But though our agricultural population, in spite of their poverty and hard work, live longer and enjoy better physical health than our town-workers, there are few who would deny that the town-workers are both better educated and more intelligent.

This intelligence must in a large measure be attributed to the influences of machinery, and of those social conditions which machinery has assisted to establish.

This intelligence must be reckoned as an adequate offset against the formal specialization of machine- labour, and must be regarded as an emancipative influence, giving to its possessor a larger choice in the forms of employment.

So far as a man's labour-power consists in the mere knowledge how to tend a particular piece of machinery he may appear to be more "enslaved" with each specialization of machinery; but so far as his labour-power consists in the practice of discretion and intelligence, these are qualities which render him more free.
Moreover, as regards the specialization of machinery, there is one point to be noticed which modifies to some considerable extent the effects of subdivision upon labour.

On the one hand, the tendency to split up the manufacture of a commodity into several distinct branches, often undertaken in different localities and with wholly different machinery, prevents the skilled worker in one branch from passing into another, and thus limits his practical freedom as an industrial worker.