The history of the industrial revolution and the dominance of all-conquering machinery in Western civilization show the inadequacy of political and economic measures to meet the terrific rise in population.  The advent of the factory system, due especially to the development of machinery at the beginning of the nineteenth century, upset all the grandiloquent theories of the previous era.  To meet the new situation created by the industrial revolution arose the new science of “political economy,” or economics.  Old political methods proved inadequate to keep pace with the problem presented by the rapid rise of the new machine and industrial power.  The machine era very shortly and decisively exploded the simple belief that “all men are born free and equal.”  Political power was superseded by economic and industrial power.  To sustain their supremacy in the political field, governments and politicians allied themselves to the new industrial oligarchy.  Old political theories and practices were totally inadequate to control the new situation or to meet the complex problems that grew out of it.

Just as the eighteenth century saw the rise and proliferation of political theories, the nineteenth witnessed the creation and development of the science of economics, which aimed to perfect an instrument for the study and analysis of an industrial society, and to offer a technique for the solution of the multifold problems it presented.  But at the present moment, as the outcome of the machine era and competitive populations, the world has been thrown into a new situation, the solution of which is impossible solely by political or economic weapons.

The industrial revolution and the development of machinery in Europe and America called into being a new type of working-class.  Machines were at first termed “labor-saving devices.”  In reality, as we now know, mechanical inventions and discoveries created unprecedented and increasingly enormous demand for “labor.”  The omnipresent and still existing scandal of child labor is ample evidence of this.  Machine production in its opening phases, demanded large, concentrated and exploitable populations.  Large production and the huge development of international trade through improved methods of transport, made possible the maintenance upon a low level of existence of these rapidly increasing proletarian populations.  With the rise and spread throughout Europe and America of machine production, it is now possible to correlate the expansion of the “proletariat.”  The working-classes bred almost automatically to meet the demand for machine-serving “hands.”

The rise in population, the multiplication of proletarian populations as a first result of mechanical industry, the appearance of great centers of population, the so-called urban drift, and the evils of overcrowding still remain insufficiently studied and stated.  It is a significant though neglected fact that when, after long agitation in Great Britain, child labor was finally forbidden by law, the supply of children dropped appreciably.  No longer of economic value in the factory, children were evidently a drug in the “home.”  Yet it is doubly significant that from this moment British labor began the long unending task of self-organization.(1)