In distributing the prizes to workmen at the Paris Exhibition, Louis Blanc, the leader of the French Republican Socialist party, quoted approvingly these words of Simonde de Sismondi:
"If the workman were his own master, when he had done in two hours with the aid of machinery what would have taken him twelve hours to do without it, he would stop at the end of the two."
M. Blanc had been discussing very eloquently, but also very fallaciously, the relations of machinery to labor. If men were properly united in the bonds of association, he said, if the solidarity of interests were realized, "the happy result of the application of mechanical power to industry would be equal production, with less of effort, for all. The discovery of an economic method would never have the lamentable consequence of robbing men of the work by which they live. Unfortunately, we are far from this ideal. Under the empire of that universal antagonism which is the very essence of the economic constitution of modern societies, and which too often only profits one man by ruining another, machinery has been employed to make the rule of the strong weigh more heavily on the weak. There is not a single mechanical invention which has not been a subject of anguish and a cause of distress to thousands of fathers of families from the moment it began to work."
If all this, and much else that M. Blanc alleges, were true, then the condition of all workingmen to-day should be in every way worse than that of their fathers, in anti-machinery days. But such is not the case. There never was a time when the laborer toiled less or enjoyed more than in these days of machinery; and the laborer's condition is best where the machinery is best and most used.
A hundred years ago the laborer toiled long, produced little, and enjoyed less. To-day, thanks to the victories of invention, machinery does the heaviest of the work; the workman's hours of labor are fewer than formerly; his wages are greater; and his earnings will buy vastly more, dollar for dollar, than in any previous age in the world's history.
What laborer of to-day would be satisfied with the remuneration, the food, the shelter, the clothing of the laboring classes of one hundred years ago? The wants of men, as well as their thoughts, are widened by the process of the suns. And in no section of society have the daily wants been more markedly increased, or the facilities for gratifying them either, than among those that live by labor.
"If the workman were his own master, when he had done in two hours with the aid of machinery what it would have taken him twelve hours to do without it, he would stop at the end of the two."
So says the theoretical socialist. The practical workman never has, nor, we believe, ever will, act so foolishly; certainly not until the limit of man's capacity to enjoy has been reached. When the united products of manual and mechanical effort fully satisfy the desires of all men, and leave no margin of want unfilled, then and then only will men be satisfied with the reduction of effort demanded by the socialists. Until then the larger part of every increase in production by mechanical improvements will go to swell the volume of good things for human use and enjoyment. Our machinery enables our thousands of busy workers to accomplish what millions could not have done years ago, and a very large part of the aggregate increase of product comes back to them in conveniences and luxuries surpassing those the wealthiest could enjoy were machinery not employed, or were it employed, as the socialist advocates, without increasing the aggregate of production. The laziness of the savage and the advantages of civilization are incompatible. The chief merit of machinery lies in its enabling us to multiply constantly the scope and variety of our enjoyments without a corresponding increase of toil.
