Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/374

 360 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

pie seam, to make a thousand gross of buttonholes in a single season.

The sweaters' victims are, perhaps, the least versatile of all the indoor-trades employes. For them, being crowded out of their narrow groove by a technical improvement means actual starvation. In Chicago, during the present season, the suicide of a tailor has been a matter of almost daily occurrence and scarcely elicits more than a passing newspaper comment. And for one suicide there are many paupers.

It may be said that the occupations cited are exceptional, that the old fundamental trades of the builder of houses and the baker of bread cannot be supplanted, or are, at least, in no immediate danger of it ; that the mason, the carpenter, and the baker are here to stay. To this it must be replied that the sash- door-and-blind factory is enabling the stupidest little boy to turn out more carpenter work, of certain kinds, than the best graduate of the best trade school could do twenty years ago. The new steel-frame construction is transferring to the girder-molder and the structural iron worker the task which fell to the mason from the days of the pyramids to the close of the Civil War. And, finally, one of the most persistent and urgent duties of factory inspectors is finding and removing the little boys who get into the bakeries under the legal age of work and there, with the help of the perfected equipment of the American Biscuit Trust, do that work of breadmaking which once fell to the housewife, but now escapes, day by day, from the adult baker to the little boy at the machine.

We are sending shoes, harnesses, chairs, bicycles and watches from Chicago to London, there to compete successfully, under the conditions of free trade, with the finest manufactured prod- uct of all the world. Now these shoes, harnesses, chairs, bicy- cles and watches are in no case made by one all-round, skilled worker, but by the finest machinery to be found in the respec- tive branches of manufacture. The only skill required is that of the narrowest specialist ; and this specialist can be replaced by a boy or a machine more easily than he can learn all the