hen the handicraftsman worked in his own
home, surrounded by his family, upon a task all the
processes of which he had mastered, giving him thus a sense
of interest and pride in the work being well and thoroughly
done. Now he leaves his home early and returns to it late,
working during the day in a huge factory with several
hundred other men. The subdivision of labor gives him now
only a bit of the whole process to do, where the work is
still done by hand, whether it be the making of a shoe or a
piano. 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. Those who profit most by the present factory system
ought, in all justice, to be held responsible to those who
suffer most from it. They ought to be held morally bound to
make up to them in some way the interest in life that has
gone out with the old handicrafts. They could interest their
hands _out_ of the working hours, and in ways that would
give them a new interest _in_ their working hours. * * *

Not a few of our manufacturers are already opening their
eyes to the f