THE METAPHYSICS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 155
placed in charge of a peculiar mechanism so self-regula- ting that a child may superintendent it..... The principle of the factory system, then, is to substitute mechanical science for hand skill, and the partition of a process into its essential constituents, for the division or gradation of labor among artisans. On the handicraft plan, labor, more or less skilled, was usually the most expensive ele- ment of production—but on the automatic plan skilled
, labor gets progressively superseded, and will, eventually, be replaced by mere overlookers of machines. By the infirmity of human nature it happens that the more skilful the workman the more self-willed and intractable he is apt to become, and, of course, the less fit a component of a mechanical system, in which, by occasional irregular- ities, he may do great damage to the whole. The grand object, therefore, of the modern manufacturer is, through the union of capital and science, to reduce the task of his workpeople to the exercise of vigilance and dexterity— faculties, when conceatred to one process, speedily brought to perfection in the young.....
“On the gradation system, a man must serve an ap- prenticeship of many years before his hand and eye be- come skilled enough for certain mechanical feats; but on the system of decomposing a process into its constituents, and embodying each part in an automatic machine, a person of common care and capacity may be entrusted with any of the said elementary parts after a short pro- bation, and may be transferred from one to another, on any emergency, at the discretion of the master. Such translations are utterly at variance with the old practice of the division of labor, which fixed one man to shaping the head of a pin, and another to sharpening its point, with most irksome and spiritwasting uniformity for a whole life..... But on the equalisation plan of self-acting
