Conditions of industry
But everywhere authority prevailed in the long run: the machine-breakers were put down. Men had to learn, sometimes at the cost of much suffering, to adapt themselves to a changed condition which had come to stay. The point of principal importance in the change is that it enabled the earth to support a larger population than had been possible before. We may notice this as a main result of each of the successive big changes. In the first known phase of human society we find man in the hunting stage; that passes into the pastoral stage, of keeping domestic animals, which supported more human beings than the hunting stage could. After the pastoral came the agricultural, with again an increase in the numbers that the earth could support, and lastly has come this industrial stage in which many more can be fed and clothed and kept in tolerable comfort than ever before.
And yet this industrial era had to bring its own hardships, and, unhappily, its own hatreds. The class hatred, as it is called—the animosity felt by the man who works with his hands against the class that has the money and works with its brains—arose directly out of the conditions which the steam-engine produced. To-day, when that industrial era has lasted more than a hundred years, it is that hatred which makes our life so very difficult for us all, both for the classes above and for the classes below. And we are compelled to realise that the hate is largely due to the hard treatment of the lower classes by the higher in those early years. It is quite different now; there is little or no animosity, as I believe, felt by the upper classes in any country towards the lower, but I do believe that the lower classes are in some part justified in thinking that their better treatment has been won by their own effort rather than freely given by those above them. In the East the same animosities have not been aroused, for the Eastern industries have not developed along the same lines and have not caused the same difficulties.
In the industrial West, and everywhere that the white man has made his settlements, the hand workers are now protected by their organisation into Trades Unions—combinations of workers formed principally in order to bargain with the employers about the wages and the hours of work and the conditions under which the work is to be done.
At the beginning of the industrial era the workers were not able to come together in this way; so the employer made his bargain with each man separately, and, as many were anxious to get work, the employer could engage them very cheaply and make them work very hard. Nor was it only the men, or only the fully grown women, that were thus made to labour long hours for low pay. Even little children, because their labour could be engaged so cheaply, were hired to work many hours a day at such jobs about the machines and factories as a child could do. Very often the conditions as to ventilation, and so on, under which the work had to be done, were such as would not be allowed by the law now; but no one then seems to have considered the hardships of the men and women and, above all, of the children. We may believe it was out of thoughtlessness and lack of recognition of their sufferings, rather than sheer cruelty, on the employer's part, that all this was done; but done it was, and it has left a bitterness of feeling which still lasts.
So the wealth of the world, as measured by its productive labour and its power of supporting human life, increased vastly; and its population increased vastly therewith. At the same time it is very much to be doubted whether the happiness of the people generally increased. But gradually, by coming together into the combinations of which I have spoken, and so being able to say to the employer, "You will not get any of us to work for you unless you give us so much money for so many hours of work"—gradually, by this argument, and sometimes by carrying it into actual effect by "striking," and ceasing to work altogether, they have won better and better terms for themselves. Employers now recognise that the workman should receive such a wage as the profits of the industry in which he is engaged suffice to pay him. Perhaps some of our more recent labour trouble is due to the worker's claim to be paid a larger wage than the industry can afford, if it is to turn out its products at a cost at which any one will buy them. And if it cannot turn them out at such cost, it must, and it will, stop producing them altogether; so that thus the workman is unemployed.
Further remarkable discoveries followed. Coal gas was used for lighting, and was later superseded by electricity. Electricity was used to give motion to machinery in place of steam. The telegraph was invented and the telephone. Engines were constructed to work by means of petrol firing within themselves—by internal combustion, as it is called—whence came motor-cars and flying machines. Wireless telegraphy made its marvellous appearance. Radio-activity with its terrifying possibilities has been discovered. But no one, not even all of these together, made a new start, with a new chapter in the story, at all in the same sense as did the application of the power of steam. All these others were rather in the nature of a development from that starting-point. They were further successful efforts on the part of man to "harness," as has been said—which means, to control for his own purposes—the forces of Nature.
Evolution
There was, however, one scientific discovery of about the middle of the nineteenth century, which is of very remarkable interest in man's history, because it gave quite a new direction to his thoughts about his own origin. It is that discovery which is summed up in the word "Evolution," and which is associated especially with the name of Darwin.
Its main importance consists in its revelation that, whatever we may think about the origin of man's soul, there can be no reasonable doubt that his bodily form, his bones and all his organs, have descended to him from ancestors belonging to the same common stock as the apes or monkeys. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century man had regarded himself as specially created in his present form. He had also supposed all other living things to have been similarly created as they are. From 1850 or so, onward, he had to realise that all the many and complicated forms of life, both of plants and animals, have developed—"evolved" was the word adopted for the process—from the very simplest forms, even from single tiny cells.