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the juice from the cane, and crystallized from it a greater quantity of sugar.

Did the limits of the lesson allow, it were an easy thing to increase these instances of machinery giving employment to the workmen in the metal trades. We might, with great care and interest, go over the manufacture of lead, the process by which increased knowledge has enabled us to save the silver from the argentiferous lead ore, and the comparatively newly-acquired knowledge and machinery which has brought zinc into common use; but it is desirable that you should dwell for a short time on some other instances of the work done for man by machinery, and trace out the special benefit it confers on the working classes and the poor.

Machinery in Providing Water.

Think for a moment how important a constant supply of water is to man, for drinking, cooking, washing, and very many manufacturing processes. In thinly inhabited countries, and in the rural districts of Britain, each household contrives by its own labour to supply itself with water as well as it can. Frequently the supply is unwholesome and scanty. During the last autumn our newspapers were constantly recording instances in which the drying up of the brooks and the failing of the springs inflicted, especially upon the cattle-farmer, severe loss. During the same season, London and Manchester were as abundantly supplied as ever they were supplied by machinery. The case of Manchester is a very remarkable one. A few years since, scarcely any considerable town in England was worse off for water; now there is perhaps no city in Britain in which, in respect both of quality and quantity, the supply is better. And this beneficial change has been effected by the adoption of those mechanical expedients with which we were previously acquainted, and the introduction of some exceedingly ingenious and novel arrangements. The water, gathered in great abundance, and in a high state of purity, is made, one might almost say, to carry itself into every house of every street, lane, and court. A similar spirit of intelligence has given to Glasgow a like unlimited supply of even greater purity.

But alongside of the supply of water, another great work is

being attempted, and machinery plays a most conspicuous part in it. I mean the drainage of great towns. We are, I am sorry to say, but ill-informed yet as a people on sanitary matters, but the drainage question has been placed by public consent in the hands of our most able engineers and machinists, for from them only does it seem possible to obtain the required help. We know how London has suffered from plague, Newcastle from cholera, and the poorer districts of our great cities from frequent visitations of typhus. From such scenes the wealthy man removes himself and his family, but the workman and the poor must live close to their employment. The washing of their clothing must be done at home. Forbid the extension of machinery to supply the cistern, the bath, and the wash-house, and you doom the poor to uncleanliness in person and in clothing; forbid, at the same time, machinery to do the drainage, and you make our courts and alleys fever-beds, you doom the elder poor to feeble health and fewer years of life, you encourage the habits of intemperance which thrive so much in scenes of filth and chronic sickness, and you increase, at a rapid rate, the mortality of the very young.

Machinery in the School-room.

One other instance, one specially for the school-boy, and I have done. The day is fast approaching when every child of honest parents in Britain will have placed within easy reach of him the elements at least of a good education. Unhappily we have heretofore been neglectful of this duty. The Registrar-General tells us that of the people who married last year four-fifths were unable to sign their names. If you have derived from your school the good your parents hope for, you will be glad to know that the present age is making great and anxious efforts to wipe away this stain upon our national character. You will see with joy the new and improved school-house with its better furniture, its plentiful supply of books and of writing materials, its diagrams and apparatus, and as the old folks tell you how utterly they were without such advantages in the days of their childhood, you may feel inclined to inquire how it is such advantages have befallen you. Doubtless many good things have been working together for your good, and conspicuous, indeed, amongst them, is that love of the young

which knowledge begets in the mind of the really educated. But the spirit of philanthropy has found a mighty helper in the increased productiveness of all industry in the present day. We do not surpass in love for childhood, Henry Pestalozzi, nor in devotion to our work, Bell and Lancaster, but we have means for carrying on our work such as they never hoped to possess.

The pupils of our first National and Lancasterian schools met in buildings little better than barns, and stood most usually on a paved or earthen floor. They were almost without books. They practised the making of letters (I will not call it writing) in trays of sand. You have a wooden floor, the sawing and the planing mills have helped you to it. You read from books and write on paper, because the printing and paper machines are pouring out on us these materials in ever-increasing quantities, and because other machinery is turning prepared metal into myriads of steel pens. You see in the cabinets of your teachers better chemical and natural philosophy apparatus than Davy or Priestley possessed until they had become renowned and wealthy men, and you have these things for your use because the instrument-maker, in common with all intelligent men, has availed himself of those mechanical helps that render industry more productive. Could we destroy all those mechanical helps, how sad would be the consequences! With the stoppage of the printing-machine we should cut off our supply of school-books. With the stoppage of the paper-making and pen-making machines we should expel from our schools the art of writing. Thousands of boys who now have education placed within their reach would be condemned to enter life unable to write a letter or to enjoy the reading of a newspaper. But we do not intend to stop this machinery. On the contrary, we are prepared to welcome its increase, for we know that machinery is a benefit to mankind.

Thus we have found machinery producing for us more food and more clothing, increasing the comfort of the houses we live in, improving the tools with which we are to work, supplying us almost at no cost with water for all our wants, and when, having soiled that water with the double quantity of soap which the improvements of the last half century have given to each of us, find it endeavouring to do its best in the work of carrying it away.

With these things in our mind, how can we for a moment believe that machinery diminishes employment? or that it damages working men? The ignorance must be very dense, and the thoughtlessness very habitual, that permits men to make such assertions. But it may be urged, machinery at the time of its introduction brings suffering to workmen. The same ignorance and thoughtlessness are shown here. When machinery is improved and extended, it does of course change the work to be done, while it increases the quantity produced for all. It changes the work. It does not destroy employment. It leaves untouched the fund called wages, out of which workmen and their families are to live, and it hastens to increase that fund. Meanwhile, what is the lot of those with whose work it has interfered? That depends, I answer, on the man, not on the machine. The machine is the cause of the work being changed, the man himself is the cause of the good he acquires from the change, or the misery he entails on himself.

Never yet was machinery invented but it gave new employment to some, and better wages to more. Never, I am sorry to say, has our stock of necessaries and comforts been increased by machinery, but misery, self-inflicted, has been suffered by others. How for the future we may get the good without the evil you will better understand after the lesson on wages. At present I shall leave you, hoping that I have excited in you a spirit of inquiry, and a desire for truth. If I have, you will for yourselves find out that, crowded as this lesson is with illustrations, not one of those illustrations has been exhausted. You will be able now to institute and to follow out for yourself such inquiries as these Which is the happier nation, and of which would I rather be a citizen; of the one where machinery is abundant and ever increasing, or of the one where the dulness of the people is slow to invent, and their ignorance prompt to reject improvement? Is it better to be an Englishman or a Spaniard? a Yankee or a Turk? If I emigrate, to which colony should I prefer to goto the one that will welcome the new plough, the sawing-mill, and the railroad, or to the one where all the work must be done in the way and with the tools such as England used in the days of the Plantagenets? Habituating yourself to such exercises, you will do more than merely acquire information. You will greatly improve your mental powers in general, and your power of reasoning in particular, and you will be fitting yourself, as far

as regards the investigation of social phenomena, for becoming a useful man. As you go on, you will of course get knowledge, but you will also get wisdom.

III. ON DIVISION OF LABOUR AND ON VALUE.

In all countries where civilisation has made any progress, the productiveness of industry is increased, not only by the adoption of improved machinery and tools, but by an arrangement called Division of Labour. Each man devotes himself to the production of some one thing, or set of things. He becomes extremely

skilful at his work, he knows exactly how to select his materials and his tools, and he gathers round him a stock of tools which he contrives always to keep in use.

Division of labour is attended immediately with the following results. The quantity of things produced is greatly increased, and so also is their quality, and this increase in both quantity and quality is accompanied by as remarkable an economy of the tools and buildings necessary for the work. We need not stop to find illustrations of the division of labour. Every instance which was used in the lesson on machinery will serve to illustrate this arrangement, and to show how great are its benefits to mankind.

What we need to illustrate now is that division of labour NECESSITATES interchange, and fixes the attention of men not only upon the USE, but upon the VALUE of their productions.

A man devotes his ability and his property to the making of some one thing—say bricks. He becomes exceedingly skilful in his work. He is an excellent judge of the land that will furnish him at once with a site for his work, and the material he is to work with. He chooses the handiest tools, the most laboursaving machines, and the ablest workmen, and he learns to understand better than we do ourselves the form, fashion, and quality of the things we require. Compared with anything that a person unused to brick-making could do, he is, both in the quantity and quality of his work, a prodigiously productive man. And he is surrounded by neighbours who, differing from him in the branches of industry to which they devote themselves, are exactly like him in their wonderful productiveness.

Whilst work is going on in this way amongst us, we know

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