artisan to wealth and
turned the "man" into the "master." But for the most part even industry
and endowment were powerless against the inertia of custom and the
dead-weight of environment. The universal ignorance of the working class
broke down the aspiring force of genius. Mute inglorious Miltons were
buried in country churchyards.

In the new world all this changed. The individual became but a shifting
atom in the vast complex, moving from place to place, from occupation to
occupation and from gradation to gradation of material fortune.

The process went further and further. The machine penetrated everywhere,
thrusting aside with its gigantic arm the feeble efforts of handicraft.
It laid its hold upon agriculture, sowing and reaping the grain and
transporting it to the ends of the earth. Then as the nineteenth century
drew towards its close, even the age of steam power was made commonplace
by achievements of the era of electricity.

All this is familiar enough. The record of the age of machinery is known
to all. But the strange mystery, the secret that lies concealed within
its organization, is realized by but few. It offers, to those who see it
aright, the most perplexing industrial paradox ever presented in the
history of mankind. With all our wealth, we are still poor. After a
century and a half of labor-saving machinery, we work about as hard as
ever. With a power over nature multiplied a hundred fold, nature still
conquers us. And more than this. There are many senses in which the
machine age seems to leave the great bulk of civilized humanity, the
working part of it, worse off instead of better. The nature of our work
has changed. No man now makes anything. He makes only a part of
something, feeding and tending a machine that moves with relentless
monotony in the routine of which both the machine and its tender are
only a fractional part.

For the great majority of the workers, the interest of work as such is
gone. It is a task done consciously for a wage, one eye upon the clock.
The brave independence of the keeper of the little shop contrasts
favorably with the mock dignity of a floor walker in an "establishment."
The varied craftsmanship of the artisan had in it something of the
creative element that was the parent motive of sustained industry. The
dull routine of the factory hand in a cotton mill has gone. The life of
a pioneer settler in America two hundred years ago, penurious and
dangerous as it was,