent inability to satisfy for all humanity the most
elementary human wants; between
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