ditions. They have failed under the new tests because, in spite of their many excellences when measured by older standards, they were not the kind of men for whom the new time was calling. Many a man, for example, who was well fitted for life in a pioneer community has failed miserably after the pioneer conditions had given place to conditions of settled industry. Possessing physical courage, hardihood, marksmanship, and a knowledge of woodcraft, he has supplied the qualities needed in pioneer life; but, lacking patience, sobriety, foresight, and the capacity for steady work, he has gone to the social scrap-heap when these qualities were absolutely required. We may sympathize with such men and do what we can to ameliorate their condition, but it would be fatal to attempt to modify our social system in such a way as to preserve them from the results of progress. That would be like trying to preserve the use of the wooden plow and the hand loom.

Similarly, the man who only possesses muscular strength and manual dexterity (that is, the man who is only capable of doing what a machine can do), however much we may admire him personally and however useful he may have been in a former state of society, is coming to be less needed. He is no longer "the man of the time." And it would be a disastrous social policy to attempt to shield him against the results of progress. That would be an attempt to preserve a type of man who was no longer needed, at the expense of a type for whom there was a growing need. The growing need is for the man who can invent and also for the man who can initiate the process of machine production. The world will be better off when everything of a purely mechanical and routine nature is done by machinery and when there are no men left who are only capable of doing what machines might very well do. The process of eliminating this type of

man, however, will be a painful process, accompanied by protests and by rebelliousness in spirit, if not in act. The obvious thing to do is to provide the best possible educational facilities, and in the broadest sense, in order that each succeeding generation of young men may have the fullest and freest possible opportunity for evading those occupations which are destined to be taken over by machines and of entering those occupations where the machine helps the man rather than competes with him. If such opportunities can be amply provided, it is to be hoped that the majority of each rising generation will be able to evade the conflict with the machine. But it is also probable that a certain number will not be able, for constitutional reasons, to avail themselves of these opportunities. Such individuals will be doomed to hardship for the simple reason that they will be useless, or almost useless, members of society. Even tho they may possess the most admirable moral dispositions, they will belong to a type of man whom society can very well spare. Neither socialism nor any other scheme would make them other than useless or almost useless members of society. And any scheme, whether labelled "socialism" or by other name, which would preserve these men from the normal results of their relative uselessness by allowing them ample incomes, would be burdening the rest of society for their support, however carefully this bald fact might be hidden under the guise of pseudo-ethical formulæ.

Thus far the discussion has been confined wholly to the influence of machinery upon the laborer's income. We have yet to consider its influence upon the laborer himself. This question merits most careful study and investigation. But up to the present time it has received more attention from popular agitators and moralists than from

professional economists. Among popular agitators it is very frequently assumed that the influence of machinery is to the disadvantage of the laborer's person, aside from its effect upon his wages. It is commonly charged, for example, that the machine tends to dominate the man, that the laborer tends to become a slave of the machine rather than its master.

Just what is meant by becoming the slave of a machine would be difficult to state, and it would become more and more difficult the more one knew about men and machinery. In so far as it means that the conditions of modern machine production are more exacting, in certain ways at least, than more primitive conditions were, it is a mere truism. That is one of the penalties of civilization, and it applies to all classes of society, not to the wage-workers alone. When each one worked independently with detached tools, he was, in a sense, more independent than he can possibly be when he works with a machine which is locked together with a large number of other machines into a system. It is no longer possible for each one to choose his own time for working and resting. He must adjust his working and resting hours to those of the whole group, nor can he work at what speed he chooses. His speed is usually set for him by the machine, and he must adapt himself to it. But this applies in very much the same way to the banker, the merchant, and the manufacturer. They must keep definite office hours, they must travel when trains run and not when they choose, they must take their meals when others do and not when their stomachs prefer, and in a thousand different ways they must conform to the average convenience of the whole social group. While this does require adaptation to a set of circumstances which did not exist under more primitive methods of industry, and while it puts a premium upon certain physical, mental, and moral

qualities which were formerly of less relative importance, it cannot be said to be the result of machinery alone nor to affect the laborers alone. It is a necessary result of a more complex organization of society. Therefore, the charge against the machine as the enslaver of the laborer may be dismissed in so far as it merely means that it makes exacting demands upon him and requires him to conform to the average convenience of the whole group to which he belongs. That is a condition which affects everybody.

If

But these exacting demands upon conformability do doubtless work some hardship, not only to certain wageworkers, but to others also. A new principle of selection is introduced as a factor in social evolution. The erratic individual, however ingenious or energetic he may be in a spasmodic way, who can only work when the notion strikes him, is of little use in a society which demands steady, constant, patient routine work. And such an individual will seldom prosper. If he is a laborer, he will usually gravitate toward the army of tramps. he belongs to some other class, he will probably join the army of adventurers who hang about the outskirts of business, curbstone speculators, small politicians, pettifogging lawyers, labor agitators, and so forth. All are rejected by the conditions of our interlocking industrial system whose demand is for that kind of efficiency which is coupled with conformability, and the men who possess this kind of efficiency gradually work their way to the front and crowd out their more erratic competitors. As illustrations of this tendency, one need only mention the growing demand for sobriety, not alone in locomotive engineers, but in every class of labor where drunkenness or other forms of unreliability may endanger lives and property, or even work to the inconvenience of the group of workers to which the individual belongs.

In so far as the somewhat impressionistic statement,.

that the laborer becomes a slave of the machine, merely expresses an instinctive feeling that the laborers have not benefited as much from machinery as was expected or that they are not served by machinery as much as other classes are, no very fundamental objection can be urged against it. But it is at least open to the objection of being an inaccurate and misleading way of stating the matter. But there can scarcely be any doubt that more is meant than we have yet considered. It is pointed out with a good deal of particularity that the operation of certain machines requires a constant repetition of certain simple movements of arm, wrist, or fingers, day in and day out, and it is argued that such work tends to make the operator a mere automaton, that he becomes merely a part of the machine. But the tendency in all such cases is for these automatic operations to be themselves taken over by the machine as fast as the inventors can bring it about. This relieves the operator more and more of the work of an automaton, leaving him freer to direct and control the machine. Thus the cure for this particular difficulty is found in more machinery rather than in less; that is, in the elaboration and completion of the machine and in the extension of its function rather than in doing away with it altogether.

It is an undoubted fact that the tendency is more and more for these purely mechanical and automatic operations to be taken over by the machines, and it is safe to predict that eventually every kind of work which can be reduced to a mechanical and routine form will be done by machines. This will relieve machinery of the specific charge of reducing the operator to a mere automaton; but, on the other hand, it will make the conditions of life even harder than they now are for those who are constitutionally unfit for any other kind of work. They will then all have to be relegated to the human