^6 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



The position of the unskilled workman,^ meaning now the 

 workman who is untrained in the use of machinery, is a peculiar 

 one. In a lecture on ballad poetry, delivered at the University 

 of Wisconsin in the spring of 1903, Professor Moulton, of The 

 University of Chicago, called attention to the fact that before the 

 time of written literature the best literary productions were equally 

 accessible to the free and to the unfree. The slave, as well as 

 his master, might know and enjoy the choicest of literary pro- 

 ductions. But, with the invention of writing and, especially, of 

 printing, the best literature came to be put into book form. Books 

 were expensive, and the knowledge requisite for using them could 

 be acquired only by a long and difficult course of training. From 

 the very nature of the case, the best literature thus became in- 

 accessible both to the slaves and to the poorer classes of freemen. 

 They could gain no positive advantage from the new invention ; 

 and they lost, relatively, by reason of the intellectual gulf which 

 opened between them and those others whose more fortunate 

 stations gave both access to the written or printed volumes and 

 afforded opportunity for learning how to use them. 



This same process is now working itself out in the matter of 

 labor and machinery. To the skilled workman, machinery opens 

 the way to profit and advancement. But to the unskilled work- 

 man, it is as a sealed, or unintelligible, book. He does not 

 understand it ; and the hopelessness of competing with one who 

 does understand it only intensifies his consciousness of inferiority 

 and increases the burden of his struggle for existence.^ Having, 



^ There is, I think, a great deal of confusion and consequent misunderstanding 

 arising from a loose use of the term " unskilled workman." We speak of paying 

 higher wages to a skilled workman than to an unskilled workman ; but the essen- 

 tial element is not skill but efficiency. Skill means rather proficiency, or dexterity, 

 in the doing of a particular thing. It has reference to the person. But when we 

 speak of a skilled machine workman, we have reference, not so much to the 

 quality of the worker as to the quality of the work done, that is, to the product of 

 his skill. The degree of skill which the machine workman possesses may, in fact, 

 be much below that of the hand worker whom he displaces ; but he is a more 

 efficient workman and, therefore, commands the higher wage. 



2 Under conditions where the laborer can offer no resistance and the so-called 

 iron law of wages operates to keep him down to the life line, machinery only adds 

 uncertainty to his other woes. He is, as it were, cut out of civilization. Whenever 



