In modern manufacturing, economy is the dominant note. The days before the advent of steam and electricity were days of small volume of business and large profits; but to-day the reverse of this condition obtains, and we find that as a rule the ever increasing volume of business has been accompanied by an ever decreasing percentage of profits. Competition has reduced the margin of profits to a point where the cost of production must be kept at the minimum by every contrivance the manufacturer may invent.

Labor in its last analysis is a commodity, just as much as cotton, and is subject to the unalterable law of demand and supply; and the manufacturers who in these days of keen competition would keep their factories in successful operation, paying to the shareholders a just interest on their investments and at the same time furnishing thousands of workers with the means of earning a livelihood, can pay only the market price for necessary commodities, whether cotton or labor. At the beginning of the last century the workingman and his employer were to all intents associated in business; the terms of the partnership may have been unequal, but the relationship between them was practically that which exists in any partnership. With the advent of the factory system came a change, the employer became essentially a buyer, the workingman a seller of labor.

Now while labor is a commodity, like cotton, coal, oil, reeds, harnesses, or any item entering into the cost of production, there is added to it the human element, and from this springs the problem. VOL. 98-NO. 3

In our age labor is not only the necessity of the poor, but it is the ideal of the rich. A man may sell cotton at a loss and say "Never mind; to-morrow market conditions will change and my loss may return to me as a profit." He may sell coal at a loss and look confidently to the future to reimburse him, these things are mere material possessions; but when he sells his labor, that is quite another thing; for his labor is his own life. That is what manufacturers buy and the multitude of workingmen sell,- parts of the lives of

men.

How shall we overcome the conflict between labor and capital? There is but one way and that way lies in the recognition of the common humanity of the man who sells and the man who buys labor.

"Here also," says Carl Hilty, a Swiss thinker, "is the reason why factory labor, and, in short, all mechanical occupation in which one does but a part of the work, gives meagre satisfaction, and why an artisan who completes his work, or an agricultural laborer, is, as a rule, much more contented than factory operatives, among whom the social discontent of the modern world first uttered itself. The factory workman sees little of the outcome of his work. It is the machine that works, and he is a part of it. He contributes to the making of one little wheel, but he never makes a whole clock which might be to him his work of art and an achievement worthy of a man."

I recognize the truth which underlies this view; I recognize the aesthetic value of hand-made things; but I insist that indiscriminate condemnation of machinery

is the child of an immature imagination. The machine is merely the man multiplied many times, and to it attaches a special dignity because it increases the power of the man to accomplish results. Let me illustrate what I mean from the industry with which I am most familiar. The art of making cloth is essentially the same in the great mills in Fall River to-day as it was centuries ago, when the first textile fabric was woven. Then the raw material was carded, that is to say, it was cleaned and the fibres laid in a uniform direction by means of a comb in the hand of the carder, thus the father of Columbus carded wool; to-day huge engines perform the work of the comb, but the carding engine is operated, as was the comb in the old days, by the human hand, only the power of that hand is multiplied many thousand times. In the old days a single spinning-wheel kept one woman employed from daylight to dark, producing less yarn than the doffers now take in an hour from any one of the thousand spindles tended by one worker; and in weaving, the power loom merely reproduces the identical movements of the hands which wove the first textile fabric before recorded history began. The great steam engine which operates the machinery in the factory is perhaps the best illustration of this idea. A double engine of the triple expansion Corliss type indicated at three thousand horse power is capable of producing the power required to raise ninety-nine million pounds to the height of one foot in one minute. How many labor

produced. Thus the whole factory is itself one great machine which the manager operates, as the weaver operates his loom; and just as the weaver must understand his machine in all its parts, the gears,

SO

the pulleys, the shafts, the cams, must the manager understand his men, who are the gears, the pulleys, the shafts, the cams, of his greater machine.

To return, however, to the main thought of our discussion. As we walk through the factories and observe the operatives standing by their machines, we are liable to confuse the man with the machine, to fail to make the distinction between labor and the laborer, between the commodity and the man who sells the commodity.

"I have worked on the same machine for twenty years," said an old slashertender one day, "until I have come to know the machine and the machine to know me." The statement is very suggestive and the workingman who made it had the imagination of a poet. "I have come to know the machine and the machine to know me." In a sense the man does become a part of the machine he operates; and the more he becomes a part of it, the more effective will be his day's work. He becomes a part of the machine in that his intelligence animates it, in that he makes himself the master of his instrument.

The man who had the imagination to make the statement just quoted, was not brutalized by twenty years of labor operating machinery. I know this man in his own home and I believe that in his daily life he deserves, as few of us do, the name of Christian gentleman; and his wife, although day in and day out for many years she has tended eight looms in a Fall River cotton mill, deserves, as few women I have had the honor to know, the rare title of lady.

Let us take this man and this woman as types of the brutalized working people, and in their home seek further light concerning the problem. The husband came to this country from Lancashire

in early manhood, being then by trade, as he is now, a slasher-tender. The wife came to America in childhood, attended the public schools until by law she was permitted to work, when she became an eight-loom weaver. After their marriage and their wedding journey from the church to their tenement, they returned to their work, and in the ten or twelve years following, saved enough from their wages to buy a comfortable home, costing perhaps three thousand dollars, and had in the savings-banks a balance sufficient to make it seem to them that the wife might with prudence leave her looms in the noisy weave-room and devote her time to her home and the two daughters, for whom she had the ambition that they might receive the education which would remove them beyond the walls of a factory. Her life of comparative ease was brief, for within two years another child was born, and after a time, fearing that the added expense of bringing up the newcomer endangered the fulfillment of her ambition to educate her daughters, she returned to the factory and remained there until she had made her vision a reality.

This is but one of many similar instances which have come under my personal observation. I am not familiar enough with the man with the hoe to venture an opinion, but as regards the man who operates the machine, I cannot believe that he stands bowed by the weight of centuries or that the influence of the machine in itself is brutalizing. There is much in the modern factory system that is brutalizing, and reforms are necessary. These reforms can come only when the man who buys labor learns that he who sells labor is a human being like himself, and when the employee comes to the realization that his master is not a monster whose one thought is to grind the workingman under his feet. Laws may be enacted should be enacted; but before they can avail greatly a better social understanding must exist between the man who buys and the man who sells labor.

We have said that labor is a commodity just as any other necessity which enters into the cost of production is a commodity; but there is added to it the human element, and this makes the buying of it the most difficult task which confronts the manufacturer. The manager of a cotton mill buys cotton, and nobody is interested except himself and the broker who sells it; he buys coal, and nobody cares about the terms of the trade except himself and the dealer who sells it; but when he buys labor, not only does his trade mean much to him, much to the few hundred individuals with whom he makes his bargain, but it means much to the whole army of the dinner-pail, which daily answers to the roll-call in all the factories throughout the land.

Let it now be our purpose to inquire more specifically into the problem and see how, outside any appeal to law, a better understanding may be brought about between the man who buys and the man who sells labor. To this end we may take a concrete.example. There exists to my own knowledge one factory, which for half a century has exemplified in its management the ideal for which I am contending. It is a small concern, employing at the most not more than three hundred hands. The superintendent knows each of his men personally; he talks with them about the things nearest to them, the little happenings in their home life, which are to them as dear as are the joys and sorrows which lighten or make dark his own fireside. In event of an accident to any of them, the doctor's bills are paid and their places held for them until their recovery. In the fifty years of this corporation's history, it has been called upon to defend in the courts but one tort case, and that brought by a miserable fellow with an illustrious criminal record, who tempted Providence to crown it by perjuring himself to obtain a few dollars from those who for twenty years had befriended him. In the fifty years of the history of this corporation there has occurred but one strike, brought