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The management of the silk-worm, and the preparation of silk, requires so much hand-labour, and labour is so very dear in America, that even this great bounty, I have been informed, was not likely to produce any considerable effect. The sixth Bounty of this kind was that granted by 11th Geo.
The old men on the rising straw-rick talked of the past days when they had been accustomed to thresh with flails on the oaken barn-floor; when everything, even to winnowing, was effected by hand-labour, which, to their thinking, though slow, produced better results.
The highlands of labour are drained by this natural flow; even the strain of competition in skilled hand-labour finds sensible relief by the voluntary emigration of the more adventurous artisans, but the poor low-skilled workers suffer here again by reason of their poverty: no natural movement can relieve the plethora of labour-power in low-class employments.
There are few things which give a man more power over his fellows than the thoroughly English quality of daring. Perhaps this was the secret why John had as yet passed safely through the crisis which had been the destruction of so many mill-owners, namely, the introduction of a power which the mill-people were convinced would ruin hand-labour.
It is sculptured on the face of a single block of basalt, which weighs between twenty and thirty tons, and must have been transported thirty miles by Mexican labourers, for the stone is not found nearer than that distance from the city; and this transportation was, of course, managed by hand-labour alone, as there were no beasts of burden.
Here and there, even in our civilised societies in remote agricultural districts, the old social conditions may remain partly undisturbed; but throughout the bulk of our societies the substitution of mechanical for hand-labour, the wide diffusion of knowledge through the always increasing cheap printing-press; the rapidly increasing gathering of human creatures into vast cities, where not merely thousands but millions of individuals are collected together under physical and mental conditions of life which invert every social condition of the past; the increasingly rapid means of locomotion; the increasing intercourse between distant races and lands, brought about by rapid means of intercommunication, widening and changing in every direction the human horizon all these produce a society, so complex and so rapidly altering, that social co-ordination between all its parts is impossible; and social unrest, and the strife of ideals of faiths, of institutions, and consequent human suffering is inevitable.
"Come, get on, old fellow," said Good, "or we shall lose our fair guide." Thus adjured, I started down the passage, and after about twenty paces found myself in a gloomy apartment some forty feet long, by thirty broad, and thirty high, which in some past age evidently had been hollowed, by hand-labour, out of the mountain.
In 1810 the average price was 103 shillings the quarter, the highest ever known except in 1800 and 1801; and as commerce was dislocated by the Continental System and hand-labour was being largely replaced by the new power-looms and improved spinning machinery, the outlook would have been hopeless, had not our great enemy allowed us to import continental corn.
And what thoughts further, as on turning to view the scene without the city he sees on one side of it the tall chimneys of the numerous mills which have sprung up in recent times, and which tell of the conjunction of English skill and capital with the cheap hand-labour of the East a combination that is destined, and at no very distant period ahead, to produce remarkable effects.
Even the more educated champions of the interests of working-classes have often viewed with grave suspicion the rapid substitution of machinery for hand-labour in the industrial arts. The enormous increase of wealth-producing power given by the new machinery can scarcely be realized.
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