Industrialist

“ 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. ”

“ To manufacture, to agriculture, to commerce, to all fields of human labor, they extend, and their name is legion. Standing on the summit of this century and looking backward, its beginning appears pitifully poor and meager. Around us to-day are hundreds of busy workshops, filled with machinery, pouring out finished products with extraordinary speed, men no longer makers of goods, but waiters upon machines. In the fields the grain is planted and harvested, the grass cut and gathered, the ground ploughed and cultivated, everything done by machines. ”

“ Thus employed, the workman learned little or nothing of the process of the manufacture at which he assisted, or of other departments of the work than the particular one in which he was engaged, and his only opportunity of acquiring such knowledge was outside the workshop or factory in a technical school. The economy effected by the division of labour led to the extension of the principle to other industries than those in which machinery is largely employed. ”

“ The technical basis of the greater industry is revolutionary. "Through machinery, chemical processes and other methods, the functions of the working class and the social labor process are revolutionized along with the technical basis of production. The division of labor is also revolutionized and masses of capital and labor are hurled incontinently from one branch of industry to another. The nature of the greater industry demands mobility of labor, a fluidity of functions and a complete adaptibility on the part of the laborers. ”

“ Similarly all industry, not agricultural or handicraft, is indiscriminately comprised in the term of manufacture, and thereby the distinction is obliterated between two great and essentially different periods of economic history: the period of manufacture proper, based on the division of manual labor, and the period of modern industry based on machinery. ”

“ From the dawn of history the manufacturer and craftsman had been, as we have said, a sort of middle-class townsman. The machine and the employer now superseded his skill, and he either became an employer of his fellows, and grew towards wealth and equality with the other rich classes, or he remained a worker and sank very rapidly to the level of a mere labourer. This great change in human affairs is known as the Industrial Revolution. ”

“ For a time I felt that having brought about in my own mills a relation between capital and labor which I may go so far as to term ideal, and having published my book, my philosophy of an employer's life, I had contributed my utmost to the cause of industrial civilization. ”

“ In the hurry of the Industrial Revolution, invention proceeded at an accelerating pace, and the introduction of some new appliance into a single industry might reduce the demand for labour by a quarter, or a half, or even three-quarters, and almost depopulate a town at a single blow. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is evident that we must build up such an order of workers' management of enterprises which would train the workers in the idea that every factory is the property not only of the workers of that particular factory, but of the whole working people. ”

“ As I have said before there is a common supposition among people who are not employers of labor, that such features of industry as the mechanical devices of modern technology and the division of labor in factory organization, are in their nature opposed to the expansive development of the people involved; that these features of apparent intrinsic importance to mass production, are antagonistic to individual growth and to the interest of workers in productive effort. ”

“ We divide the history of industrial production since the Middle Ages into three periods: (1) handicraft, small master craftsmen with a few journeymen and apprentices, where each laborer produces the complete article (2) manufacture, where greater numbers of workmen, grouped in one large establishment, produce the complete article on the principle of division of labor, each workman performing only one partial operation, so that the product is complete only after having passed successively through the hands of all ”

“ The Manufacturing Industry.—It is the function of the agriculturist and the herdsman, the miner and the lumberman, to produce the raw material. The sailor and the train-hand, the longshoreman and the teamster, transport them to the industrial centres. It is the business of [181] the manufacturer and his employees to turn them into the finished product for the use of society. ”

“ The change, at first view, is not striking, for the manufacturing was still done by petty artisans working at home with their own tools. The ownership of the raw material, however, had passed from the artisans to an employer, who took the risk of the manufacture and reaped profits corresponding to his success in conducting it.
Brain power now took a place in manufactures above hand power. The new class of employers were men who could devote their energy entirely to studying the larger questions212 of production. ”

“ Thus, labour expended in the acquisition of manufacturing skill, I class as productive, not in virtue of the skill itself, but of the manufactured products created by the skill, and to the creation of which the labour of learning the trade is essentially conducive. ”

“ The starting point of Modern Industry is, as we have shown, the revolution in the instruments of labour, and this revolution attains its most highly developed form in the organised system of machinery in a factory. ”

“ 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 industrial organization had been perfected. Work was done by machines. Men attended them for short hours and played through long ones. There were no rich, and no poor. The products of industry were fairly divided. ”

“ The keystone figure represents The Power of Industry, the man who both thinks and uses his hands.
In the tympanum are the types representing the Varied Industries.
In the center is Agriculture representing the food side of life. On the left a workman, possibly an architect, suggests the refinements of the varied industries, while on the right one sees the ordinary workman with his sledge-hammer, bringing to mind the rougher side of industry. In the left corner a woman with her spindle - a lamb standing near - recalls the making of textiles. ”

“ The modern manufacturing organization and the influence of machinery have been treated, from the economic standpoint, by Hobson, Modern capitalism, and Schulze-Gaevernitz, The cotton trade, Manchester, 1895. ”

“ Trusting to the reports of our exhibitions of industrial skill, I was ready to swear that we had left our neighbours of England a hundred leagues behind, and that their manufacturers, to avoid being reduced to beggary by our competition, would soon be obliged to come over to learn how to smelt and refine iron, how to spin cotton, how to manufacture steel, how to manage the most gigantic establishments in the most economical manner, how to despatch mountains of merchandise beyond sea most expeditiously. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Before capitalistic production, i.e., in the Middle Ages, the system of petty industry obtained generally, based upon the private property of the laborers in their means of production; in the country, the agriculture of the small peasant, freeman or serf; in the towns, the handicrafts organized in guilds. ”

“ Industries are in an appalling condition, and the employing class stand aghast at their own handiwork. For almost a century and a-half theirs has been the task to apply the economic policy of industry. ”

“ It was an industry that sought to provide homes for the people, and to dignify labor and life in the midst of surroundings that taxed every resource of action, and the ultimate verge of human daring; an industry that employed the plainest instruments—the axe to hew down the forest, and the plow to turn the furrow. ”

“ Now, just fancy what a position the world, considered as one great workroom—one great factory in the form of a globe—would have been in by this time, if it had in the least understood this duty, or been capable of it. ”

“ Manufactures and Commerce.—The scarcity of labour prevents the growth of any great manufacturing industries. There is no native artisan class; for except in very rare cases, the people value their independence too highly to work in factories, or even to enter domestic service. ”

“ Because he possesses not only a pair of hands, but also those means of production without which work is impossible nowadays: factories, land, machines, railroads, mines, ships and steamers, and all kinds of apparatus and instruments. ”

“ In industry it is difficult to recognize, because every civilized nation in a healthy state of development must present an extension of industrial production, for the following four reasons: 1. Because occupations that were formerly domestic in character have been taken over by industry. ”

“ Whether this more generous concept of the workers' lives yields more in manufactured goods than one that confines the activity of the workers to the factory in which they labor, scientific management, so far as I know, has not discovered. ”

“ It is by a minute division of their details; by convenient and labor-saving machinery; by healthy, even elegant workshops, where a certain refinement could be introduced, and scientific thought combined with the pursuit of industry; by short sessions of labor, and the prosecutions of all of its branches by groups of persons united in taste and in sympathy of character, thus bringing the play of the sentiments into industry, and identifying the social and productive life of man ”

“ Nothing in modern times has exerted a more profound or far-reaching influence upon the general course of civilization. The factory is the symbol of a new economic order. It has been said, and rightly, that three things,—steam, steel, and credit,—have revolutionized industry during the past hundred years.
Industrial Organization of Today.—In the days of hand-industry men needed no large amounts of capital in order to engage in the production of goods. ”

“ The Industrial Revolution, thus springing from the sudden growth in the use of machinery, occasioned not only economic but political and social results. On the economic side, the effect was to extend old industries and to create new ones, as well as to revolutionize the methods of the production and distribution of wealth. ”

“ The very discovery of improved industrial methods, by leading to specialisation, makes manual labourer and brain- worker alike dependent on the rest of the community for the means of subsistence, and subordinates them, even in their own crafts, to the action of others. ”

“ Three classes of men answer to this specialization at the present day: the traders, who are not producers, but act as middlemen between producer and consumer, deciding what shall be produced and concerning themselves solely with buying and selling; the industrial capitalists, who, at the tradesmen’s orders, direct the transformation of the raw materials entrusted to them, in workshops and with machinery which are their property; finally the workmen, who, mere wage-earners, carry out manual or mechanical work as they are told. ”

“ Miscellaneous industries.—Various branches of industry, for which the raw material is or can be produced in the country, appear capable of introduction or development and improvement. Milling and oil-pressing, for example, need to be further modernised. ”

“ While commemorating the labours and honouring the names of those who have striven to elevate man above the material and mechanical, the labours of the important industrial class to whom society owes so much of its comfort and well-being are also entitled to consideration. ”

“ The Industrial Revolution is the term applied to the change which came over industry when mechanical appliances led to the factory system and the specialising of factory labour. There were rich men before that happened, but they belonged to the class of merchants and financiers rather than to that of manufacturers. And when the Industrial Revolution came, the manufacturer was not specially wealthy. He lived, as a rule, like a workman enjoying a substantial income. ”