“In this boasted land of freedom there are bonded baby slaves,
And the busy world goes by and does not heed.
They are driven to the mill, just to glut and overfill
Bursting coffers of the mighty monarch, Greed.
When they perish we are told it is God’s will,
Oh, the roaring of the mill, of the mill!”
—Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
I
It is a startling and suggestive fact that the very force which Aristotle, the profoundest thinker of antiquity, regarded as the only agency through which the abolition of slavery might be made possible, served, when at last it was evolved, not to destroy slavery, but to extend it; to enslave in a new form of bondage those who hitherto had been free. Aristotle regarded slavery as a basic institution and saw no possible means whereby it might ever be dispensed with, “except perhaps by the aid of machines.” He said, “If every tool ... could do the work that befits it, just as the creations of Dædalus moved of themselves, or the tripods of Hephæstos went of their own accord; if the weavers’ shuttles were to weave of themselves, then there would be no need of apprentices for the master workers, or slaves for the lords.”[[85]] When more than two thousand years had passed, a machine, a wonderful, complex tool, almost literally fulfilling his conditions, was invented.
We speak of the power-loom as Cartwright’s invention, but in truth it was the joint production of numberless inventors, most of them unknown to history, and some of whom lived and labored long before Aristotle sat at Plato’s feet in the great school at Athens. Looking at a modern power-loom in one of our great factories not long ago, I asked the name of the inventor, which was readily enough given. But as I watched the marvellous mechanism with its many wheels, levers, and springs, I wondered how much of it could be said to have had its origin in the brain of the inventor in question. Who invented the wheel, the lever, the spring? Who invented the first rude loom, reproduced, in principle, in the wonderful looms of the twentieth century? No man knows. We do not know the name of the inventor of the loom figured in all its details upon the tomb of the ancient Egyptian at Beni Hassan;[[86]] we do not know who invented the loom which the Greek vase of 400 B.C. depicts,—a loom which, so William Morris tells us, is in all respects like those in use in Iceland and the Faroe Islands in the latter half of the nineteenth century.[[87]] Many thousands of years ago, in the simple tribal communism of primitive man, the great bed-rock inventions were evolved. Thousands of years of human experience led up to the ribbon-loom which, in the early part of the sixteenth century, brought sentence of death upon the poor inventor of Danzig[[88]] whose very name has been forgotten. This ribbon-loom was a near approach to the wonderful tool of which Aristotle dreamed as the liberator of enslaved man.