MACHINERY AND WAGES 1. Progressive control over natural conditions. 1 2. Labor-saving invention as a dynamic factor. 1 3. The lump of labor notion. 1 4. Evils of "the industrial revolution." f 5. Some evils of the introduction of machinery. f 6. Loss to the less efficient workers. f 7. Effect of ma chinery in different industries. § 8. Beneficial effect of machinery upon wages. f 9. Dependence on abstinence. 1 10. Grades of labor and gains from machinery. f 11. Opposing tendencies.
§ 1. Progressive control over natural conditions. Vari ous stages of progress in human history have been recognized. First is the stage of appropriation—the stage of hunting, or of fishing, or of gathering the spontaneous fruits of the fields. Man in this stage is little beyond the animal in his economic methods; he uses some tools to gather what nature chances to bring forth, but he does not guide and direct the natural processes. The limitation to man's powers in this stage are marked. There is excess of supply and waste at one season, scarcity and great suffering at another. With such crude utilization of the bounties of nature, a vast area will support but a small population. When sheep and cattle have been domesticated and where there is a large area for grazing, in dustry rises to the pastoral stage. While still dependent on nature's bounties for the feeding of his cattle, man is hourly intervening to protect, increase, regulate, and improve the flocks and herds on which depends his supply of food and materials. Famines are more rare, economic welfare is greater, a larger population is nourished on the same area. The agricultural stage begins whenever man tills the soil, plants seeds, and increases by his care the supply of vege table food. This is a still greater intervention in the course 456 of nature. Man anticipates the future, directs forces, and groups materials to his purpose of getting a regular food supply. He is thus forced into settled life, at the same time improves in hand-production of commodities, and makes fur ther steps in commerce. Then gradually comes the indus trial stage, in which control over nature grows, supplies increase, machinery and motive forces are utilized, and hu manity is in the full tide of industrial development. Thus throughout history the economic progress of society has been marked by decreasing dependence on the bounties and chances of nature and by increasing shaping of materials and control of natural forces by man. There are no sharply marked
changes, but there is a growth of security, of certainty, and of productivity. With man's increasing power and fore sight, the element of chance is reduced.
§ 2. Labor-saving inventions as a dynamic factor. For several centuries, accompanying the advance of the natural sciences, there has been a gradual improvement of mechan ical appliances in the practical arts in western Europe and America. The question may be put as regards the simplest improvement of the simplest tools: how do they affect the wages of the workers? The question took a dramatic form when power-using machines were so rapidly introduced in the last half of the eighteenth century in England.
It is by the use of power that the greatest saving of labor can be effected. Machinery is applicable in very different degrees in different processes and industries. In many in dustries and parts of industries, machines are usable only in a slight measure, indirectly, or not at all. They are of the least assistance in the personal services, and in the immediate work of the thinker, the teacher, the speaker, and the artist. Agriculture presents conditions of difficulty for the use, in the fields, of power other than that of man and of draft ani mals. Even horse-drawn gang-plows, planters, seeders, mow ers, reapers, harvesters, hay-loaders, etc., to be used profit ably require a level surface and a pretty large area given to a single crop. Such farm machinery can not be used as well east of the Alleghany Mountains as in the Mississippi Valley, and it is still uneconomical in large portions of the civilized world. The use of traction engines for plowing is increasing slowly. Other machines that can be used at the barn, and can be moved from one farm to another, have a constantly widening use, as threshers, automatic unloading-forks, corn shellers, feed-cutters, hay-balers, steam and gasoline engines for pumping, wood-sawing, etc. With the aid of these ma chines the labor required to produce the staple food for one hundred people is a fraction of what it was a hundred years ago.