whenever he falls out with his “hands,” contemptuously tells them: “The factory operatives should keep in wholesome remembrance the fact that theirs is really a low species of skilled labour; and that there is none which is more easily acquired, or of its quality more amply remunerated, or which by a short training of the least expert can be more quickly, as well as abundantly, acquired.… The master’s machinery really plays a far more important part in the business of production than the labour and the skill of the operative, which six months’ education can teach, and a common labourer can learn.”[1] The technical subordination of the workman to the uniform motion of the instruments of labour, and the peculiar composition of the body of workpeople, consisting as it does of individuals of both sexes and of all ages, give rise to a barrack discipline, which is elaborated into a complete system in the factory, and which fully developes the before mentioned labour of overlooking, thereby dividing the workpeople into operatives and overlookers, into private soldiers and sergeants of an industrial army. “The main difficulty [in the automatic factory] … lay … above all in training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton. To devise and administer a successful code of factory discipline, suited to the necessities of factory diligence, was the Herculean enterprise, the noble achievement of Arkwright! Even at the present day, when the system is perfectly organised and its labour lightened to the utmost, it is found nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty, into useful factory hands.”[2] The factory code in which capital formulates, like a private legislator, and at his own good will, his autocracy over his workpeople, unaccompanied by that division of responsibility, in other matters so much approved
- ↑ “The Master Spinners’ and Manufacturers’ Defence Fund. Report of the Committee.” Manchester, 1854, p. 17. We shall see hereafter that the “master” can sing quite another song, when he is threatened with the loss of his “living” automaton.
- ↑ Ure, l. c., p. 15. Whoever knows the life history of Arkwright, will never dub this barber-genius “noble.” Of all the great inventors of the 18th century, he was incontestably the greatest thiever of other people’s inventions and the meanest fellow.
