It is therefore in extending machinery for all articles which have no individual artistic value that we shall get rid of most of the lower and more degrading forms of labour--machinery for ploughing, sowing, reaping, binding, thrashing, dairying, laundry work, baking, cooking, cutting straight and smoothing clean, grinding and polishing, and for the processes of printing. These are true friends of man.
It is to be noted that every increase of the gross output which machinery enables man to produce, increases the demand for the more skilled portions of the work, for those which require judgment and character. The multiplication of the printing output of the country has increased the number of writers, of reporters, of proof-readers, of overlookers, and of men who can tastefully arrange a title page. It has also multiplied the demand for men who can draw, can photograph, or can reproduce illustrations. Similarly the “hands” who work the machines on a farm are fewer but are probably more intelligent than the agricultural labourer in a backward country.
It will be observed that this inquiry has left untouched and unaffected--
1. The skilled artistic crafts where a sense of the beautiful and a special value in human thought goes to each article.
2. The mass of unskilled and unspecialized labour at the bottom of the social ladder which division of labour and machine production leave largely untouched.
To the cleansing, quieting, moralizing of machinery, then, not to its extinction or supersession, social reformers should apply themselves. To the compulsory consumption of smoke, to sanitary factories and workshops, to the substitution of gas or electricity for steam, we must look with hope.
Therefore, out of the industrial hurly-burly, we must look forward, not back--accept the industrialization of the world which marked the nineteenth century, and go on to find a home for humanity in it. It is a world phenomenon, and it is the result of one thing, the exploitation of coal.
It is in the abuse of this very coal, on which all manufacturing and transport depends, that the most obvious wrong has been done to humanity. The first condition of human happiness to-day is to be found in the abolition or sufficient abatement of smoke, so keeping our skins and clothes clean.