rue that considerable differences of individual skill and
effort survive in the typical machine industry. "Machine-weaving, for
instance, simple as it seems, is divided into higher and lower grades,
and most of those who work in the lower grades have not the stuff in
them that is required for weaving with several colours."[222] But the
general effect of machinery is to lessen rather than to increase
individual differences of efficiency. The tendency of machine industry
to displace male by female labour is placed beyond all question by the
statistics of occupations in England, which show since 1851 a regular
and considerable rise in the proportion of women to men workers in
most branches of manufacture. Legal restrictions, and in the more
civilised communities, the growth of a healthy public opinion, prevent
the economic force from being operative to the same degree so far as
children are concerned.

Those very qualities of narrowly restricted care and judgment,
detailed attention, regularity and patience, which we see to be
characteristic of machine work, are common human qualities in the
sense that they are within the capacity of all, and that even in the
degree of their development and practice there is less difference
between the highly-trained adult mechanic and the raw "half-timer"
than in the development and practice of such powers as machinery has
superseded. It must be recognised that machinery does exercise a
certain equalising influence by assigning a larger and larger relative
importance to those faculties which are specific as compared with
those which are individual.[223] "General ability" is coming to play a
more important part in industry than specialised ability,[3] and
though considerable differences may exist in the "general ability" of
individuals, the differences will be smaller than in specialised
abilities.[224]

The net influence of machinery upon the quality of labour, then, is
found to differ widely according to the relation which subsists
between the worker and the machine. Its educative influence,
intellectual and moral, upon those concerned with the invention,
management, and direction of machine industry, and upon all whose work
is about machinery, but who are not detailed machine-tenders, is of a
distinctly elevating character. Its effect, however, upon
machine-tenders in cases where, by the duration of the working day or
the intensity of the physical effort, it exhausts the productive
e