521 INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTIONS. 



rendered superfluous. The successive improvements of the 

 motor-agency itself show this effect. Originally the steam- 

 engine required a boy to open and shut the steam-valves 

 at the proper moments. Presently the engine was made 

 to open and shut its own valves, and human aid was to 

 that extent superseded. For a time, however, it continued 

 needful for regulating the general supply of steam. When 

 the work the engine had to do was suddenly much increased 

 or decreased, the opening through which the steam passed 

 from the boiler had to be enlarged or diminished by an 

 attendant. But for the attendant there was presently sub 

 stituted an unintelligent apparatus the governor. Then, 

 after an interval, came a self -stoking apparatus, enabling 

 the engine itself to supply fuel to its steam-generator. Xow 

 this replacing of muscular and mental processes by me 

 chanical processes, has been going on not only in the motor 

 but in the vast assemblages of machines which the motor 

 w r orks. From time to time each of them has been made to 

 do for itself something which was previously done for it ; so 

 that now it stops itself, or part of itself, at the proper mo 

 ment, or rings a bell when it has finished an appointed piece 

 of work. To its attendant there remains only the task of 

 taking away the work done and giving other work, or else 

 of rectifying its shortcomings: tying a broken thread for 

 instance. 



Clearly these self -adjustments, continually decreasing the 

 sphere for human agency, make the actions of the workman 

 himself relatively automatic. At the same time the mono 

 tonous attention required, taxing special parts of the nervous 

 system and leaving others inactive, entails positive as well as 

 negative injury. And while the mental nature becomes to 

 the implied extent deformed, the physical nature, too, un 

 dergoes degradations; caused by breathing vitiated air at a 

 temperature now in excess now in defect, and by standing 

 for many hours in a way which unduly taxes the vascular 

 system. If we compare his life with the life of the cottage 



