in saving labor and lowering the prices of production by the agency of machines.
Their intellectual capacity is improved; their powers of production are increased, in a much more rapid progression than their prices are lowered; and, above all, so infinitely and incalculably is the consumption of products augmented, in excess of the decrease of money values, that, the demand increasing in a ratio far greater than any arithmetical progression, the call for laborers, the increased prices of the entire production, and the command of wages by ability, skill and intellect, increase pari passu. Nor is this all; for it cannot be denied that the mechanic, the artisan and the manufacturer must necessarily rise in position, in self-respect, in social esteem, and in the natural scale of humanity, as a higher range of qualifications are required of him, and as he is compelled to advance in his own attainments and capacities, in order to keep up with the advances of the age and nation.
This is the true solution of the great problem of the laboring classes, their prospects and their condition; and this is the true reply to all the imbecile jargon of the pseudo-philosophical socialists of the French school, concerning the nobility of manual labor, and the equality, or I believe, superiority of the hand-worker to the head-worker; of the delver, the ditcher, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, to the thinker, the inventor, the creator – or in other words, of the equality, or superiority, accordingly as it may be claimed, of mere physical force, unguided by any thing of judgment or intellect, to the highest cultivation of the thinking powers, to the completest development of the loftiest human capabilities, to the largest expansion of those qualities in which, after the affections, we approximate the nearest to divinity. But there is no such thing, nor ever will be. There is no nobility, whatsoever, in the mere act and exercise of bodily labor, or even of patient industry – although in the causes, which stimulate to that exertion and lend endurance to that industry, there may be much of the very noblest.
There is, in the nature of things, no possible show of equality, much less of superiority, as between physical and intellectual ability, between the head-worker and the hand-worker; because, in the latter, the utmost powers that man can put forward are as the toils of a pigmy, a mere Lilliputian, to the enormous forces of the elephant or of the camel; while in the former, the genius of the man, and the grasp of his mental attainments, are a little lower only than those of the angels; and these are hourly making progress toward that perfectionment which never will be attained in this world; whereas, in those there has been no increase, but probably the reverse, from the days of the patriarchs to the present hour.
The world neither does, nor ever will, accept of any equality between mental and physical labors and abilities; and the only hope of raising the condition and social scale of the working-classes lies not in striving impotently to drag down those naturally, constitutionally and educationally their superiors to the lower level, but by encouraging the inferiors to aspire to the like elevation, to cultivate on every occasion their higher faculties, to aim at the attainment of capacity for head-labor in their degree, to learn to think, and not to act only, to strive, in fact, to resemble less the beasts that perish, and more the men who live forever.
Encouragement may do this, kindling the worker to a hope of better things, and showing him that such a hope is not the vain imagination of a dream, but a real, tangible possibility.
Making him discontented with his lot; leading him to misapprehend his own position and to undervalue that of his superior, can tend only to render him a very bad member of society, and a very unhappy member of the human family.
Fortunately, other and far higher causes are at work, than the Utopian dreams of visionary sophists and the sentimental false philosophy of world-reforming lunatics, for the ameliorating the condition, both physical and social, of the laborer. And one of these – nor that the least – when superadded to the increasing purposes and enlarged principles of the times – will be found, I believe, in the necessity arising from the general use of complicated machines, which is compelling the mechanic and hand-laborer to educate his head as well as to harden his hands; to develop his soul as well as his sinews, and to become himself head-worker no less than handy-craftsman. In this most desirable change, not a false pride and real ignorance of their own real position, but a clear perception and humble estimate of their own deficiencies and of the means of overcoming them, are requisite to the working-classes; and he is their true friend who insists to them on the former and assists them toward the latter – not he who mendaciously and mischievously asserts to them – as is now too frequently done – that a hodman is at least equal if not superior to a Herschel, an Irish ditcher to a Descartes or a Newton, and the meanest stoker that fires up a furnace to him whose intellect combined the various principles, and conceived the vast system, of that motive power which, in the last quarter of a century has revolutionized the world of art and science, joined ocean shores by bridges of almost continuous steamboats, and linked continents together by the iron groves and metallic wires which speed the space-annihilating messengers of steam and electricity from hemisphere to hemisphere unhindered.
To these considerations we are naturally led when we envisage the fact that these very labor-saving machines are themselves created by other machines of like principles and scarcely inferior powers, such as we purpose to introduce to our readers, by a series of cuts, with some brief explanation of their uses and principles of action, in this present article.
The unparalleled extension of rail-roads in this country, so peculiarly calculated for their creation by its natural configuration and geological structure, has called for a supply of rail-road materials, both raw and manufactured, to a degree almost inconceivable even at the present day; and so great have been the improvements recently introduced into machinery, so enormous the weight of the persons and freight to be transported, and so extraordinary the speed expected, and in fact demanded, by the traveling public, that nothing short of perfection in finish and strength will suffice, whether for marine engines, locomotives, or in fact, any power machines.
This will easily be admitted when it is considered that on all the really good and well supported lines of road, in the Eastern states more especially, the rate of travel averages from thirty to fifty miles per hour, at an average cost to each passenger of about one-and-a-half cent per the mile of distance.
We of course do not here take into account such miserable effete monopolies as some of our own interior, and some of the Southern roads, or that of the New Jersey Rail-Road and Transportation Company, the rates of which do not exceed fourteen miles to the hour, at a charge of something exceeding three cents per mile – since these are the exceptions to the rule, arising from the mistaken policy of the states through which they pass, in granting them exclusive privileges, enabling them with a minimum of speed, punctuality, civility, cleanliness, safety and comfort, to exact a maximum of fare from all who are so unfortunate as to be compelled to travel by them.
These unimproved concerns, retrogressive in the very centre of the most brilliant progression, may, however, count their days as numbered, their unhallowed and enormous gains as arrested. The latter rail-road, never exceeding the average speed of good stage-coach travel, is now so seriously rivaled by heavy omnibuses running on a plank-road, that its locomotives to-day barely draw an average of three empty cars, where six weeks since they drew from eight to ten, filled to discomfort.
Hitherto all their underhand attempts to buy up this road, by means of individual stockholders, in order to destroy its efficiency and raise the prices, have failed so signally, that it is evident that the people over whom they have so long driven roughshod will endure their insolent tyranny no longer, and they must either tranquilly submit to pass away into contempt, bankruptcy and abeyance, or they must make their road reasonably cheap, as speedy, punctual and convenient to passengers as others – which they can readily do by diverting a portion of their colossal gains from dividends and personal profits to the exigencies of the public, in laying proper tracks, adopting improved engines, employing clean, comfortable and roomy cars, guided by capable and civil conductors, all at the ordinary price of rail-road transportation on the best, fleetest, and most favored lines.
To produce this excellence and finish, tools of peculiar quality – in the form of power-machines, adapted for planing, turning, and drilling iron, cutting gears, and the like – have become actually necessary; doing their work at an incalculably lower price, and greater celerity than the ablest human hands, and with a mathematical regularity