Every-day Science: Volume 6. The Conquest of Nature

by Henry Smith Williams; Edward Huntington Williams

But we must not here pause for further outlines of a subject which it is the purpose of this and succeeding volumes to explicate in detail. All our succeeding chapters will but make it more clear how marvelous are the elaborations of method and of mechanism through which the world's work of to-day is accomplished. We shall consider first the mechanical principles that underlie work in general, passing on to some of the principal methods of application through which the powers of Nature are made available. We shall then take up in succession the different fields of industry. We shall ask how the work of the agriculturist is done in the modern world; how the multitudinous lines of manufacture are carried out; how transportation is effected; we shall examine the modus operandi of the transmission of ideas; we shall even consider that destructive form of labor which manifests itself in the production of mechanisms of warfare. As we follow out the stories of the all-essential industries we shall be led to realize more fully perhaps than we have done before, the meaning of work in its relations to human development; and in particular the meaning of modern work, as carried out with the aid of modern mechanical contrivances, in its relations to modern civilization.

The full force of these relations may best be permitted to unfold itself as the story proceeds. There is, however, one fundamental principle which I would ask the reader to bear constantly in mind, as an aid to the full appreciation of the importance of our subject. It is that in considering the output of the worker we have constantly to do with one form or another of property, and that property is the very foundation-stone of civilization. "It is impossible," says Morgan, in his work on Ancient Society, "to overestimate the influence of property in the civilization of mankind. It was the power that brought the Aryan and Semitic nations out of barbarism into civilization. The growth of the idea of property in the human mind commenced in feebleness and ended in becoming its master passion. Governments and laws are instituted with primary reference to its creation, protection, and enjoyment. It introduced human slavery in its production; and, after the experience of several thousand years, it caused the abolition of slavery upon the discovery that the freeman was a better property-making machine." If, then, we recall that without labor there is no property, we shall be in an attitude of mind to appreciate the importance of our subject; we shall realize, somewhat beyond the bounds of its more tangible and sordid relations, the essential dignity, the fundamental importance—in a word, the true meaning—of Work.

Undoubtedly there is a modern tendency to accept this view of the dignity of physical labor. At any rate, we differ from the savage in thinking it more fitting that man should toil than that his wife should labor to support him—though it cannot be denied that even now the number of physical toilers among women greatly exceeds the number of such toilers among men. But in whatever measure we admit this attitude of mind, there can be no question that it is exclusively a modern attitude. Time out of mind, physical labor has been distasteful to mankind, and it is a later development of philosophy that appreciates the beneficence of the task so little relished.

The barbarian forces his wife to do most of the work, and glories in his own freedom. Early civilization kept conquered foes in thraldom, developing an hereditary body of slaves, whose function it was to do the physical work.

The Hebrew explained the necessity for labor as a curse imposed upon Father Adam and Mother Eve. Plato and Aristotle, voicing the spirit of the Greeks, considered manual toil as degrading.

To-day we hear much of the dignity of labor; but if we would avoid cant we must admit that now—scarcely less than in all the olden days—the physical toiler is such because he cannot help himself. Few indeed are the manual laborers who know any other means of getting their daily bread than that which they employ. The most strenuous advocates of the strenuous life are not themselves tillers of the soil or workers in factories or machine shops.

The farm youth of intelligence does not remain a farmer; he goes to the city, and we find him presently at the head of a railroad or a bank, or practising law or medicine. The more intelligent laborer becomes finally a foreman, and no longer handles the axe or sledge. We should think it grotesque were we to see a man of intellectual power obstinately following a pursuit that cost him habitual physical toil. When now and then a Tolstoi offers an exception to this rule, we feel that he is at least eccentric; and we may be excused the doubt whether he would follow the manual task cheerfully if he did not know that he could at any moment abandon it. It is because he knows that the world understands him to be only a dilettante that he rejoices in his task.

After all, then, judged by the modern practice, rather than by the philosopher's precept, the old Hebrew and Greek ideas were not so far wrong. Using the poetical language which was so native to them, it might be said that the necessity for physical labor is a curse—a disgrace.