Earth-Hunger and Other Essays/Liberty and Machinery

by William Graham Sumner

Liberty and Machinery

A great deal of stress is often laid on the assumed fact that men who labor, at least in manual occupations, are paid for their nerve and sinew, and inferences are deduced from this assertion of fact which are believed to establish especial hardship for that class of persons.

I am not able to find any case whatever, at the present time, in which a human being is paid for anything but intelligence. It may be that some one can bring forward a case; if so, I should be interested to see it. Any mere exertion of animal energy can be converted into pounds of coal, and can be supplanted by steam. The limitations and conditions are, however, that the task to be done must present uniform requirements over a considerable extent of time or place, so that it may be economically possible to apply machinery without intelligence. Some examples will make this point clear.

We see men employed in shoveling and carrying coal from the side-walk into the cellar. Are they paid for pure energy, or for intelligence? If it was the fact that the coal-bins of all houses were built in the same shape and in the same position relatively to the sidewalk, then coal carts could be fitted with apparatus for passing the coal into the bin without any shoveling or carrying. In fact, carts have been invented, and are in use, which do this in that great number of cases where the position and shape of the bins conform to a general plan of house construction. Or, if coal had to be put into the cellar every few days, apparatus could be arranged for each house, in spite of differences of construction, to put it in without hand labor. In fact, therefore, at the present time, the services of the coal-heavers are required to adapt the task to the varying circumstances of the different cases; that is, to apply intelligence where it cannot be dispensed with.

Another case, familiar to our notice, in which human beings expend much nerve and muscular energy, is in hod-carrying. Steam hod-hoisters are familiar, but it is obvious that their applicability and utility is limited to the cases where a large building is to be constructed at one spot; otherwise it does not pay to put up the apparatus. Therefore the case is that the task can be reduced to routine and machinery can be applied to it, if the amount of it is sufficient, within the limits of time and space, to give the machine simply machine work to do, namely, the plodding repetition of a set operation. In other cases the man does the work because he must use his intelligence all the time to produce the ever-changing application which is called for.

A steam shovel will transfer sand or gravel from the bank at a rate to defy the competition of men, so long as the task is to transfer it in the same way, or within narrow limits; but a machine to apply steam-power to the excavation of a trench for a sewer, through hard soil and under constantly varying conditions, is hardly imaginable. Here, therefore, we find the human power almost unrivaled.

On the other hand, we find in mills and factories machines which, as the saying is, "can almost talk." They perform very complicated operations with perfection, provided only the task is to be repeated without limit of time, in some process of manufacture. Hence the machines and the power are all the time invading the domain of intelligence, wherever the task can be put in the mechanical form, and made to comply with the mechanical conditions; the man stands by and supplies the intelligence at the points where the intelligence is still indispensable. Some machines seem more intelligent than some men, but no machine can "feed itself" with new material. The operations of the machine are often immeasurably more worthy of intelligence than the operation of going after more material and feeding it into the machine, but not always so; for the arrangement of the machine and the material, that the machine may do its work well, is often no trifling demand on intelligence.

I believe, therefore, that it is a correct statement of the case that, where the task calls for brute force only, the steam or other engine supplants the man, and that where the man holds the field because his intelligence is indispensable, it is his intelligence that is paid for. If it is indispensable, it is also well remunerated in proportion to the time and capital which must be spent in preparing for the task, while great physical vigor, if necessary, helps to make a natural monopoly. This is why the modern laborer constantly turns to demand the help of machinery wherever it can possibly be applied, and the notion is finding especial illustration just now in the case of the stokers in modern steamships of high speed. Either machinery must be applied where machinery hardly seems applicable at all, or the men who bring the requisite intelligence to bear under very hard conditions, together with the mere mechanical energy whose market value is that of a few pounds of the coal they handle, will obtain a remuneration indefinitely greater than that of the general class or workmen to which they belong, or with which they have hitherto been classed.

Whether this view of the matter can be maintained as absolutely correct or not, it certainly has enough truth in it to show that the current assertions about the hapless position of the man who "has only his labor to sell" rest upon very superficial and hasty knowledge of the case.

On the one hand, then, it is true that that man is unfortunate who, in the world of steam and machinery, can do nothing which steam and machinery cannot do; but, on the other hand, it is true also that steam and machinery are a grand emancipation for the man who will raise himself above them and learn to use them by his intelligence.

If I apprehend this matter aright, then it is only another case of a general principle which I have already tried to expound: that every new power is a new chance, but that every chance brings with it a twofold possibility. If we seize it and use it rightly, we go up by means of it; if we fail to understand it, or miss it, or abuse it, we fall just so much lower on account of it. If we live in a world of machinery and steam, and cannot learn to command machinery and steam, we shall count for no more than a handful of coal; if we rise to the occasion, and by work and study make steam and machinery our servants, we can be emancipated from drudgery and from the wear of the nerves and the muscles. The true hardship of our time is that this alternative is forced upon us over and over again with pitiless repetition.

In a wider and more philosophical view of the matter, every new application of science and every improvement in art, is a case of advancing organization. It always comes with two faces—one, its effect on what is and what has been; the other, its effect on what may be. Its effect on what is and has been is destructive; hence the doctrine that "the better is the greatest foe of the good." Its effect on what may be is creative; results before impossible are now brought within reach. The cost is the sacrifice of the old and the strain to rise to the command of the new.

The effect on our social life of a misapprehension of the relations between modern arts and wages or any ther feature of the economic organization is trifling as compared with the effects of misapprehension of the moral and educating effects of the same arts. It is asserted that there is a moral loss in the sacrifice of skill, and "all-round" efficiency, and dexterity of manipulation. The moral and educating effect on the race of a constant demand to hold the powers alert and on strain to understand and keep up with the "march of progress," transcends immeasurably any similar moral or educating effect to which men have before been subjected. He who will may see the proofs of it on every side, and on all classes; where are the dull boors, the stupid peasantry, the rollicking journeymen (in the original sense of the word) of former times? There never was a time when a man had so much reason to be a man, or so much to make him a man as he has now.

Those then who ascribe liberty to the wise resolutions of political conventions, and set it in opposition to the industrial conditions of modern life, make a woeful mistake. If we have any liberty, it is power over nature which has put it within our reach, and our power over nature is due to science and art. It is they which have emancipated us, but they have not done it without exacting a price, nor without opening to us new vistas of effort and desire; and liberty is still at the end of the vista, where it always has been and always will be.