ARTIFICIAL STONE, OR CONCRETE 



the industrial world, and while most of them have 

 been effected so gradually that they have caused com- 

 paratively little hardship to the skilled workmen, 

 it has happened more than once that some have been 

 so sudden in their results, owing to the marked superior- 

 ity of the new methods, that much suffering has been 

 caused among certain classes of workmen. In our 

 own generation a most striking example of this is shown 

 in the field of wood-engraving. The introduction of 

 photographic methods, superior, quicker, and far less 

 expensive than hand methods, captured the world 

 so quickly that thousands of skilled wood-engravers 

 were thrown out of employment permanently. In 

 this particular instance great hardship was caused to 

 a certain class for the benefit of the world at large. 



It is the possibility of this sort of thing that causes 

 many classes of skilled workmen to oppose threatening 

 innovations. A century ago such new methods were 

 combated violently in many instances. This was at 

 the beginning of the age of machinery, when it ap- 

 peared to many that manual labor, particularly skilled 

 labor, was doomed. The inventors of the cotton 

 gin and the power-loom, for example, had literally 

 to fight their way through armed mobs to place their 

 machines in the factories. Yet the members of the 

 mobs found, after they had lost their bloody contests, 

 that the very machines they had opposed gave them 

 more work and better pay than the older systems they 

 had fought to uphold. These are but two examples, 

 out of hundreds that could be cited as showing how 

 little anyone can predict with certainty just what effect 



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