n organized companies. Throwing out
of account the professions, a few trades of the highest sort, and the
class of labor which is performed by employers themselves and their
salaried assistants, it is practically true that labor is in a universal
ebb and flow; it passes freely to occupations which are, for the time
being, highly paid, and reduces their rewards to the general level.

This objection to the proposed grouping is not theoretical. The question
is one of fact; it is the development of actual industry that has
invalidated the theory which, in the seventies, expressed an important
truth concerning economic relations in England. Moreover, the author of
the theory anticipated one change which would somewhat lessen its
applicability to future conditions. He recorded his belief that
education would prove a leveler, and that it would merge to some extent
the strata of industrial society. The children of hod-carriers might
become machinists, accountants, or lawyers when they could acquire the
needed education. He admitted also that new countries afford conditions
in which the lines of demarcation are faint. He was not in a position to
appreciate the chief leveling agency, namely, the machine method of
production as now extended and perfected. Education makes the laborer
capable of things relatively difficult, and machines render the
processes which he needs to master relatively easy. The so-called
unskilled workmen stand on a higher personal level than those of former
times; and the new methods of manufacturing are reducing class after
class to that level. Mechanical labor is resolving itself into processes
so simple that anyone may learn them. An old-time shoemaker could not
become a watchmaker, and even his children would have found difficulties
in their way had they attempted to master the higher trade; but a laster
in a Lynn shoe factory can, if he will, learn one of the minute trades
that are involved in the making of a Waltham watch. His children may do
so without difficulty; and this is all that is necessary for maintaining
the normal balance between the trades.

The largest surviving differences between workmen are moral. Bodily
strength still counts for something, and mental strength for more; but
the consideration which chiefly determines the value of a workman to the
employer who intrusts to him costly materials and a delicate machine is
the question of fidelity. Character is not monopolized by any social