The daily morning journal and courier. [volume] (New Haven, Conn.) 1894-1907, 1899-10-30
SCIENCE AND LABOR.

| eAiS ms man anu WOHldIl " NC Lea
! too good for laborers work. Let US
cast our thoughts, however, over a
| wider horizon, and see how the decades
that bring the peril are also bringing
the remedy. Science is steadily sweep
ing away all those humblest classes OF
employment. Hardly any man has now
TO toll up ladders with the hod of bricks
upon his shoulder. The donkey engine
does the purely animal part of the work
The reaper is displaced by the machine
and the ploughman is fast receding as
the steam plough 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 dimnl-
shing.
1t is true that science has by means
conquered the 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 fer
tile 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 require? imagine, if ships had still
to be moved by galley rowers what mil
lions would be doomed to a beast-like
toll. Some parts of the big domains of
unreflected labor will long be left I'M
touched but the process is going for
o,I. u t., al In OI1I
cation is rendering the lower CLASSES UNI
fit for the humblest sorts of occupations.
1t would be too much to hope that
these processes should be at all times
strictly proportional to one another.
But in the general drift Of things they
are compensatory, and if we only give
science a reasonable time it will leave
us none of that labor to be dore which
requires an educated laborer.
Then comes the uneasy question as
what is to become of the classes thus
deprived of occupation. The working
classes themselves often curse the pro-
gress of invention, and are tempted to
look upon it as no friend to their well
fare. There are now, it is true, no
longer any machine breaking frenzies
but the difficulty often arises in an
acute, though silent suffering. Unfor-
tunately society has, always to travel to
permanent good though transitory Ills.
When an army of compositors is dis
missed because some one has invented
a machine there is excuse for some bit
terness of feeling And yet there was
a time when a whole army of manu-
script book copiers had to give way be-
fore the advent of the compositor.
But the difficulty is always evanescent
for here, too, there are compromising
influences at work. For if science is
occupations at the lower end
of the scale she is creating new ones at
the top. Think of the hundreds of thou
sands of men who i'm England are now
employed in callings that had no exist
ence sixty years ago; the telegraphers,
and photographers, land machinists of
a hundred kinds. In the last decade
or two, what an army of skilled men
have been demanded by the invention Of
the bicycle, the telephone and the cleo
trio light! AS compared with the begin
ming of the century, thing of the long
array of marine and locomotive engi-
neers, the chemists, the journalists, the
the teachers, the pOstmen
porters and tram conductors
What a multitude of callings are there
which are either new or the newly
stocked, so that, while the population
has uuadruped, their ranks have been
multiplied hundred fold. But it is the
entirely new empoyments that strike
the mind most forcibly and any one
who runs his eye down census of the
of the people will satisfy
himself that in England of the present |
lay one-fifth part of the adult male
population find their livelihood in call
ngs that had no existence when the
century began.
Thus while science takes away with |
me hand it literally bestows with the |
}ther; but what it takes away are the |
ow class occupations, and what it gives |
ire the high class ones, demanding in |
diligence and cultivating it. The gene
al tendency is, therefore, humanizing.
But, of course, it never happens that |
he coal HEAVIER, when thrown out Of |
work. by the introduction of steam
rane, can go away and get 4 place in |
me of the newly created superior call
ngs. He is not such fool as to waste
lis time in applying for an opening
IS an electrical engineer. But there is
gradual creeping up that is always
aking place. And yet the transfer is
much less effected by the promotion of
Individuals than by promotions Of gene
ations. No doubt it sometimes happens
he intelligent plumber steps into the
lew opening for an electrical engineer,
nd leaves a gap which some one of an
Inferior calling steps into the gaps be-
He'd in succession until perhaps the
iveter, thrown out of work by the in
of hydraulic machinery,
nds a vacancy at last and steps into
. But it more frequently happens that
he plumber educates his son to be an
lectrical engineer, and the carter APP
rentices his boy to the plumber, and
lie dock laborer sees his young folk as
iring to be carriers.
Thus the general drift Of the whole
lcial scale is steadily upward in pro-
ortion as science provides intelligent
at the upper end and abol-
hes those that are more or less brute
Ike at the lower, and SO humanity as |
whole is the gamer. There is, there
IRE, no reason to feel uneasy at a pros
act of oVereducation.-Nne |
.