While the exploitation of the skill of the workman in the interest of the owners of raw materials and manufactured goods, had its depressing and corrupting influence on creative effort, the creative impulse found a stimulus in the respect a community still paid the skill and ability of the worker.  It was not until machine standards superseded craft standards and discredited them that the processes of production, the acts of fabrication, lost their standards of workmanship and their educational value for the worker.  The discredits were psychological and economic; they revolutionized the intellectual and moral concepts of men in relation to their work and the production of wealth.

As machine production superseded craftsmanship the basis of fixing the price of an article shifted from values fixed by the standards of workers to standards of machines, Professor Veblen says to standards of salesmen.  It is along these lines that mechanical science applied to the production of wealth, has eliminated the personality of the workers.  A worker is no longer reflected in goods on sale; his personality has passed into the machine which has met the requirements of mass production.

The logical development of factory organisation has been the complete cooerdination of all factors which are auxiliary to mechanical power and devices.  The most important auxiliary factor is human labor.  A worker is a perfected factory attachment as he surrenders himself to the time and the rhythm of the machine and its functioning; as he supplements without loss whatever human faculties the machine lacks, whatever imperfection hampers the machine in the satisfaction of its needs.  If it lacks eyes, he sees for it; he walks for it, if it is without legs; and he pulls, drags, lifts, if it needs arms.  All of these things are done by the factory worker at the pace set by the machine and under its direction and command.  A worker’s indulgence in his personal desires or impulses hinders the machine and lowers his attachment value.

This division of the workers into eyes, arms, fingers, legs, the plucking out of some one of his faculties and discarding the rest of the man as valueless, has seemed to be an organic requirement of machine evolution.  So commendable the scheme has been to business enterprise that this division of labor has been carried from the machine shop and the factory to the scientific laboratories where experiment and discovery in new processes of technology are developed, and where, it is popularly supposed, a high order of intelligence is required.  The organization of technological laboratories, like the organization of construction shops to which they are auxiliary, is based on the breaking up of a problem which is before the laboratory for its solution.  The chemists, physicists, machinists and draftsmen are isolated as they work out their assigned tasks without specific knowledge of what the general problem is and how it is being attacked.  Small technological