Woman and Labour | Page 9

race. Already today we tremble on the
verge of a discovery, which may come tomorrow or the next day, when,
through the attainment of a simple and cheap method of controlling
some widely diffused, everywhere accessible, natural force (such, for
instance, as the force of the great tidal wave) there will at once and for
ever pass away even that comparatively small value which still, in our
present stage of material civilisation, clings to the expenditure of mere
crude, mechanical, human energy; and the creature, however physically
powerful, who can merely pull, push, and lift, much after the manner of
a machine, will have no further value in the field of human labour.
Therefore, even today, we find that wherever that condition which we
call modern civilisation prevails, and in proportion as it tends to
prevail-- wherever steam-power, electricity, or the forces of wind and
water, are compelled by man's intellectual activity to act as the
motor-powers in the accomplishment of human toil, wherever the
delicate adaptions of scientifically constructed machinery are taking the
place of the simple manipulation of the human hand--there has arisen,
all the world over, a large body of males who find that their ancient
fields of labour have slipped or are slipping from them, and who
discover that the modern world has no place or need for them. At the
gates of our dockyards, in our streets, and in our fields, are to be found
everywhere, in proportion as modern civilisation is really dominant,
men whose bulk and mere animal strength would have made them as
warriors invaluable members of any primitive community, and who
would have been valuable even in any simpler civilisation than our own,
as machines of toil; but who, owing to lack of intellectual or delicate
manual training, have now no form of labour to offer society which it
stands really in need of, and who therefore tend to form our Great Male
Unemployed--a body which finds the only powers it possesses so little

needed by its fellows that, in return for its intensest physical labour, it
hardly earns the poorest sustenance. The material conditions of life
have been rapidly modified, and the man has not been modified with
them; machinery has largely filled his place in his old field of labour,
and he has found no new one.
It is from these men, men who, viewed from the broad humanitarian
standpoint, are often of the most lovable and interesting type, and who
might in a simpler state of society, where physical force was the
dominating factor, have been the heroes, leaders, and chiefs of their
people, that there arises in the modern world the bitter cry of the male
unemployed: "Give us labour or we die!" (The problem of the
unemployed male is, of course, not nearly so modern as that of the
unemployed female. It may be said in England to have taken its rise in
almost its present form as early as the fifteenth century, when economic
changes began to sever the agricultural labourer from the land, and rob
him of his ancient forms of social toil. Still, in its most acute form, it
may be called a modern problem.)
Yet it is only upon one, and a comparatively small, section of the males
of the modern civilised world that these changes in the material
conditions of life have told in such fashion as to take all useful
occupation from them and render them wholly or partly worthless to
society. If the modern man's field of labour has contracted at one end
(the physical), at the other (the intellectual) it has immeasurably
expanded! If machinery and the command of inanimate motor-forces
have rendered of comparatively little value the male's mere physical
motor-power, the demand upon his intellectual faculties, the call for the
expenditure of nervous energy, and the exercise of delicate
manipulative skill in the labour of human life, have immeasurably
increased.
In a million new directions forms of honoured and remunerative social
labour are opening up before the feet of the modern man, which his
ancestors never dreamed of; and day by day they yet increase in
numbers and importance. The steamship, the hydraulic lift, the patent
road-maker, the railway-train, the electric tram-car, the steam-driven

mill, the Maxim gun and the torpedo boat, once made, may perform
their labours with the guidance and assistance of comparatively few
hands; but a whole army of men of science, engineers, clerks, and
highly-trained workmen is necessary for their invention, construction,
and maintenance. In the domains of art, of science, of literature, and
above all in the field of politics and government, an almost infinite
extension has taken place in the fields of male labour. Where in
primitive times woman was often the only builder, and patterns she
daubed on her hut walls