failing instrument, while his connexion with the whole mechanism compels him to work with the regularity of the parts of a machine.[1]
Since the collective labourer has functions, both simple and complex, both high and low, his members, the individual labour-powers, require different degrees of training, and must therefore have different values. Manufacture, therefore, developes a hierarchy of labour-powers, to which there corresponds a scale of wages. If, on the one hand, the individual laborers are appropriated and annexed for life by a limited function; on the cther hand, the various operations of the hierarchy are parcelled ont among the laboures according to both their natural and their acquired capabilities.[2] Every process of production, however, requires certain simple manipulations, which every man is capable of doing. They too are now severed from their connexion with more pregnant moments of activity, and ossified into exclusive functions of specially appointed labourers. Hence, Manufacture begets, in every handicraft that it seizes upon, a class of so-called unskilled labourers, a class which handicraft industry strictly excluded. If it developes a one-sided specialty into a perfection, at the expense of the whole of a man's working capacity, it also begins to make a specialty of the absence of all development. Alongside of the hierarchic gradation there steps the simple separation of the labourers into skilled and unskilled. For the latter, the cost of apprenticeship vanishes; for the former, it diminishes, compared with that of artificers, in
- ↑ The question put by one of the Inquiry Commissioners, How the yonng persons are kept steadily to their work, is very correctly answered by Mr. Wm. Marshall, the general manager of a glass manufactory: "They cannot well neglect their work; when they once begin, they must go on; they are just the same as parts of a machine." ("Children's Empl. Comm.," 4th Rep., 1865, p. 247.)
- ↑ Dr. Ure, in his apotheosis of Modern Mechanical Industry, brings out the peculiar character of mannfacture more sharply than previous economists, who had not his polemical interest in the matters, and more sharply even than his contemporaries—Babbage, e.g., who, though much his superior as a mathematician and mechanician, treated mechanical industry from the standpoint of manufacture alone. Ure says, "This appropriation … to each, a workman of appropriate value and cost was naturally assigned, forms the very essence of division of labour." On the other hand, he describes this division as "adaptation of labour to the different talents of men," and lastly, characterises the whole mannfactnring system as "a system for the division or gradation of labour," as "the division of labour into degrees of skill," &c. (Ure, l. c., pp. 19-23 passim.)
