“The workingman has been taught that his chief asset is skill.  It has been his stocks, his bonds, the pride of his life.  Poor as to purse and impoverished in his household; his cupboard bare, his last penny spent on a bread crust, he is not humbled; no, he merely stretches out his ten fingers and two callous palms, exactly as a proud king extends his diamond-tipped sceptre, to show you that which upholds him in his birthright.  ‘My skill is my portion given to the world,’ he says.  ’I shall not want.  See, I am without a penny.  I touch this bar of steel, and it becomes a scissors blade.  My skill did it.  I take this stick of oak and it becomes a chair rung.  My skill is the grandest magic on earth, the common magic of every day.  By it I live and because of it I hold my head royal high.’

“But the machine now attacks and displaces this skill.  The cunning of trained fingers is transferred to cranks, cogs and belts.  The trade secrets are objectified in mechanical form; able to mix the product, compound the chemicals, or make the notch at the right place.

“Besides this loss of skill, the workman loses, in the grind of the machine, his sense of the value of his work.  Next to his pride of skill the workman has always been proud to be the connoisseur:  stand back near the light with his product on his upraised hand, showing to all passers-by what he has done.  Perhaps it was a red morocco slipper for a dancer, or a pearl button to go on the cloak of a little child, or maybe it was a horseshoe to go on the mayor’s carriage horse.  On a day a party of visitors would come to the little shop and the owner would pick up a hand-forged hammer and say, ‘See what John made!’ But, in our modern industry, no one man ever completes a task.  Each task is subdivided into twenty, forty, a hundred or more portions, and a workingman is given just one to work on, day by day, year after year, for a working generation.

“After the time has come when the workman can find no distinct esthetic pleasure in his work, his loyalty to his employers suffers a shock.

“Then, when this indifference or disloyalty is full grown, the employer has full on him acute and formidable labor diseases.  The man who should stand at his shoulder faces him, instead, with a hostile poise.  The mill full of people over whom he holds power, upon whom he depends for his success, and who, in turn, depend upon his initiative and capital for their bread and butter, is turned into an armed camp of plotting enemies, who, while they work, grumble, and who, while they receive their wages, scheme for the overthrow of the entire concern!  His mills, instead of being shelters for his brothers and sisters, are nests of scratching eagles—­ready to rend and claw!