e to keep them in health; are housed for
the most part in places that no man thinks fit for his horse; are
separated by so narrow a margin from destitution that a month of bad
trade, sickness, or unexpected loss brings them face to face with hunger
and pauperism."[12]

Chapter II.

The Effects of Machinery on the Condition of the Working-Classes.

Sec. 1. Centralizing-Influence of Machinery.--In seeking to understand the
nature and causes of the poverty of the lower working-classes, it is
impossible to avoid some discussion of the influence of machinery. For
the rapid and continuous growth of machinery is at once the outward
visible sign and the material agent of the great revolution which has
changed the whole face of the industrial world during the last century.
With the detailed history of this vast change we are not concerned, but
only with its effects on the industrial condition of the poor in the
present day.

Those who have studied in books of history the industrial and
educational condition of the mass of the working populace at the
beginning of this century, or have read such novels as _Shirley_, _Mary
Barton_, and _Alton Locke_, will not be surprised at the mingled
mistrust and hatred with which the working-classes regarded each new
introduction of machinery into the manufacturing arts. These people,
having only a short life to live, naturally took a short-sighted view of
the case; having a specialized form of skill as their only means of
getting bread, they did not greet with joy the triumphs of inventive
skill which robbed this skill of its market value. Even the more
educated champions of the interests of working-classes have often viewed
with grave suspicion the rapid substitution of machinery for hand-labour
in the industrial arts. The enormous increase of wealth-producing power
given by the new machinery can scarcely be realized. It is reckoned that
fifty men with modern machinery could do all the cotton-spinning of the
whole of Lancashire a century ago. Mr. Leone Levi has calculated that to
make by hand all the yarn spun in England in one year by the use of the
self-acting mule, would take 100,000,000 men. The instruments which work
this wonderful change are called "labour-saving" machinery. From this
title it may be deemed that their first object, or at any rate their
chief effect, would be to lighten labour. It seems at first sight
therefore strange to find so reasonable a writer as John