In like manner, we need not rely upon the poets and poetical historians, as Professor Veblen apparently does, for knowledge of what the “handicraft” civilization meant. We can study it, as it survives practically unchanged in the miserable hovels of Bohemian and Italian and Spanish peasants, where men and beasts rot together in conditions of sanitation that would not long be tolerated in any place where the “machine civilization” has inaugurated its high and ever higher moral and physical standards. We need not go so far from home. To get a picture of a prosperous handicraft city of the middle ages, go to New York’s East Side, where are the fast disappearing sweatshops that were transplanted from “handicraft neighborhoods” of Europe. The poets have it otherwise; and so do those historians who like to paint alluring pictures for their readers--and hate to grub for facts. But there is the grisly truth. Contrast the average sweatshop with the average factory. No; contrast the best sweatshop with the worst factory.
Partly because some men are so much shrewder and more persistent and more far-sighted than the masses of their fellows, but chiefly because the mass of mankind has not been long enough emancipated by the power of the machine to learn how to work intelligently and efficiently, the power machine, become enormously beneficent through steam and electricity, has not yet done all, or even more than a very small part, of what it can do, and shall do, for mankind. But already--in less than ten decades, less than seven--what a forward stride! In place of a world where all but a handful toiled early and late--from dawn until far into the night--toiled that others might reap all and they only blows and the meagre bread of bitterness, we now have a world where millions upon millions are comfortable. And as for the masses and toilers still in the shackles of the old régime, are they not better off than they were under that régime where wages were alms, and alms of the scantiest; where the only lights in the black darkness of utter ignorance were the will-o’-the-wisps of Superstition, drawing man farther and farther into the morass of slavery to king and noble and priest?