The Anaconda standard. [volume] (Anaconda, Mont.) 1889-1970, 1899-11-26
DOING AWAY With HUMAN LABOR.
Science Replacing 1t With Mocha meal
Devices of All Kinds.

1t certainly seems at first sight to be
an economic danger this educating Of
laboring men and women to be far too
good for laborer's work. Let us cast
our thoughts, however over wider
horizon and see how the decades that
bring the peril are also bringing the
remedy. Science is steadily sweeping
away all these humblest classes of en-
ployment. Hardly any man has now to
toll up ladders with the bod of bricks
upon his shoulder. The donkey engine
does the purely animal part OF OF
the machine and the plowman is fast
receding as the steam pillow makes its
appearance. We rarely see long lines
of men laden with coal bags running
up planks as in the olden days. The
need of men to do the work of horses
is steadily diminishing. 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 mucles, with but little
use of brain. And yet even in our fer
tile country science never works by
revolution, but only by progress. One
domain after another have gone.
Where are now the armies of water
carriers and chair porters and night
men and sawyers whom our grand
fathers used to require? Imagine, #
ships had still to be moved by galley
rowers, what millions would be doomed
to a beast-like toll. Some parts of the
big domains of unreflective labor will
long be left untouched, but the process
is going forward. and it is clear that
while education is rendering the lower
classes unfit for the humblest sort of
occupations, science is steadily sweep
ing away these occupations. 1t would
be too much to hope that these pro-
cesses should be at all times strictly
propOrtioned to one another. But in
the general drift of things they are
compensatory, and if we only give sci
ence a reasonable time it will leave us
none of that labor to be done which re-
quires 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. I'm
| fortunately society has always tc
travel to permanent good through
| transitory ills. When an army of COM
| posters is dismissed because someone
has invented a linotype 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
| positor.
But the difficulty is always evanes-
| cent for here, too, there are compen-
sating influences at work. For science
! is abolishing occupations at 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 Eng,
land are now employed in callings that
| telegraphers photographers and ma.
chinist of a hundred kinds In the last
decade or two what an army of skilled
men have been demanded by the in.
vention of the bicycle, the telephone
and the electric light. As compared
| with the beginning of the century
think of the long array of marine anG
| locomotive engineers, the chemists, tht
| journalists, the draughtsmen, TIL,
| teachers, the postmen, railway porter
and tram conductors. What a multi
| tude of callHgs are there which ar
| either new or else newly stocked. 81
that while the population has quad
rupled their ranks have been multi
| Piled a hundredfold. But 1t is the en-
ttrely new employments that strike
the mind most forcibly, and anyon
who runs his eye down census of tn