In the early days of the labor movement
William Morris wrote, "we have become slaves of the monster to which
invention has given birth." In 1853, shortly after the introduction of
the cotton gin into India, the Viceroy wrote: "The misery is scarcely
paralleled in the history of trade." (A large statement that!) "The
bones of the cotton workers whiten the plains of India."
But the temporary suffering caused by the immediate crowding out
of cottage industry and the abrupt increase in production was
insignificant beside the deeper influence, physical, moral, mental,
of the machine in changing the permanent habitat and the entire mode
of living for millions of human beings. It removed them from those
healthy rural surroundings which preserve the half-primitive,
half-poetic insight into the nature of things which comes from
relative isolation and close contact with the soil, to the nervous
tension, the amoral conditions, the airless, lightless ugliness of
the early factory settlements. Here living conditions were not merely
beastly; they were often bestial. The economic helplessness of the
factory hands reduced them to essential slavery. They must live where
the factory was, and could work only in one factory, for they could
not afford to move. Hence they must obey their industrial master in
every particular, since the raw material, the plant, the tools, the
very roof that covered them, were all his! In this new human condition
was a powerful reinforcement, from another angle of approach, of
the humanistic impulse.
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