The daily Nome industrial worker., 1917-02-21

modern textile worker is aged at forty and losing job can hardly get another.
 Machinery has not frightened hu- man toll, it has, as Marx pointedly remarked, merely served to increase profits. It has, instead, shortened lives and made them the degenerate thing that old age too often ap- pears in industrial centers, things of gray haired destitution, prema- turely old, senile, and physically wrecks. The fotsam and jetsam that the industrial flood tide casts dere- lict upon the shores of society are unwholesome to look at, and un- pleasant to understand.
 Naturally with this condition pre- vailing great plants have to maln- tain what are called employment managers Their function is some what similar to that of the planta- ton foreman in slavery days. They have to secure employees for the different departments in the indus try and keep tabs upon working conditions so that each may be ad justed to his position.
 All the time the work must never stop. and the output as to capa- city and as to profit and as to speed maintained at the very highest point
 Employment managers deal with the personal factor. But the per conal factor in modern industry is only very small portion of the fac tors which make and which just as surely break workers. The ma chine is reacting upon it's tender with just as powerful force as the motive power is affecting the ma chine. The machine is really the gl ant power in modern production, the power that has to a very great extent crushed into the system. the bitterness of it's own iron and it's own mechanical soul. The machine undoubtedly erects an environment which molds the workers mind as it warps his body to the iron necessity of it's own motions. It is the ever present assertion of the law of eau sation It asserts the necessity of cause and effect, act and reaction, motion and consequence, action and result always and with monotonous, uniform and precise regularity Every rotation of a pulley. every swing of the lever, every drive Of the screw, every wheel, cog and ec- centric insists upon the elimination of the unnecessary and certain re- lation of action and reaction.
 At the machine this terrific discip- line brands it's marks upon the soul of the machine tender beyond the power of welfare workers or em- ploment managers to effoce. In con sequence he takes it with him from the workshop and his mind auto matically considers every question in terms of that mechanical discip- line It interrogates everything in terms of it's necessity: governmental institutions religious doctrines, po- litical and economic theories. Every thing that justfies itself by the doc Urine of necessity averts it's elimina- tion by reason thereof. Everything that presents itself as a superfluity, as an inutility, as something which may be eliminated with benefit to the scheme of social things is sub- jected to an erosive criticism that will soon destroy it.
 So it is that the machine discip- line itself is subjecting private own ership and profit making to analysis. It is asking the question whether society requires these things to get the greatest good from human activ- ity by the active ones.
 It is questioning the merits of a system insists upon destroying hu- man life and upon menacing the social health, and it is querying the immutability which the technique of modern employment management in- sists as the premises for founding it's work. The machine itself that private owners have harnessed to their private uses when 1t should b, for the public benefit Is the very factor which threatens the existence of that private ownership.