The Factory System and Checks Thereto.
It was in England toward the end of the eighteenth century that inventors first lifted the latch for an industrial revolution. When James Watt devised his steam engine, and its power was applied to spinning and weaving, these tasks were driven from the home to the factory, there to be more economically performed. Other industries followed, all the way from paint grinding to nail making, so that in a few years a profound change came over the field of labor. Under a scheme of subdivided toil the factory hand succeeded to the journeyman who, with a few mates, had split nails or drawn wire in a shop no bigger than some day he might own for himself. With the need to occupy large premises, to install engines and elaborate machinery, the capital of an employer has to be vastly more than of old, creating a new dependence on the part of the workman, and rendering it all but impossible that he should ever have a factory of his own. While the factory system of production is general in America, it is far from universal. Many leading manufactures, those of textiles, of boots and shoes, and so on, are usually conducted in factories, while some important industries, that of clothing, for example, are for the most part carried on at the homes of work people, or in small shops. Massachusetts in 1900, according to the U. S. census of that year, had 200,508 hands in 1078 textile mills and boot and shoe factories. Apart from these industries were 28,102 factories and shops, employing 291,418 hands, an average of but 10.57 each.[44] Taking the United States as a whole, the census for 1900 reports that the hand trades in small shops representing a product of $500 or less each, numbered 127,419. Presumably in all these cases the worker toiled by himself, usually as a repairer or a jobber rather than as a maker of new wares. All the other manufacturing concerns, 512,675 in number, employed on an average only 10.36 persons each. It is clear that the American factory is not as engulfing as many critics believe it to be. In larger measure than is commonly supposed workmen are to-day their own masters, or are busy in shops small enough to give scope to individual ingenuity and skill.
[44] Quoted by Edward Atkinson in a paper on the tendencies of manufacturing. American Social Science Association, 1904.
Let us grant that a shoemaker, say in St. Louis, at work in a stall of his own is a better and happier man than if in a nearby factory he fastened eyelets, or burnished heels, day in and day out for years together. While the harm to the toiler wrought by extreme subdivision of labor is plain, its evils are being abated in more ways than one. First of all the productiveness of the modern factory has so augmented the joint dividend of capital and labor that while the working day grows shorter, wages are increased, every earned dollar buying more manufactured wares than ever before. Secondly, in some large railroad and other shops the workmen are given a variety of tasks in succession, so as to be more versatile, more useful in emergencies, than if ever punching steel, or threading bolts. Even if the result of such a plan is to diminish the total output in the course of a year, it is worth while to lose some money that human nature may be redeemed from stupefying monotony of toil. High wages and large dividends cost too much when bought at the expense of hurt to muscle, nerve and brain.