Mass production

“ The typical unit of production is no longer a single family or a small group of persons working with a few cheap simple tools upon small quantities of material, but a compact and closely organised mass of labour composed of hundreds or thousands of individuals, [89] co-operating with large quantities of expensive and intricate machinery, through which passes a continuous and mighty volume of raw material on its journey to the hands of the consuming public. ”

“ We may confine our attention to the system of distribution which is the most complex, and which virtually includes all others—that in which the produce of manufactures is shared between two classes, labourers and capitalists, and the produce of agriculture among three, labourers, capitalists, and landlords.
The characteristic features of what is commonly meant by industrial progress, resolve themselves mainly into three, increase of capital, increase of population, and improvements in production ”

“ The materials of manufacture being all drawn from the land, and many of them from agriculture, which supplies in particular the entire material of clothing; the general law of production from the land, the law of diminishing return, must in the last resort be applicable to manufacturing as well as to agricultural history. As population increases, and the power of the land to yield increased produce is strained harder and harder, any additional supply of material, as well as of food, must be obtained by a more than proportionally increasing expenditure of labour. ”

“ From the bowels and the treasures of the earth labor puts out the material for fuel and the essential things which, after being transformed, comprise the implements and machinery of production and distribution. With the matter thus furnished production proper for the providing of all necessary things of life and comfort is carried on in the various, but inter-depending places of production, mills and factories. ”

“ But the difficulties of the organization of production and circulation can be diminished in other directions as well as by a decrease in the number of plants. Production can be divided into two great fields; those in which the production is for consumption and those in which production is for production. The production of means of production, thanks to the extensive division of labor, has become to-day the most important portion of production and it continues to increase steadily. ”

“ A country which produces for a larger market than its own, can introduce a more extended division of labour, can make greater use of machinery, and is more likely to make inventions and improvements in the processes of production. Whatever causes a greater quantity of anything to be produced in the same place, tends to the general increase of the productive powers of the world. ”

“ Let there be reflection upon the thought that in quarrelling about the division of produce we have been forgetting to produce enough, and have been blind to the unbalance and distortion of our production. ”

“ But now gigantic mills filled with many spindles have little accurate relation to consumption. The power of production by means of improved machinery is something immense, and it is exercised with no very watchful or cautious regard to the immediate needs of the community. Goods are piled up in vast quantities in waiting for a future market, or for an anticipated change in price ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ Turning our attention again to the industrial organism, we shall strive to ascertain the chief changes that have been brought about in the size and structural character of industry, in the relations of the several parts of the industrial world, of the several trades which constitute industry, of the processes within these trades, of the businesses or units which comprise a trade or a market, and of the units of capital and labour comprising a business. It will then remain to undertake closer studies of certain important special outcomes of machinery and factory production. ”

“ The development of large scale factory production, the benefit of combination in the competitive struggle, and the tremendous advantage of concentration in securing possession of the unoccupied opportunities, were so great that vast accumulations of capital became the normal agency of the industrial world. ”

“ They show us how at a single stroke the productivity of labor can be increased simply by concentrating the total production in the most perfect industrial plants and throwing all those out of operation which do not attain a definite standard. ”

“ 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 present century has been marked by a prodigious increase in wealth-producing power. The utilization of steam and electricity, the introduction of improved processes and labor-saving machinery, the greater subdivision and grander scale of production, the wonderful facilitation of exchanges, have multiplied enormously the effectiveness of labor. ”

“ In the first place, division of labor—the first and most powerful of all cheapeners of production, but for which there is in extractive industry but very limited scope—finds in manufacturing industry an almost unbounded range for its application; and, secondly, it is in manufacturing industry also that machinery, the other great cheapener of production, admits of being employed on the largest scale, and has, in fact, been employed with the most signal success. ”

“ For a high efficiency of production, as a whole, conditions must favor the best organization and direction of industry. Industry is dependent primarily upon natural resources. Climate, rainfall, iron deposits, fuel, supply of wood or coal, predetermine in large measure the limits within, and the direction in which, the industry of any community can move. The progress of production depends also on an increasing efficiency of labor as embodied in individual men, and upon social and political conditions making possible an increase of capital. ”

“ In manufactures, accordingly, the causes tending to increase the productiveness of industry, preponderate greatly over the one cause which tends to diminish it: and the increase of production, called forth by the progress of society, takes place, not at an increasing, but at a continually diminishing proportional cost. ”

“ The extractive, transport, manufacturing, and merchant stages may of course be subdivided into many complex processes, as applied to the history of the more elaborately-produced commodities. But at each point in the process of production there must stand a quantity of plant and machinery designed to assist in moving the productive goods a single step further on the road towards consumption. ”

“ Largely determined by the two groups of influences named above are the forces which represent the national character at any given time, the outcome of primitive race characteristics, food supply, speed and direction of industrial [110] development, density of population, and the various other causes which enter in to determine efficiency of labour. The play of these natural and human forces in world-competition leads to such a settlement of different industries in different localities as yields the greatest net productiveness of labour in each part. ”

“ Production is not a fixed but an increasing thing. When not kept back by bad institutions, or a low state of the arts of life, the produce of industry has usually tended to increase; stimulated not only by the desire of the producers to augment their means of consumption, but by the increasing number of the consumers.
We have seen that the essential requisites of production are three—labor, capital, and natural agents; the term capital including all external and physical requisites which are products of labor, the term natural agents all those which are not. ”

“ In the first class will be placed those economies which arise from increased sub-division of labour and increased efficiency of productive energy, and which represent a net saving in the output of human energy in the production of a given quantity of commodities, from the standpoint of the whole productive community. ”

“ If we look then, as we shall briefly do, at the wonderfully increased production of Great Britain, we shall be naturally led to the conclusion that some cause, much more efficient than the inclosure of waste lands, has given us the means of feeding a population which has doubled since the beginning of the century. This production is the result of the whole course of improvement effected by science, and stimulated by capital. ”

“ Another of our important problems is the distribution of raw materials. We cannot say that we have sufficient raw materials, but we have enough to fill present requirements, and we can hold out for a considerable time with our own production. We have made a thorough inventory and only those factories are supplied which are held to be absolutely in need. ”

“ There are other commodities where saturation has not been reached. Increasing efficiency not only releases labor and direction for greater production of these things but enables their wider diffusion over the population. A selection of such industries shows a growth of 60 per cent in the last decade. ”

“ It will have to take possession of land, factories, mines, means of communication, etc., and besides, it will have to study what products will promote general well-being, as well as the ways and means of an adequate production. ”

“ Those manufacturing improvements which cannot be made instrumental to facilitate, in any of its stages, the actual production of food, and therefore do not help to counteract or retard the diminution of the proportional return to labour from the soil, have, however, another effect, which is practically equivalent. ”

“ We see this very clearly wherever the division of labor has made it customary for different parts of the full process of production to be carried on by different sets of producers—that is to say, wherever we are in the habit of estimating the amount of value which the labor expended in any preparatory stage of production has created. ”

“ Mines, factories and mills of all kinds, large business houses and stores, together with those farms whose owners would employ hired labor for the production of goods to be sold at profit, would all be looked upon as being among the principal means of production. ”

“ It is the application of machinery to agriculture and the general tendency to production on a large scale. The same tendency which substitutes the factory, with its army of operatives, for many independent hand-loom weavers, is beginning to exhibit itself in agriculture. ”

“ In production, the particular conditions of each industry will determine how much capital is to be set apart for raw material, how much for machinery, buildings, and all forms of fixed capital, and how many laborers will be assigned to a given machine for a given amount of material. With some kinds of hand-made goods the largest share of capital goes to wages, a less amount for materials, and a very small proportion for machinery and tools. In many branches of agriculture and small farming this holds true. The converse, however, is true in many manufactures, where machinery is largely used. ”

“ But although the economy of mechanical power was not yet operative to any appreciable extent in concentrating labour, certain other notable economics of large-scale production were beginning to assert themselves in all the leading manufactures. ”

“ One person by the aid of mechanical and electrical devices produces as much in the same time as could a score or even a hundred without such help formerly. The chief reason why quantity production is cheaper than individual production is that it allows for a division of labor, a separation of the preparing processes into several operations or occupations. Growing the grain, transporting it to market, grinding it into flour, baking it into bread, and selling the bread, indicate some of the several occupations, that arise in the simple preparation of “our daily bread.” ”

“ The requisites of production being labour, capital, and land, it has been seen from the preceding chapter that the impediments to the increase of production do not arise from the first of these elements. On the side of labour there is no obstacle to an increase of production, indefinite in extent and of unslackening rapidity. Population has the power of increasing in an uniform and rapid geometrical ratio. If the only essential condition of production were labour, the produce might, and naturally would, increase in the same ratio ”

“ But to labour expended in the subdivided branches of production that require proximity to other producers and especially to labour expended in that final part of production which consists in distribution, it will yield much larger returns. ”