Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/747

Rh of suck a situation have not been strikingly apparent. But the mechanical advances in all branches of iron manufacture during the last few years have been marvelous, and the consequent economies equally marvelous. The trades-unionists have carried on a silent, secret, and to a large degree a successful movement against the efficient introduction of these new methods in the shops under their control. There is no good reason to doubt the statement, repeatedly made by the iron masters, that Great Britain is, in consequence, far behind the competing nations in many forms of iron manufacture, in efficiency of equipment, and in product per man.

So far as this fact is due to English trades-unionism, it must be regarded as a triumph for that organization; and it is somewhat difficult to get at the philosophy by which organized labor justifies itself in standing athwart the pathway of mechanical progress. At its basis undoubtedly lies the inherited antipathy of the English workingman to labor-saving machinery. He possesses this antipathy to a degree and extent unknown in any other country. It has come down to him through the generations, and its tenacity is one of many evidences of the narrowing influence of insular conditions. The time has long since passed when this antipathy takes on the form of open violence, the smashing of machines, the burning of mills, and the maltreatment of inventors—things common enough in the days of the Luddites, seventy-five years ago. The modern manifestation of this inborn and inherited antipathy to labor-saving machinery is a species of moral boycott—indefinite, intangible, indirect, felt rather than seen. It frequently takes the form of union regulations, under which the mechanic restrains himself from turning out more than a given product in a day, irrespective of the possibilities of the improved machine he operates. The engineers' strike has inspired a great mass of literature showing how the enforcement of these regulations has tended to limit output, and thus handicap English manufacturers in their struggle against foreign competitors. Here is one of many illustrations given by Colonel Dyer, the chairman of the Federated Employers, in a recent magazine article:

We have a very large boring machine at Elswick; this boring machine is eighty feet long. We do very rough work on it—i. e., we take the center out of the shaft by means of a trepanning tool. We took the center out of a shaft the other day seventy feet long. The whole center was trepanned out. We selected a man for working the machine; a man came round, a very intelligent-looking man, and that was all we had to judge by—we can not ask him what society he belongs to. We asked him if he could work this machine. He said of course he could. We put him on the machine, and he worked it about six or seven months. We could never get more than four or five inches an hour out of the machine. We pressed him,