AND ON THE CONTINENT.

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requiring strength are accomplished by the machine. He re-sembles not the labour virtuoso of the so-called manufacture(division of labour without mechanical power) which,by reason of extensive division of labour, requires fewhand-touches for perfection. Tools now accomplish these touchesmore perfectly—tools which attack more and more the field of so-called “ mechanical ” work. Freeing the man therewith from thetie of the constantly developing division of labour, the perfectmachine simply requires watching. With increasing size andspeed, with their augmenting productive power and complication,there is, on the other hand, a continuously increasing brain-attention demanded from the operative—an understanding of thetherein embodied thoughts of technicality. The man attending itshould be a son of the century of natural science. The modernmethod of production also tends towards the contraction of similaror increased labour capacity to a shorter time : it is cheaper toexhaust the working power in nine than in eleven hours. Themodern operative, as produced by the American and English Centralised Industry, is the extreme opposite of that handworkerwho, by reason of a real or legal position of monopoly,“ makes his customers wait.”

This development has been, without doubt, hurried forward inEngland by social moments, especially by the contraction ofchildren’s work and the shortening of the hours of labour whichthe Factory Acts caused. The workpeople’s combinations, andtheir struggles with the employers, are also to be taken intoaccount. For instance, it is undoubtedly correct that the Self-actor , invented by Roberts in 1830, was designed as a weaponagainst the spinner, and first came into general use in consequenceof strikes (36). Looked at from this point of view, the socialmovements of that time, those of the philanthropic Tories, aswell as the workmen striving to raise themselves, first attain thefoundation of economical necessity. Both have done their quotato urge forward technical development. This consciousness isexpressed unusually early in the “Edinburgh Review” of July,1835. “If from the discovery of the Spinning Frame up to the

36. Ure: “Philosophy of Manufactures,” 367. Ure: “Cotton Manu-facture,” II., 194. Committee on Manufactures (5,621, 5,421). On the otherhand, the so-called “ cheap labour ”(i.e. labour feeble, incapable of exertion)held full sway on Saxon spinning up to the “sixties ” with the ancient systemof hand-mule. Compare Martin, “Der wirtschaftliche Aufschwung der Baum-wollspinnerei im Konigreich Sachsen,” Smoller’s “ Jahrbuch fiir Gesetzgebung,”Band xvii., Heft 3, pp. 12, 13