le the maintenance upon a low level of existence of these rapidly
increasing proletarian populations. With the rise and spread throughout
Europe and America of machine production, it is now possible to
correlate the expansion of the "proletariat." The working-classes bred
almost automatically to meet the demand for machine-serving "hands."

The rise in population, the multiplication of proletarian populations as
a first result of mechanical industry, the appearance of great centers
of population, the so-called urban drift, and the evils of overcrowding
still remain insufficiently studied and stated. It is a significant
though neglected fact that when, after long agitation in Great Britain,
child labor was finally forbidden by law, the supply of children dropped
appreciably. No longer of economic value in the factory, children were
evidently a drug in the "home." Yet it is doubly significant that
from this moment British labor began the long unending task of
self-organization.(1)

Nineteenth century economics had no method of studying the interrelation
of the biological factors with the industrial. Overcrowding, overwork,
the progressive destruction of responsibility by the machine discipline,
as is now perfectly obvious, had the most disastrous consequences upon
human character and human habits.(2) Paternalistic philanthropies and
sentimental charities, which sprang up like mushrooms, only tended to
increase the evils of indiscriminate breeding. From the physiological
and psychological point of view, the factory system has been nothing
less than catastrophic.

Dr. Austin Freeman has recently pointed out (3) some of the
physiological, psychological, and racial effects of machinery upon the
proletariat, the breeders of the world. Speaking for Great Britain, Dr.
Freeman suggests that the omnipresence of machinery tends toward the
production of large but inferior populations. Evidences of biological
and racial degeneracy are apparent to this observer. "Compared with the
African negro," he writes, "the British sub-man is in several respects
markedly inferior. He tends to be dull; he is usually quite helpless
and unhandy; he has, as a rule, no skill or knowledge of handicraft,
or indeed knowledge of any kind.... Over-population is a phenomenon
connected with the survival of the unfit, and it is mechanism which
has created conditions favorable to the survival of the unfit and the
elimination of the fit." The whole indictment