OF INDUSTRIES. 19 



why the machinery performs its rhythmical 

 movements. 



Skilled artisanship is being swept away as a 

 survival of a past condemned to disappear. The 

 artist who formerly found aesthetic enjoyment 

 in the work of his hands is substituted by the 

 human slave of an iron slave. Nay, even the 

 agricultural labourer, who formerly used to find 

 a relief from the hardships of his life in the home 

 of his ancestors the future home of his chil- 

 dren in his love of the field and in a keen inter- 

 course with nature, even he has been doomed 

 to disappear for the sake of division of labour. 

 He is an anachronism, we are told ; he must be 

 substituted, in a Bonanza farm, by an occa- 

 sional servant hired for the summer, and dis- 

 charged as the autumn comes : a tramp who will 

 never again see the field he has harvested once 

 in his life. " An affair of a few years," the 

 economists say, "to reform agriculture in 

 accordance with the true principles of division 

 of labour and modern industrial organisation." 



Dazzled with the results obtained by a century 

 of marvellous inventions, especially in England, 

 our economists and political men went still 

 farther in their dreams of division of labour. 

 They proclaimed the necessity of dividing the 

 whole of humanity into national workshops 

 having each of them its own speciality. We 



