In 1836, in a Manchester mill, nine frames, each having three
hundred and twenty-four spindles, were tended by four spinners.
Afterwards the mules were doubled in length, which gave each of
the nine six hundred and eighty spindles and enabled two men to
tend them.
There we have the naked fact of the elimination of the workman by
the machine. By a simple device three workmen out of four are
evicted; what matters it that fifty years later, the population
of the globe having doubled and the trade of England having
quadrupled, new machines will be constructed and the English
manufacturers will reemploy their workmen? Do the economists
mean to point to the increase of population as one of the
benefits of machinery? Let them renounce, then, the theory of
Malthus, and stop declaiming against the excessive fecundity
of marriage.
They did not stop there: soon a new mechanical improvement
enabled a single worker to do the work that formerly occupied
four.
A new three-fourths reduction of manual work: in all, a reduction
of human labor by fifteen-sixteenths.
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