There is no limit to that blessing. Those who have it are anxious to share it, must share it in fact, in order to keep it for themselves, under the principle that the cheapness of things is in proportion to the quantity produced. The more the cheaper; the fewer the dearer.
Are you beginning to suppose that man has found what he sought? Since in this extraordinary manner he appears to have provided himself with plenty, shall that dusty bundle of prayers be recalled or sent to the furnace?
As to his prayers, they were never frank. Perhaps for that reason he should wish he had them back. He prayed for plenty; what he secretly associated with the thought of plenty was leisure—freedom from toil. And once more he is disappointed, thwarted by his own inventions. Plenty he has achieved. Toil he has not escaped.
The machine that was to have been a labour-saving device becomes an engine of production that must be served. It is as if you could not save labour at all—as if you could make it only more productive, thereby achieving an abundance of things with no effect whatever upon the necessity to perform monotonous labour. All this labour-saving machinery we live with notwithstanding, never were people more complaining of their tasks. That might mean only that they were increasingly conscious of an abating evil; but there is no certainty that the abatement even where it is noticeable is permanent. The signs are otherwise.
In all material respects people are better off than ever before. Their bodies are more comfortable, their minds are free from the terror of hunger, they have much more to enjoy and consume and hope for, because their labour is more richly rewarded in things. See the amazing quantity and variety of things such as only the rich could once afford now circulating at the base of the human pyramid. Not necessaries only. Silks, watches, ornaments, shoes like those of queens and ladies, plated ware, upholstered furniture, soft beds, besides things that were formerly non-existent and therefore beyond the reach of kings, sultans and nabobs, such as electric lights, plumbing, motor-cars. In the United States a motor-car to every six persons! And still no sign that the curve of human contentment is rising; no sign that the curse of toil will ever be got rid of.
Instead of saving labour the machine has multiplied it. True, the hours of industrial labour are fewer than they were, e.g. now eight where they were ten and twelve a day; but this is merely to compare worse with better where better is, and that is not everywhere. For a proper contrast compare the industrial with the idyllic task. Even eight hours of labour a day continuously performed by the industrial worker represents a much greater sum of annual effort than his ancestor put into the soil. Consider also how the machine, directly or indirectly, has laid new work upon races hitherto naively existing in a state of nature.
The riddle is that industrial civilization, having created to its unknown ends a race of mechanical drudges, requires nevertheless a contribution of human toil more intense, more exacting, more irksome than ever. As toil it is more productive—there is more to consume. Life has been expanded. It is safer. Physically it is inconceivably richer. Was that the goal? What else is gained?
You would think that when man had found a way to provide himself with artificial things in unlimited plenty and a way at the same time to spread the food supply evenly over the face of the earth, the gift of universal peace might follow. Never was the peace more frail; and this, as we shall see—the frailty of the peace—is also a product of the machine.
What force is this by fumbling found that man has put in motion? Its pulsations he controls; its consequences so far have controlled him, and modern life has become so involved in a mechanical spiral that we cannot say for certain whether it is that we produce for the sake of consumption or consume for the sake of production.