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ers, as compared with various forms of freer and less specialised manual labour. The intellectualisation of the town operatives (assuming the process to be taking place) may be attributable to the thousand and one other influences of town life rather than to machinery, save indirectly so far as the modern industrial centre is itself the creation of machinery.[213] It is not, I think, possible at present to offer any clear or definite judgment. But the following distinctions seem to have some weight in forming our opinion. The growth of machinery has acted as an enormous stimulus to the study of natural laws. A larger and larger proportion of human effort is absorbed in processes of invention, in the manipulation of commerce on an increasing scale of magnitude and complexity, and in such management of machinery and men as requires and educates high intellectual faculties of observation, judgment, and speculative imagination. Of that portion of workers who may be said, within limits, to control machinery, there can be no question that the total effect of machinery has been highly educative. The growing size, power, speed, complexity of machinery, undoubtedly makes the work of this class of workers "more intellectual." Some measure of these educative influences even extends to the "hand" who tends some minute portion of the machinery, so far as the proper performance of his task requires him to understand other processes than those to which his labour is directly and exclusively applied. So likewise consideration must be taken of the skilled work of making and repairing machinery. The engineers' shop and other workshops are becoming every year a more and more important factor in the equipment of a factory or mill. But though "breakdowns" are essentially erratic and must always afford scope for ingenuity in their repair, even in the engineers' shop there is the same tendency for machinery to undertake all work of repair which can be brought under routine. So the skilled work in making and repairing machinery is continually being reduced to a minimum, and cannot be regarded, as Professor Nicholson is disposed to regard it, as a factor of growing importance in connection with machine-production. The more machinery is used, the more skilled work of making and repairing will be required, it might seem. But the rapidity with which machinery is invading these very functions turns the scale in the opposite direction, at any
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