Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/293

 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS 279

The immediate effect of the factory system was the displacement of labor by machin- ery, and a greater product for "the same amount of human effort. The displacement was so rapid that many laborers failed of proper coordination in the new economic order and so a large amount of actual hardship and suffering was produced. In a new and rapidly developing country the effects of the displacement of labor are not as painful as they are in an older and a more slowly developing one. In America, "we are, therefore, in great danger of doing the gravest injustice to large classes, and even masses, of our suffering fellow countrymen, by asserting and maintaining the easy-going optimism prevalent in all our well-to-do circles, which so stoutly claims that 'no man, willing and able to work, fails to find opportunity to earn a decent live- lihood, except there be some moral obliquity to account for his failure.' The facts of the increasing displacement and irregularity of labor, and the precariousness of liveli- hood consequent upon the inevitable and ultimately beneficial development of labor- saving machinery, must be faced and the general good, undoubtedly promoted thereby, must somehow, sooner or later, be made to compensate those who suffer loss as unjust as it has been irretrievable." Another result of the factory system is the impetus it gave to the principle of competition as a social force and a consequent appearance of the phenomena "overproduction." The manufacturer was originally a hand-working producer, but now became the possessor of the machinery of production, and the employer of the workers.

Machine production has intensified all and occasioned some of the following effects upon labor :

(1) The separation of the employing and the employed classes. t

(2) The concentration of capital and especially the tools of production in the hands of relatively few.

(3) The lowering of price of manufacturers' goods and the increase in the purchas- ing power of labor.

(4) The increase in the complexity, fluctuations, speculative element, and uncertainty of industrial interests affects the social conditions of labor by enhancing the precarious- ness of livelihood, shortening the working season and lengthening its working day, less- ening the yearly average of wages by the more frequent intervals of enforced idleness, and by breaking up the permanency of abode and compelling populations to become transient through the necessity of seeking work from place to place.

(5) The centralization of population in factory towns and manufacturing cities has ever been attended with the most serious social and ethical effects upon the san- itary safety, family interests, and moral conditions of the operative classes.

(6) The disproportionate increase of women workers over men, and the persist- ency of child labor.

The last and most far reaching of the social effects of the machine production system here noted is the intensifying, the permanancy and the practically universal pervasiveness of the principle of industrial competition.

The reentrance of ethics and religion into the economic domain of human rela- tionship compels us to "recognize competition to be a thing neither good nor bad," and "look upon it as resembling a great physical force which cannot be destroyed but may be controlled and modified.

That Humanity in Industry Pays is seen in the successful democratic and con- siderate administration of the wage-system in the National Cash Register Company at their shops in Dayton, Ohio. Here obtains the most careful consideration for the health and comfort, the conveniences and feelings of the employe's. The considera- tion shown the three hundred women employe's savors of the chivalrous, and due regard for what men care most for is shown the fourteen hundred employe's. " The N. C. R. House " is practically a social settlement for the families of the employe's. The saving on the annual payment of 1700,000 for labor is thought to yield good inter- est on the sum invested in sanitary safety. in value of the real estate near the shops is estimated to more than cover the expenditure in landscape art and the garden-flats, and the training of the boys of the neighborhood in truck gardening. The company, " now, next in value to the perfected, patented, mechanical processes, and products .... rates highest among the assets of the concern the intelligence,