The Worcester spy. [volume] (Worcester, Mass.) 1898-1904, 1899-12-17
Education, Science and Labor
Tend to Advance the Whole
Social Scale.
OCCUPATIONS ARE
ENDED BY SCIENCE
But for All That Are Removed at
the Bottom New and Better
Ones Are Made at the Top

1t is true that science has by no
means conquered the whole domain.
There is still much scrubbing of floors
to be done by men and women on
Bonded knees; and coal is still hewn
out with pick and axe and the use of
muscle, with but little use of brains.
And yet, even in our fertile country,
science never works by revolution, but
only by progress. One domain after
another has gone, Where are now the
armies of water carriers, and chair
porters and night men and sawyers
whom our grandfathers used to re-
quire? Imagine, if ships had still to
be moved by galley rowers, what mil
lions would be doomed to a beastlike
toll. Some parts of the big domains of
unreflected labor WIN long be left I'M
touched but the process is going for
ward; and it is clear that while edu-
cation is rendering the lower classes
unfit for the humblest sorts of occupa
lions, science is steadily sweeping
away these occupations. 1t would be
too much to hope that these processes
should be at all times strictly proper
toned to one another. But in the gen
eral drift of things they are compen-
satory, and if we only give to science
a reasonable time it will leave us none
of that labor to be done which requires
an uneducated laborer.
Then comes the uneasy question as
to what is to become of the classes thus
deprived of occupation. The working
classes themselves often curse the
progress of invention and are tempted
to look upon it as no friend to their
welfare. There are now, it is true, no
longer any Misunderstanding frenzies;
but the difficulty often arises in an
acute, though silent, suffering. Unfor-
tunately society has always to travel
to permanent good through tranSitory
ills When an army of compositors is
dismissed because some one has in
vented a machine there is excuse for
some bitterness of feeling. And yet
there was a time when a whole army
of manuscript book copiers had to give
way before the advent of the com
position.
But the difficulty is always evanes-
cent, for here, too, there are compen-
sating influences at work. For if sci
ence is abolishing occupations "a the
lower end of the scale, she is creating
new ones at the top. Think of the hun
dreds of thousands of men who in En-
gland are now employed in callings
that had no existence 60 years ago;
the telegraphers and photographers,
land machinists of hundred kinds. In
the last decade or two, what an army
of skilled men have been demanded by
the invention of the bicycle, the tele-
phone and the electric light! AS COM
pared with the beginning of the cen
fury, think of the long array of marine
and locomotive engineers, the drafts
men, the teachers, the postmen rail-
way porters and tramconductors What
a multitude of callings there are
which are either new or else newly
stocked so that, while the population
has quadrupled, their ranks have been
multiplied a hundredfold But it is
the entirely new employments that
strike the mind most forcibly, and
any one who runs his eye down a cen
sus of the occupations of the people,
will satisfy himself that in England of
the present day, one-fifth part of the
adult male population find their liveli-
hood in callings that had no existence
when the century began.
Thus, while science takes away with
one hand, it literally bestows with the
other; but what it takes away are the
low-class occupations, and what it
gives are the high-class ones, demand
ing intelligence and cultivation. The
general tendency is, therefore, human
izing
But, of course, it never happens that
the coal HEAVIER, when thrown out of
work by the Introduction of steam
crane, can go away and get a place in
one of the newly created superior calla-
ings. He is not such a fool as to waste
his time in applying for an opening as
an electrical engineer. But there is a
gradual creeping UP that is always
taking place. And vet the transfer is
much less effected by the promotion of
individuals than by promotion of gen
eratiOns. No doubt it sosmetimes hap
pens that the intelligent plumber steps
into the new opening for an electrical
engineer, and leaves gap which some
one of an inferior calling steps into,
the gaps being filed in succession untiu
perhaps the riveter, thrown out of work
by the introduction of hydraulic ma
chinery, finds a vacancy at last and
steps into it. But it more frequently
happens that the plumber educates his
son to be an electrical engineer and
the carter apprentices his boy to the
plumber, and the dock laborer sees his
young folk aspiring to be carriers.
Thus the general drift of the whole
social scale is steadily upward in pro-
portion as science provides intelligent
occupations at the upper end and abol-
ishes those that are more or less brute
like at the lower, and so humanity as
whole is the gamer. There is, there
fore no reason to feel uneasy at a
prospect of n.-Nineteenth
Century.