people. Hence the writers of the manufacturing period treat the division of labour chiefly as a means of virtually supplying a deficiency of labourers, and not as a means of actually displacing those in work. This distinction is self-evident. If it be said that 100 millions of people would be required in England to spin with the old spinning-wheel the cotton that is now spun with mules by 500,000 people, this does not mean that the mules took the place of those millions who never existed. It means only this, that many millions of workpeople would be required to replace the spinning machinery. If, on the other hand, we say, that in England the power-loom threw 800,000 weavers ou the streets, we do not refer to existing machinery, that would have to be replaced by a definite number of workpeople, but to a number of weavers in existence who were actually replaced or displaced by the looms. During the manufacturing period, handicraft labour, altered though it was by division of labour, was yet the basis. The demands of the new colonial markets could not be satisfied owing to the relatively small number of town operatives handed down from the middle ages, and the manufactures proper opened out new fields of production to the rural population, driven from the land by the dissolution of the feudal system. At that time, therefore, division of labour and co-operation in the workshops, were viewed more from the positive aspect, that they made the workpeople more productive.[1] Long before the period of Modern Industry, co-operation and the concentration of the instruments of labour in the hands of a few, gave rise, in numerous countries where these methods were applied in agri-
- ↑ Sir James Stewart also understands machinery quite in this sense. “Je considère donc les machines comme des moyens d’augmenter (virtuellement) le nombre des gens industrienx qu’on n’est pas obligé de nourrir.… En quoi l’effet d’une machine diffère-t-il de celui de nouveaux habitants?” (French trans. t. I, l. I., ch. XIX.) More naïve is Petty, who says, it replaces “Polygamy.” The above point of view is, at the most, admissible only for some parts of the United States. On the other band, “machinery can seldom be used with success to abridge the labour of an individual; more time would be lost in its construction than could be saved by its application. It is only useful when it acts on great masses, when a single machine can assist the work of thousands. It is accordingly in the most populous countries, where there are most idle men, that it is most abundant. It is not called into use by a scarcity of men, but by the facility with which they can be brougbt to work in masses.” (Piercy Ravenstone: “Thoughts on the Funding System and its Effects.” London, 1824, p. 15.)
