demand for which is not yet
sufficiently large or regular to justify the application of
labour-saving machinery. But even assuming that the whole or a large
part of the displaced labour is engaged in work which is proved to
have been less muscular or less automatic by the fact that it is not
yet undertaken by machinery, it does not necessarily follow that there
is a diminution in the aggregate of physical energy given out, or in
the total "monotony" of labour.

One direct result of the application of an increased proportion of
labour power to the kinds of work which are less "muscular" and less
"automatic" in character will be a tendency towards greater division
of labour and more specialisation in these employments. Now the
economic advantages of increased specialisation can only be obtained
by increased automatic action. Thus the routine or automatic
character, which constituted the monotony of the work in which
machinery displaced these workers, will now be imparted to the higher
grades of labour in which they are employed, and these in their turn
will be advanced towards a condition which will render them open to a
new invasion of machinery.

Since the number of productive processes falling under machinery is
thus continually increased, it will be seen that we are not entitled
to assume that every displacement of labour by machinery will increase
the proportion of labour engaged in lighter and more interesting forms
of non-mechanical labour.

Sec. 2. Nor is it shown that the growth of machine-production tends to
diminish the total physical strain upon the worker, though it greatly
lessens the output of purely muscular activity. As regards those
workers who pass from ordinary manual work to the tending of
machinery, there is a good deal of evidence to show that, in the
typical machine industries, their new work taxes their physical vigour
quite as severely as the old work. Professor Shield Nicholson quotes
the following striking statement from the _Cotton Factory Times_:--"It
is quite a common occurrence to hear young men who are on the best
side of thirty years of age declare they are so worked up with the
long mules, coarse counts, quick speeds, and inferior material, that
they are fit for nothing at night, only going to bed and taking as
much rest as circumstances will allow. There are few people who will
credit such statements; nevertheless they are true, and can be
verified any day in the great majority of t