It reduced him from a craftsman to a specialist, from a maker of
shoes to a mere stitcher of soles. It took from him, at a single
blow, his interest in the workmanship of his task, his ownership
of the tools, his garden, his wholesome environment, and even his
family. All were swallowed by the black maw of the ugly new mill
town. The hardships of the old days were soon forgotten in the
horrors of the new. For the transition was rapid enough to make
the contrast striking. Indeed it was so rapid that the new class
of employers, the capitalists, found little time to think of
anything but increasing their profits, and the new class of
employees, now merely wage-earners, found that their long hours
of monotonous toil gave them little leisure and no interest.

The transition from the age of handicrafts to the era of machines
presents a picture of greed that tempts one to bitter invective.
Its details are dispassionately catalogued by the Royal
Commissions that finally towards the middle of the nineteenth
century inquired into industrial conditions. From these reports
Karl Marx drew inspiration for his social philosophy, and in them
his friend Engles found the facts that he retold so vividly, for
the purpose of arousing his fellow workmen. And Carlyle and
Ruskin, reading this official record of selfishness, and knowing
its truth, drew their powerful indictments against a society
which would permit its eight-year-old daughters, its mothers, and
its grandmothers, to be locked up for fourteen hours a day in
dirty, ill-smelling factories, to release them at night only to
find more misery in the hovels they pitifully called home.

The introduction of machinery into manufacturing wrought vast
changes also in the organization of business. The unit of