62 American Economic Association [860 



The position of the unskilled workman 1 , 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 productions. 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 inaccessible 

 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 oppor- 

 tunity for learning how to use them. 



This same process is now working itself out in 

 the matter of labor and machinery. To the skilled 



1 There is, I think, a great deal of confusion and consequent mis- 

 understanding arising from a loose use of the term " unskilled work- 

 man." We speak of paying higher wages to a skilled workman than 

 to an unskilled workman ; but, the essential 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 ma- 

 chine 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. 



