Art. 4.-MEN VERSUS MACHINES IN THE UNITED STATES.

IN the Declaration of Independence-that faded parchment of many adventures, now enshrined in a marble aumbry with bronze doors, in a wall of the Library of Congress-the Rights of Man' are set forth in a preamble which presently trails off into a blazing indictment of that well-intentioned monarch, King George the Third, and of our British brethren' who 'have been deaf to the voice of Justice and of Consanguinity.' Sir John Fortescue has now shown us that in the matter of the American Colonies King George was more far-sighted than his ministers.

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After Life' and 'Liberty,' Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues place the 'Pursuit of Happiness' among those inalienable Rights. It is well known that the Fathers had in mind some far utopian policy in which, by some eager teleosis, American life should become a thing enskyed and sainted, so as to be worthy of what Jefferson as President, in his first Inaugural Address, called the bright constellation which has gone before us, and guided our steps through an age of Revolution and Reformation.' Yet in spite of a sea-change the old Adam in our nature persists, as Dante reminds us in his awesome epos. Before Jefferson was born the Calvinists of New England were already persecuting religious sects, precisely as their own forbears were persecuted in the Motherland before the Mayflower' sailed away with the Pilgrims to a freer and brighter land:

'J'avais un idéal frais comme la rosée,

Une vision d'or, une opale irisée

Par le regard de Dieu !'

It was, after all, the same old world of common human experience; the same stress and press of selfinterest which that grossly-maligned realist, Nicolò Machiavelli, presents to us in his passionless prose, with the natural activity of virtù ever ready to seize its opportunity. We soon find Destiny preached in the United States. The spirit of conquest was in full blast in President Polk's day; a silent, sardonic person who

annexed half a million square miles of his helpless neighbour's territory, and carried his frontier at last out to the Pacific Ocean.

It is highly instructive to watch the steady growth of disillusion in those utopian American leaders. This process began with General Washington himself, in the terrible winter of 1776, when he was vainly imploring food of the New Jersey farmers for his starving militia in Valley Forge. It continues to Woodrow Wilson in Paris; and in between these examples we have sad Emerson bewailing the imperfectibility of man: 'There is a crack in everything that God has made'! Yet all through these drab annals, the Pursuit of Happiness was nailed to America's mast as her peculiar ensign. How was this euphoria to be attained? By reducing manual labour. By harnessing the powers of nature-which are prodigious over there-until five brief days should be enough for any man's working week; and thereby insuring that the Felicity as well as Food' which Ruskin urged, should become a generous reality, a standard of life which the rest of the world could only marvel at and envy.

In other words, Machinery was the secret. Thomas Edison states the formula as follows: No man shall perform a task which a Machine can do as well, or better.' And that singular genius, Henry Ford-the richest individual who has ever lived-sees the American continent of the future dotted all over with little centres of hydro-electric plant, with rural spaces round it: Most of us will be tilling the soil, raising crops, and earning money in between times in the local factory.' Et in Arcadia vixi!

Few Europeans realise how far this mechanised civilisation has progressed since 1895, when Niagara itself was first forced to run trams and light streets in the City of Buffalo. In America to-day every conceivable human service, from rocking a baby's cradle or sweeping the room, to cutting coal in a mine or ploughing a farm, is done by machines. On any given day the entire continental population of 120,000,000 people could crowd into its own motor-cars and speed off awheel on vast arterial roads, 3000 miles in length, between the two great oceans. Natural gas, buried

deep in the earth-chiefly in the South-Western States -likewise displaces human labour to the tune of $300,000,000 a year. Telephones in the home, dictaphones in the office, and petrol tractors in the field, all tend to the same goal of human leisure and the higher life.

It is due to a mechanical complex that the American farmer can feed nine persons as well as himself, and at least one other person besides in a foreign land. What a sidelight is here thrown on the breakdown of that Geneva Conference, and the respective naval defences which Great Britain and the United States require! I spent a night with the King,' wrote that fine American, Walter Hines Page, in one of his vivid letters home during the War. And he only gave us so much bread, one egg apiece and-lemonade!' 'We haven't more than six weeks' food supply; and last week the submarines sank 237,000 tons. These English do not publish the harrowing facts, and nobody knows them but a few official people.'

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In every American factory an 'Idea-box' is placed, and intelligent workers are invited to show how manpower may still further be saved by the use of this or that gadget or contrivance. Such amateur inventors receive money-prizes or promotion, if their hints prove to be of value. The application of science to industry is more than a religious rite in the United States: it is a passion almost comic in its fierce intensity. Are ye Englishmen or vandals?' cried Thornton, the designer of the Capitol, after Ross's troopers had burned the Parliament House, and were turning their guns upon other public buildings in the desecrated Washington of 1814. This is the Patent Office-the depository of America's inventive genius in which the whole civilised world is concerned. Would you destroy it?' Then such havoc of the red-coats must needs pass through Thornton's body first! As though mad with glimpses of a mechanical futurity, one of the Westinghouse Company's engineers has produced a sort of 'human' servant that can sweep the house, make up fires, cook a dinner, and even answer the telephone by sound-waves,' whilst a 'help'-less mistress is gossiping or playing bridge in a friend's salon miles away. These weird devices are now installed

in the War Department in Washington. Other ingenious inventions take the place of living watchmen at the city reservoirs; and, questioned over the telephone, they give accurate replies as to the levels of water, and take and obey orders to raise or lower these, as may be required.

Equally curious is the mechanical mind' brought into being at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is called the 'product integraph,' and is the invention of Dr Vannevar Bush, Professor of Electric Transmission. This enthusiast points out that, while business folk are content with machines that add, subtract, multiply, and divide, the engineer must needs deal with curves and graphs' which show the past, present, and future of his recondite problems.

"The integraph,' Dr Bush explains, 'is a device of electrical measurements, gears, and recording tables: it is virtually a man-made "brain" which transcends human reasoning, and readily plots the answer to problems which cannot now be solved by formal mathematics. It requires from eight minutes to an hour to make computations which would take an engineer from one month to a year to work out by ordinary methods. . . . The foundation of the Integraph is a watthour meter, of the same type as that used in every home for recording the power used during the month.'

And so on into obscure arcana which leave the merely human mind limping badly-even pondering dully the tall yellow chair, with its gyves and electrodes in the sinister death-house of Sing Sing, up the Hudson River. For even the murderer is here put to death by machinery at the pushing of that ubiquitous button!

There is no end to the button-pushing and petrol policies of a people ever on tip-toes of expectancy for more wonders-' and then some!' as the fervid zealot has it. If the fuelless motor is a go,' muses the pensive American hopefully-'may we not yet live to see the radio church collection?' Road-haulage, cranes, hoists, winches, power-shovels, air-compressors, concrete-mixers, road-rollers-all these are largely automatic, with skilled human labour more and more ousted from its olden pride of place. These apostles of 'output' have no use for the patient craftsman. What is the Pittsburg boss, who handles metal in molten seas, to think of a

mediæval mossbacker' like Lorenzo Ghiberti, niggling at the Bronze Doors of his Baptistry for forty years— con grandissima diligenza è grandissima amore?

In the United States to-day electric power alone performs labour which would require the combined efforts of all Europe's population to produce by hand. Artificial thunderstorms cause mushrooms to grow. Even the hen is galvanised into laying more eggs; everything from music to photographs is now ground out at a touch, as though by magic. 'Prosperity depends on machinery,' Mr Henry Ford lays down as a dogma. 'It means more production and higher wages.' This is true, but it is not the whole truth, as will presently appear. Mechanism, these giants of industry maintain, will banish monotony, drudgery, and dreary routine from the workaday world. They point in triumph to the 80,000,000,000 kilo-watt hours of electric power used in the United States last year. If converted into its human equivalent, this would provide the average American family of about four persons with the services of eleven mechanical labourers, each working eight hours a day including Sundays and holidays, at a total cost for these eleven slaves' of only $75 a year.

But-and it is a very disconcerting but '-the United States, as to-day's arbiter mundi, looks up from all these joyous deductions to behold bread-lines of distress forming up in her city streets, and some four millions of men out of work. What is to be done about it? The actual figures are none too sure, because statisticians over there resolutely ignore disagreeable facts, as quite out of keeping with the pink thought of a Prosperity which must needs go on and on, incendiant l'azur of American infinity. Most astonishing of all, this suddenly-realised unemployment problem synchronises with a 'peak' of production which has never yet been equalled in the United States. Here, then, is a matter of extraordinary interest, both at home and abroad. After the depression of 1921-with 5-6,000,000 persons out of work-the replacement of men by machines was prosecuted on a great scale, with the automotive industry (in which the vast sum of 1,000,000,000l. is invested) energetically leading the way. One huge plant had soon reduced its labour costs by 60 per cent. By 1925 the decrease in employment