owded him into the towns. It took the loom
from his cottage and placed it in the factory. It took the tool from his
hand and harnessed it to a shaft. It robbed him of his personal skill
and joined his arm of flesh to an arm of iron. It reduced him from a
craftsman to a specialist, from a maker of shoes to a mere stitcher
of soles. It took from him, at a single blow, his interest in the
workmanship of his task, his ownership of the tools, his garden, his
wholesome environment, and even his family. All were swallowed by the
black maw of the ugly new mill town. The hardships of the old days were
soon forgotten in the horrors of the new. For the transition was rapid
enough to make the contrast striking. Indeed it was so rapid that the
new class of employers, the capitalists, found little time to think of
anything but increasing their profits, and the new class of employees,
now merely wage-earners, found that their long hours of monotonous toil
gave them little leisure and no interest.

The transition from the age of handicrafts to the era of machines
presents a picture of greed that tempts one to bitter invective. Its
details are dispassionately catalogued by the Royal Commissions that
finally towards the middle of the nineteenth century inquired into
industrial conditions. From these reports Karl Marx drew inspiration
for his social philosophy, and in them his friend Engles found the
facts that he retold so vividly, for the purpose of arousing his
fellow workmen. And Carlyle and Ruskin, reading this official record
of selfishness, and knowing its truth, drew their powerful indictments
against a society which would permit its eight-year-old daughters, its
mothers, and its grandmothers, to be locked up for fourteen hours a day
in dirty, ill-smelling factories, to release them at night only to find
more misery in the hovels they pitifully called home.

The introduction of machinery into manufacturing wrought vast changes
also in the organization of business. The unit of industry greatly
increased in size. The economies of organized wholesale production were
soon made apparent; and the tendency to increase the size of the factory
and to amalgamate the various branches of industry under corporate
control has continued to the present. The complexity of business
operations also increased with the development of transportation and the
expansion of the empire of trade. A world market took the place of the
old town market, and the