9.For instance, Mr Southward tells us "a minder may understand only book machines or only news machines; he may know all about"machines that print from flat surfaces or those that print from cylinders; "or of cylinders he may know only one kind.Entirely novel machines create a new class of artisans.There are men perfectly competent to manage a Walter press who are ignorant how to work two-colour or fine book-work machines.In the compositor's department division of labour is carried out to a still minuter degree.An old-fashioned printer would set up indifferently a placard, a title-page, or a book.At the present day we have jobbing hands, book hands, and news hands, the word 'hand' suggesting the factory-like nature of the business.There are jobbing hands who confine themselves to posters.Book hands comprise those who set up the titles and those who set up the body of the work.Of these latter again, while one man composes, another, the 'maker-up,' arranges the pages."10.Let us follow still further the progress of machinery in supplanting manual labour in some directions and opening out new fields for its employment in others.Let us watch the process by which large editions of a great newspaper are set up and printed off in a few hours.To begin with, a good part of the type-setting is itself often done by a machine; but in any case the types are in the first instance on a plane surface, from which it is impossible to print very rapidly.The next step therefore is to make a papier-mach?cast of them, which is bent on to a cylinder, and is then used as the mould from which a new metal plate is cast that fits the cylinders of the printing machine.Fixed on these it rotates alternately against the inking cylinders and the paper.The paper is arranged in a huge roll at the bottom of the machine and unrolls itself automatically, first against the damping cylinders and then against the printing cylinders, the first of which prints it on one side, and the second on the other: thence to the cutting cylinders, which cut it into equal lengths, and thence to the folding apparatus, which folds it ready for sale.
More recently the casting of the type has been brought under the new methods.The compositor plays on a keyboard like that of the type-writer, and the matrix of a corresponding letter goes into line: then after spacing out, molten lead is poured on the line of matrices, and a solid line of type is ready.And in a further development each letter is cast separately from its matrix; the machine reckons up the space taken by the letters, stops when there are enough for a line, divides out the free space equally into the requisite number of small spaces betweenthe words; and finally casts the line.It is claimed that one compositor can work several such machines simultaneously in distant towns by electric currents.
11.The jack-plane, used for making smooth large boards for floors and other purposes, used to cause heart disease, making carpenters as a rule old men by the time they were forty.Adam Smith tells us that "workmen, when they are liberally paid, are very apt to overwork themselves and to ruin their health and constitution in a few years.A carpenter in London, and in some other places, is not supposed to last in his utmost vigour above eight years...Almost every class of artificers is subject to some particular infirmity occasioned by excessive application to their peculiar species of work." Wealth of Nations, Book I, chapter VII.
12.The efficiency of labour in weaving has been increased twelve fold and that in spinning six fold during the last seventy years.
In the preceding seventy years the improvements in spinning had already increased the efficiency of labour two-hundred-fold (see Ellison's Cotton Trade of Great Britain, ch.IV and V).
13.Perhaps the textile industries afford the best instance of work that used to be done by hand and is now done by machinery They are especially prominent in England, where they give employment to nearly half a million males and more than half a million females, or more than one in ten of those persons who are earning independent incomes.The strain that is taken off human muscles in dealing even with those soft materials is shown by the fact that for every one of these million operatives there is used about one horse-power of steam, that is, about ten times as much as they would themselves exert if they were all strong men; and the history of these industries will serve to remind us that many of those who perform the more monotonous parts of manufacturing work are as a rule not skilled workers who have come down to it from a higher class of work, but unskilled workers who have risen to it.A great number of those who work in the Lancashire cotton-mills have come there from poverty-stricken districts of Ireland, while others are the descendants of paupers and people of weak physique, who were sent there in large numbers early in the last century from the most miserable conditions of life in the poorest agricultural districts, where the labourers were fed and housed almost worse than the animals whom they tended.Again, when regret is expressed that the cotton factory hands of New England have not the high standard of culture which prevailed among them a century ago, we must remember that the descendants of those factory workers have moved up to higher and more responsible posts, and include many of the ablest and wealthiest of the citizens of America.Those who have taken their places are in the process of being raised; they are chiefly French Canadians and Irish, who though they may learn in their new homes some of the vices of civilization, are yet much better off and have on the whole better opportunities of developing the higher faculties of themselves and their children than they had in their old homes.
