the place to discuss methods of reform. It is sufficient to note the
testimony borne by all alike to the disintegrating influence of
machinery.

Again, the growth of machinery makes industry more intricate.
Manufacturers no longer produce for a small known market, the
fluctuations of which are slight, and easily calculable. The element of
speculation enters into manufacture at every pore--size of market,
competitors, and price are all unknown. Machinery works at random like
the blind giant it is. Every improvement in communication, and each
application of labour-saving invention adds to the delicacy and
difficulty of trade calculations. Hence in the productive force of
machinery we see the material cause of the violent oscillations, the
quiver of which never has time to pass out of modern trade. The periodic
over-production and subsequent depression are thus closely related to
machinery. It is the result upon the workman of these fluctuations that
alone concerns us.

The effect of machinery upon the regularity of employment is both a
difficult and a serious subject. Its precise importance cannot be
measured. Before the era of machinery there often arose from other
reasons, especially war or failure of crops, fluctuations which worked
most disastrously on the English labourer. But in modern times we must
look to more distinctively industrial causes for an explanation of
unsteadiness of employment, and here the close competition of steam-
driven machinery plays the leading part.

It must not, however, be supposed that machinery is essentially related
to unsteadiness of work. The contrary is obviously the case. Cheap tools
can be kept idle without great loss to their owner, but every stoppage