CHAPTER II.
The Effects of Machinery on the Condition of the Working-Classes.
Sec.1.

Centralizing-Influence of Machinery .-- In seeking to understand the nature and causes of the poverty of the lower working-classes, it is impossible to avoid some discussion of the influence of machinery.

For the rapid and continuous growth of machinery is at once the outward visible sign and the material agent of the great revolution which has changed the whole face of the industrial world during the last century.
With the detailed history of this vast change we are not concerned, but only with its effects on the industrial condition of the poor in the present day.
Those who have studied in books of history the industrial and educational condition of the mass of the working populace at the beginning of this century, or have read such novels as _Shirley_, _Mary Barton_, and _Alton Locke_, will not be surprised at the mingled mistrust and hatred with which the working-classes regarded each new introduction of machinery into the manufacturing arts.

These people, having only a short life to live, naturally took a short-sighted view of the case; having a specialized form of skill as their only means of getting bread, they did not greet with joy the triumphs of inventive skill which robbed this skill of its market value.

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.