Heavy industry

“ The most necessary products are often made in such a manner that they not only go through twenty or thirty hands in the same factory, but often pass from one factory to another in order to be completed. The raw material for the manufacture of these articles often comes from distant places, and railroads, mails, and telegraphs are vital to production. Now, if it happens that one wheel of this enormous mechanism of society stops, the whole of this particular industry is laid idle. ”

“ The industrial overlord holds control of the job with one hand. With the other he controls the product of industry. From the time the raw material leaves the earth in the form of iron ore, crude petroleum, logs, or coal, through all of the processes of production, it is owned by the industrial master, not by the worker. Workers separate the product from the earth, transport it, refine it, fabricate it. Always, the product, like the machinery, is the possession of the owning class. ”

“ This check to production, beginning at the basis of interlaced industry, propagates itself from exchange point to exchange point, cessation of supply becoming failure of demand, until, so to speak, the whole machine is thrown out of gear, and the spectacle is everywhere presented of labor going to waste while laborers suffer from want.
This strange and unnatural spectacle of large numbers of willing men who cannot find employment is enough to suggest the true cause to whomsoever can think consecutively. ”

“ In mining, railway transportation and building we have positive evidence of diminished efficiency of labor, which in the aggregate is not offset by the improvements of management, or but barely. There remains but manufacturing as the other great branch of producing industry, apart from agriculture. ”

“ The tendency, then, being to a perpetual increase of the productive power of labour in manufactures, while in agriculture and mining there is a conflict between two tendencies, the one towards an increase of productive power, the other towards a diminution of it, the cost of production being lessened by every improvement in the processes, and augmented by every addition to population; it follows that the exchange values of manufactured articles, compared with the products of agriculture and of mines, have, as population and industry advance, a certain and decided tendency to fall. ”

“ Production has somewhere been checked and this reduction in the supply of some things has shown itself in cessation of demand for others, the check propagating itself through the whole framework of industry and exchange.
The real obstacle The industrial pyramid manifestly rests on the land. ”

“ Factories containing machinery operated by steam power could produce cloth, shoes, implements, and almost every other sort of manufactured commodity more cheaply than they could be made by hand-industry in the homes or in small shops. So the factory system spread over the length and breadth of the land, drawing large investments of capital into its vortex, giving rise to great industrial corporations, creating a new labor class, fostering the growth of great cities, and compelling the government to take a hand in the regulation of industry. ”

“ Far-reaching changes have taken place, of late, in the type of men who have held the reins of control over industry. During its early years the economic machinery was constructed by men who had worked at their trades ”

“ For what is it that, by means of great capital, working with the powers which their immortal discoveries have conferred, manufacturing industry has become? Why, it has all, or nearly all, run into huge mills, or other establishments, in which machinery, at a cost of thirty, forty, or fifty thousand pounds, is erected, and a crown of needy women and children are employed, in ordinary [Pg 540] times, at the lowest wages which can support existence, with a few men at a guinea or twenty-five shillings a-week, to direct and superintend their labours. ”

“ The enormous power, inherent in the factory system, of expanding by jumps, and the dependence of that system on the markets of the world, necessarily beget feverish production, followed by over-filling of the markets, whereupon contraction of the markets brings on crippling of production. The life of modern industry becomes a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation. ”

“ This was the commodity which you workers supply. It is human power, human labor-power.
One hundred years ago almost everything was produced by human labor-power, but gradually improved machinery has been invented that lessens the human toil needed to make things. Big machines, run by steam, or water-power, now do-most of the heavy and difficult work. But the owner of the mine or factory or mill needs one other commodity to guide the machines, to tend the machines and feed them. He needs your labor-power. ”

“ That's the kernel of the industrial question. Industry has passed out of the alluvial stage into the reefing. We must have machinery to work with or we may all starve in the midst of mountains of gold. ”

“ Industry offers the workingman an opportunity to earn a living, subject to the caprice of overwork, sickness, accidents, new machinery, individual shut-downs and general suspensions of industrial activity—a hierarchy of forces which overshadow every movement of his life, threatening continually to hurl him into an abyss of hardship and misery. Any one, or any combination of these five forces, may, at any time, diminish, temporarily or permanently, the income-earning capacity of the worker. ”

“ The equipment with which men work today can be divided into separate individual shares only at the cost of incalculable embarrassment to industry. Before the days of machiinery, and aggregated capital, and the application of science to methods of production, no calamity less than war, famine or pestilence could produce equal industrial disturbance. ”

“ Now, however the existing state of things may be in this country, or in other countries, arising out of a variety of arbitrary circumstances, foreign to the natural, and in all cases the ultimately inevitable course of industry, it is a matter of justice, clear and undeniable, that every improvement in society ought to be the property of the many, and not of a few; and that it ought either to lessen the quantity of labour necessary for acquiring the means of living, or to increase the profit to be gained by continuing the same quantity of labour. ”

“ The direct causal connection between the increased productive power of modern machinery and trade depression clearly emerges from a comparison of the fluctuations in the several departments of industry in different industrial countries. ”

“ In proportion as the industries of the world multiplied and became complex, and the volume of capital involved was increased, these business cataclysms became more frequent, till, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, there were two years of bad times to one of good, and the system of industry, never before so extended or so imposing, seemed in danger of collapsing by its own weight. ”

“ The hand worker with his old tools was more and more at a disadvantage compared with the workman who produced commodities by machinery. The result was inevitable, namely, that domestic industry was supplanted by the factory. ”

“ When you sought an accumulation of corn, of clothing, of housing, of fuel as the indispensable preliminary to the launching of your new industry; when you looked round for someone who could find the accumulated wealth necessary for these considerable experiments, you had to turn to the class which had already monopolised the bulk of the means of production in England. The rich men alone could furnish you with those supplies. ”

“ The experience that crises are caused by blind, anarchic production, i. e., that production is carried on without a knowledge of the volume of supply, of sales and of demand of and for the several goods in the world's market, has, as indicated in previous passages, caused large manufacturers in several branches of industry to join in Trusts and rings, partly with the view of steadying prices, partly also for the purpose of regulating production by the light of previous experience and of the orders received. ”

“ But the factories give employment to the population, and working people are content to labor even in an unwholesome atmosphere for their daily bread. To require the entire suppression of nuisances involves outlay of money, and, in the present depressed state of manufacturing industry in Britain, proprietors are unwilling to incur expense. ”

“ The manufacturing industry is continually passing under the management of fewer individuals, while the number of operatives in each factory tends to increase. With concentration of management goes concentration of wealth, and the gap widens between rich and poor. Out of the modern factory system has come the industrial problem with all its varieties of skilled and unskilled work, woman and child labor, sweating, wages, hours and conditions of labor, unemployment, and other difficulties. ”

“ While industry is suspended, while the plough lies in the furrow, while the Exchange is silent, while no smoke ascends from the factory, a process is going on quite as important to the wealth of nations as any process which is performed on more busy days. ”

“ The problems of industry are enormously aggravated by the fact that the numbers of individuals concerned even in particular plants, mills, mines, factories, stretch the capacities of human management too often beyond the possibilities of human understanding and sympathy. ”

“ So long as we are a commercial people, vast warehouses, piled from cellar to roof with heavy merchandise, must abound in all our cities. And yet how utterly incompetent would many such buildings be to stand alone! So long, too, as we are a manufacturing people, must we have huge mills crowded full with heavy apparatus, vibrating machinery, and human lives. ”

“ Within a short time the whole face of industry was changed. The primitive shop had been absorbed into the industrial factory, eliminating the individual owners. Gigantic industrial corporations with billions of dollars at their command became the masters of industry, dictating the price of commodities, the wages of Labor and the policy of our State and National Governments. While the captains of industry were creating these great industrial combinations what were the leaders of Labor doing? Not a thing except to draw down their fat salaries, and they never failed in that. ”

“ Under the stimulus of this the wheels of industry hummed. Factories covered the land. National production grew to a colossal size and the whole outer world seemed laid under a tribute to the great industry. ”

“ It was provincial in thought, speech, and habits. It was given over to agriculture, small trade, and rude home manufacture. Presently came the revolutionary inventions of textile machinery, of the steam-engine, and of processes for extracting and utilizing coal and iron. The heavy, costly machinery required capital and the factory. Concentrated capital and machinery required workers. The working people were forced to give up their small home manufacturing and their unprofitable farming and move to the industrial barracks and workrooms of the manufacturing centres. ”

“ Industry will never progress to vigorous and healthy development unless our conception of the relationship between industry and the nation is radically revised. That conception to-day is mean, stunted, and utterly devoid of any power of inspiration. Industry I have defined, in the language of economics, as the production of commodities and services for the purpose of satisfying the wants and desires of men. ”

“ The degree of protection which will be required for domestic industry beyond 1842, depends upon the reduction of wages, the accumulation of capital, the improvement in skill, the protection of machinery, and the cheapening of the price, at home, of essential articles, such as fuel, iron, and so forth. ”

“ While we believe that labor in the aggregate naturally obtains the whole of the produce of industry after the deduction of the fair shares of capital and management (which are limited by competition) and that the benefit of improvements effected by virtue of invention, engineering and organization inevitably accrue mainly to labor, there may be delay of the natural result through imperfection of competition and temporary opportunities for employers to take advantage of labor. ”

“ Economy without industry will barely appear in a whole coat; industry without economy will appear in rags. The first is detrimental to the community, by preventing the circulation of property; the last is detrimental to itself. It is a singular remark, that even industry is sometimes the way to poverty. ”

“ First, in industry, the persistence, and, in some cases, even increase, of petty industries; second, in agriculture, the failure of large-scale farming, and the decrease of the average farm acreage; third, in retail trade, the persistence of the small stores, despite the growth in size and number of the great department stores; fourth, the fact that concentration of industry does not imply a like concentration of wealth, the number of shareholders in a great industrial combination being frequently greater [Pg 122] than the number of owners in the units of industry prior to the combination. ”

“ And that this latter effect is so necessary, in order to create a continued stimulus to productive industry, and keep up an abundant supply of commodities, that in the cases in which it does not take place, a stagnation in the demand for labour is immediately perceptible, and the progress of wealth is checked. ”

“ We have built upon this most uncertain apex as a base, an inverted pyramid by which ocean and land carriers, merchants, brokers, speculators, and every branch of parasite commerce were to wax lustily. We may devise as we will rural credits, schools of agriculture, prophets of agrarian science, bellowing from the tail-end of peripatetic railway coaches, grants of seed, warrants, elevators, labour-saving machinery, and every other panacea to nurse the sick field labourer. ”