Sec. 2.  Class Separation of Employer and Workmen.—­The first effect of machinery is to give a new and powerful impulse to the centralizing tendency in industry.  “Civilization is economy of power, and English power is coal,” said the materialistic Baron Liebig.  Coal as a generator of steam-power demands that manufactures shall be conducted on a large scale in particular localities.  Before the day of large, expensive steam-driven machinery, manufacture was done in scattered houses by workers who were the owners of their simple tools, and often of the material on which they worked; or in small workshops, where a master worked with a few journeymen and apprentices.  Machinery changed all this.  It drove the workers into large factories, and obliged them to live in concentrated masses near their work.  They no longer owned the material in which their labour was stored, or the tools with which they worked; they had to use the material belonging to their employer; the machinery which made their tools valueless was also the property of the capitalist employer.  Instead of selling the products of their capital and labour to merchants or consumers, they were compelled to sell their labour-power to the employer as the only means of earning a livelihood.  Again, the social relations between the wealthy employer and his “hands” were quite different from those intimate personal relations which had subsisted between the small master and his assistants.  The very size of the factory made such a social change inevitable, the personal relation which marked medieval industry was no longer possible.  Machinery then did two things.  On the one hand, it destroyed the position of the workman as a self-sufficing industrial unit, and made him dependent on a capitalist for employment and the means of supporting life.  On the other hand, it weakened the sense of responsibility in the employer towards his workmen in proportion as the dependence of the latter became more absolute.

With each step in the growth of the factory system the workman became more dependent, and the employer more irresponsible.  Thus we note the first industrial effect of machinery in the formation of two definite industrial classes—­the dependent workman, and the irresponsible employer.  The term “irresponsible” is not designed to convey any moral stigma.  The industrial employer can no more be blamed for being irresponsible than the workman for being dependent.  The terms merely express the nature of the schism which naturally followed the triumph of machinery.  Prophets like Carlyle and Ruskin, slighting the economic causes of the change, clamoured for “Captains of Industry,” employers who should realize a moral responsibility, and reviving a dead feudalism should assume unasked the protectorate of their employes.  The whole army of theoretic and practical reformers might indeed be divided into two classes, according as they seek to impose responsibility on employers, or to establish a larger independence in the employed.  But this is not the place to discuss methods of reform.  It is sufficient to note the testimony borne by all alike to the disintegrating influence of machinery.