But this is by no means all that is signified by the "equality of workers before the machine." It is the adaptability of the machine to the weaker muscles and intelligence of women and children that is perhaps the most important factor. The machine in its development tends to give less and less prominence to muscle and high individual skill in the mass of workers, more and more to certain qualities of body and mind which not only differ less widely in different men, but in which women and children are more nearly on a level with men. It is of course true that considerable differences of individual skill and effort survive in the typical machine industry. "Machine-weaving, for instance, simple as it seems, is divided into higher and lower grades, and most of those who work in the lower grades have not the stuff in them that is required for weaving with several colours."[222] But the general effect of machinery is to lessen rather than to increase individual differences of efficiency. The tendency of machine industry to displace male by female labour is placed beyond all question by the statistics of occupations in England, which show since 1851 a regular and considerable rise in the proportion of women to men workers in most branches of manufacture. Legal restrictions, and in the more civilised communities, the growth of a healthy public opinion, prevent the economic force from being operative to the same degree so far as children are concerned.
Those very qualities of narrowly restricted care and judgment, detailed attention, regularity and patience, which we see to be characteristic of machine work, are common human qualities in the sense that they are within the capacity of all, and that even in the degree of their development and practice there is less difference between the highly-trained adult mechanic and the raw "half-timer" than in the development and practice of such powers as machinery has superseded. It must be recognised that machinery does exercise a certain equalising influence by assigning a larger and larger relative importance to those faculties which are specific as compared with those which are individual.[223] "General ability" is coming to play a more important part in industry than specialised ability,[3] and though considerable differences may exist in the "general ability" of individuals, the differences will be smaller than in specialised abilities.[224]
The net influence of machinery upon the quality of labour, then, is found to differ widely according to the relation which subsists between the worker and the machine. Its educative influence, intellectual and moral, upon those concerned with the invention, management, and direction of machine industry, and upon all whose work is about machinery, but who are not detailed machine-tenders, is of a distinctly elevating character. Its effect, however, upon machine-tenders in cases where, by the duration of the working day or the intensity of the physical effort, it exhausts the productive energy of the worker, is to depress vitality and lower him in the scale of humanity by an excessive habit of conformity to the automatic movements of a non-human motor. This human injury is not adequately compensated by the education in routine and regularity which it confers, or by the slight understanding of the large co-operative purposes and methods of machine industry which his position enables him to acquire.
FOOTNOTES:
[198] Cf. supra, chap. iii. § 2.
[199] Karl Marx ranks the chief economies of machinery under two heads—(1) Machinery supersedes the skill of men working with tools. "The machine, which is the starting-point of the industrial revolution, supersedes the workman, who handles a single tool, by a mechanism operating with a number of similar tools, and set in motion by a single motive power, whatever the form of that power may be." (2) Machinery supersedes the strength of man. "Increase in the size of a machine, and in the number of its working tools, calls for a more massive mechanism to drive it; and this mechanism requires, in order to overcome its resistance, a mightier moving power than that of man." (Capital, vol. ii. pp. 370, 371.)
[200] Principles of Economics, 2nd edit., pp. 314, 322.
[201] Der Grossbetrieb, p. 120.
[202] Ibid., p. 117.