[133] Cf. Ashley, English Economic History and Theory, bk. i, ch. i; Karl Bücher, Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft, ch. iii.
[134] Cf. R. Ehrenberg, Das Zeitalter der Fugger.
[135] Seen, as indicated above, in the matter-of-course resort of the scientists to the conception of efficient cause as a solvent of problems touching material phenomena, as well as in the theologians’ and philosophers’ resistless drift toward creative efficiency as the ultimate term of their speculations.
[136] Cf. Locke, Of Civil Government, ch. v, “Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person; this nobody has a right to but himself. The labour of his body and the work of his hands we may say are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”
[137] Illustrative instances of such a customary code of “natural” rights and obligations are numerous in the late literature of ethnology. Good illustrations are afforded by various papers in the Reports of the Am. Bureau of Ethnology, on the culture of the Pueblos, Eskimo, and the Indians of the North-West Coast; so also in Skeat and Blagden, Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula, or in Seligmann, The Veddas.
[138] Cf., e. g., C. Beard, The Industrial Revolution, ch. ii; Spencer Walpole, History of England from 1815, vol. i; C. W. Taylor, The Modern Factory System, ch. i, ii.
[139] In a general way, the relation in which the skilled workman in the large industries stands to the machine process is analogous to that in which the primitive herdsman, shepherd or dairymaid stand to the domestic animals under their care, rather than to the relation of the craftsman to his tools. It is a work of attendance, furtherance and skilled interference rather than a forceful and dexterous use of an implement.
[140] It follows also, among other secondary consequences, that the effective industrial life of the skilled workman will, in order to the best average effect, begin at an appreciably more advanced age, and will therefore be shortened by that much. The period of preparation becomes more protracted, more exacting and more costly, and the effective life cycle of the workman grows shorter. Although it does not, perhaps, belong in precisely this connection, it may not be out of place to recall that the increasingly exacting requirements of the machine industry, particularly in the way of accurate, alert and facile conformity to the requirements of the machine process, interrupt the industrial life of the skilled workman at an earlier point in the course of senile decay. So that the industrial life-cycle of the workman is shortened both at its beginning and at its close, at the same time that the commonplace preparation for work grows more costly and exacting.
Child labour, which once may, industrially speaking, have been an economical method of consuming the available human material, is no longer compatible with the highest industrial efficiency, even apart from any question of hardship or deterioration incident to an excessive or abusive recourse to child labour; it is incompatible with the community’s material interests. Therefore the business community—the body of businessmen at large—for whose behoof the industries of the country are carried on, have a direct interest not only in extending the age of exemption from industrial employment but also in procuring an adequate schooling of the incoming generation of workmen. The business community is evidently coming to appreciate this state of the case, at least in some degree, as is evidenced by their inclination to favour instruction in the “practical” branches in the public schools, at the public expense, as well as by the wide-reaching movement that aims to equip private and state schools that shall prepare the youth for work in the various lines of industrial employment.
[141] Cf., e. g., Adam Smith’s reflections on the uses of an accurate watch, Theory of the Moral Sentiments, part iv, ch. 2.