Increase of Labor-Saving Machinery an Injury to the Race
By Editor
We have before pointed this out with respect to this country. This increase makes the laborer the part of a great machine; it makes him a dependent on some great manufacturing establishment; it fosters trusts, and it widens the breach between employer and employee. And it has worked the same way in Europe; it is working the same way in Japan. A writer in the June Far East, an English edition of an able Japanese monthly magazine, the Kokumin-no-Tomo (published at Tokyo), incidentally states the same thing, tho writing on a different subject—“Strikes in Japan.” The writer says:— “Since the introduction of machinery into this country, the factory system has been fast replacing the home manufactories, and it has now become an indispensable part of our industrial organization. With this development of the factory system, the relation of employers and employees has undergone a great change. Compassion, benevolence, faith, and fealty—in a word, all that were connecting links of masters and hands, have been swept away, and what now remains?—Perfidy and contempt on one hand; stern insolence and perfect indifference on the other. Under this strained relation, laborers, who are always the weakest of the two, get worsted, abused, annoyed, and persecuted. Wretchedness, misery, and poverty is their lot.” In it all the writer sees great possible strife and trouble. It is one of the signs of the rapidly-living and degenerate (because unnatural) life of the nineteenth century, which is hastening the disintegration of our present “high” civilization.