He cannot be master of a craft, but only master of a fragment of the craft.

He cannot have the pleasure or pride of the old-time workman, for he _makes_ nothing.

He sees no complete product of his skill growing into finished shape in his hands.

What zest can there be in this bit of manhood?
Steam machinery is slowly taking out of his hands even this fragment of intelligent work, and he is set at feeding and watching the great machine which has been endowed with the brains that once were in the human toiler.

Man is reduced to being the tender upon a steel automaton which thinks and plans and combines with marvelous power, leaving him only the task of supplying it with the raw material, and of oiling and cleansing it.
Some few machines require a skill and judgment to guide them proportioned to their own astonishing capacities, and for the elect workmen who manage and guide them there is a new sense of the pleasure of power.
But, for the most part, mechanism takes the life out of labor as the handicraft becomes the manufacture--or, more properly, the _machino_-facture; and the problem of to-day is, how to keep up the interest of labor in its daily task, from which the zest has been stolen.
Manufacturers ought to see this problem and hasten to solve it.