THE CURSE OF MACHINERY

I SUPPOSE that we may take it for granted that the ordinary nonthinking individual, if the matter were laid before him for judgment, would set down the advent of the motor-car as one of the latest steps in the march of progress. But there are still in being those who cannot look upon the mere annihilation of space as a matter of very great interest or importance; and who, if it were brought about to the detriment of aims of a higher order, could not do other than look upon it as no matter upon which to congratulate themselves.

I do not know what one could take as a good definition of a machine, but however that may be, the thing that any ordinary mortal would call a machine, and not a mere tool, has been among us as a factor largely bearing upon human affairs for something less than a century.

Man seems to have been given the power to expand his taste for experimental research to an almost infinite degree in any direction. Towards whatever point he turns his attention an endless vista of discovery opens out to him, but he seems to have been left no guidance, other than that of the accomplished thing, as to whether his discoveries along any one path are for the moral well-being of the race or not.

Looking backwards upon what one knows of the last hundred years, one cannot but be struck with the possibility that the application of man's genius to the invention of machinery has been fraught with loss rather than gain to the true moral and intellectual progress of the race.

It will not, I hope, take up too much space and time to hold in brief review a few of the various departments of human life into which machinery has brought great changes, and to try to form a hasty opinion as to whether those changes have been really beneficial.

Whether the Englishman of the past has had an inherent love for beautiful forms, or whether the materials for building that have come to hand have, by a divine foresight, of themselves been conducive to beauty in the buildings of which they were the component parts, it would be hard to decide. Probably the truth lies in both hypotheses, but certain it is that almost any English farmhouse,

hamlet, or village that has not been altered by the influence of machinery-either directly or indirectly-has been just the last touch that an artistic eye would feel to be needful to make the prospect complete. The local materials used have been in harmony with their surroundings. The rough-hewn timbers of the roof have in them the curves that the hand of nature moulded in the tree. The vegetable thatch, the wall of local stone, clay, or mud have all been in the same key to which the surrounding country was attuned. The buildings have been sprinkled along the watercourses, in the bottoms where their more formal outlines have not broken in upon the contours of the hills.

It would be hard to believe that lives spent in surroundings and amid prospects harmonious with nature can have received from them no moral influence for good, or that it is not well for the life of man to be at least as attuned to beauty as that of the rest of creation.

Now as to the prospect where the hand of machinery has been at work.

See this fair timbered valley, or would-be fair, rather—for what is it that spoils the whole and sets our artistic teeth on edge? If we would make a picture of it, what is it that we must leave out, or betake ourselves to some other scene? It is the roof of that great barn that offends. Look at the uncompromising rectangles thereof, its uniform grey metallic glitter! Can any man with a soul overlook a cluster of roofs of corrugated iron, set in a fair prospect, without shudder? Albeit the vaunted machinery of the Black Country foundries produced it, the railway made its use here possible.

I do not know that we need comment more on it. It can tell its own glaring story very well, and unfortunately the softening hand of time will have very little influence upon it.

The art of the thatcher and the thatcher himself too have been banished to make way for the artisan of the Black Country. This is one of machinery's victories. It is only one culled at large from many of a kind.

We most of us have known some little fishing port before and after the railway' opened it up.'

It used to straggle up the little stream, and each house was placed, not selfishly where it would get the most view for itself, but where it would help the prospect most.

I do not mean to pretend that this was intentional, but where man is more or less primitive-i.e. natural-his works seem to be more in harmony with nature by a kind of natural instinct.

Then came the railway with the tripper and the jerry builder in its train, and now the gaudy terraces flaunt their angular straightnesses fresh from the saw mill-not up the valley, but row after row along

the cliffs themselves, as ugly a collection of unpleasing straight lines as ever could be designed to spoil the infinite curves of the shore.

They have indeed gotten their 'view' of the sea-but look at the expense: a prospect spoiled by this marspot for just as many miles as it can be seen.

This is no hyperbole. 'Tis not a wickedness perpetrated in one or two places, but all along the coast. It is the offspring of the machine that runs along the railway.

With whatever of my various diatribes against, or accusations of, machinery, the reader may or may not find himself in agreement, of the lamentable results of its interference with agriculture I believe there will be no two opinions.

It would be no fiction of the pen to say that the stalwart lines of men who, say thirty years ago, used to swing the scythe to the music of the falling ears were the backbone of the country. The wages of the rural labourer were small indeed, pitifully and possibly needlessly so, but, judging by the few remaining specimens of the breed who have survived to the present time, they were a race to whom for kindly geniality and intelligent reasonableness none of us are fit to hold a candle. I can recall the faces of many of these lean old toil-worn labourers, faces that looked as if they were the index of all the sturdy virtues that have been characteristic of the English race.

On every farm of any size throughout the land there were several of them employed, and to the blessings that honest arduous toil brought to them and their posterity was added the joy of work in company.

The ruthless hand of the machine gradually thinned their numbers ; they were not wanted, and now the cry of the farmer is that he cannot get the few men that he does want.

Apart from the attraction of the towns there is another cause for this that has been considerably overlooked. Very few men are company enough for themselves, and they dislike monotonous toil in the fields alone. The zest of a man's vying with his fellows for the best work done is gone; and the few men who still have the chance to lend an extra hand at harvest time complain that the 'self-binder' and other ingenious labour-saving appliances of that ilk have taken from the harvest field all its poetry-all its fun, they call it, but, 'tis no matter. The scythe and drashel were instruments fitted indeed to mould the muscle and stiffen the bone of the rank and file of a nation; and if that were a matter of importance-which it certainly is not-it has turned out, I believe, as a matter of fact, that the self-binder and the thrashing machine do not do it any cheaper.

A race of giants banished for gain, and yet no one a farthing the better! (To the other counts against thee, O Machinery! we have to set thee down a fool.)

Within the last few years every town that has been swelled by the tide of immigration, and even some of those that have had the good luck to keep within a working companionable size, have started a system of electric trams. The motive for so doing is obscure, but probably the powers that be have considered that in this undertaking they have been moving with the times, a consolation that no one can deny them.

Now the consequences of our becoming a nation of town-dwellers have been deplored on all sides.

All the thinkers of the age agree that it is, or at any rate will be, a cause of degradation in the national physique. Yet what must we think of the intelligence of a town that provides a cheap and easy mode of abolishing the powers of walking among its citizens? Time was, when the business man and the clerk did at least put their muscles into use by walking to their places of business, likewise the women-folk to their shopping; but now to many of these good people the idea of getting to any place by walking never seems to occur, and the tram service is looked upon as a great improvement. Improvement of what?

Will folk never learn that hardness is the only schoolmistress that can teach, and that all the mechanical aids to luxury are bad through and through and beyond a certain point absolutely devitalising?

Again, machinery in the shape of the railway engine, by forming a cheap and easy means of transit from the country, and in the shape of the manufactories (which, by the bye, is just what they are not) by necessitating the making of things in large centres instead of by local craftsmen, has been without doubt one of the, if not the most, important causes of the rural exodus and the fungus-like phenomenal growth of the towns.

Time was, and not so very long ago either, when the towns were pleasant enough places for a man to live in, and for the love of which it was even worth while his fighting, if need was.

The churches and public buildings were the visible signs of the rise and fall of a nation's art, and the private dwellings, humble it is true, but each bearing the individuality of, and being a witness to, the architectural taste of the individual who built it, as diversified as nature, and yet each town homogeneous and with a character of its own, given it by the local materials the builder was perforce

driven to use.

I have been in old towns in which one could if so

disposed seat oneself down in any part thereof and find the materials for a pleasing sketch.

But what of the houses in the towns to the growth of which machinery has given rise, what are they like? If machinery had been merely the first cause of their being, it would be hard to say how much they might have differed from their predecessors; but as it

is, unfortunately, machinery has had a finger in the pie of their actual building. The railway has brought the cheap and nasty deal from abroad, the sawmill has shaped it into beams, joists, and planks, as shapely as the parallelograms of Euclid.

The railway has brought too the cast-iron railings to which the factories of the North have given birth-a most uninteresting prodigy. Whatsoever of ornament there is in use about the houses has not been the work of the craftsman, and as such a stimulant to his art, but has been almost invariably moulded in some distant factory.

We could write on this subject ad nauseam, but to what purpose? Enough of anything nasty, at any rate, is as good as a feast. There they stand, these houses, rows of them, miles of them, unpleasing, horrible. Nothing there is about them for the wholesome pride of the dwellers therein. 'Tis true they serve for a covering from the winds of heaven, and to a certain extent they are sanitary-as witness the very evident cast-iron drainpipes and ventilating shafts.

But are these the only qualities fitting to adorn the dwellings of the highest of creation? Is man to be put to shame by the art of such a humble builder as, say, the chaffinch in the beauty of his dwelling?

Sir Walter Besant in one of his novels has remarked that the most noticeable difference between the times of a hundred years ago and our own is that in the old days everything in the house was made by someone that one knew. The fender on my great-grandfather's hearth was made for his grandfather by Tom Smith at the end of the village. He hammered it out by the sweat of his brow. My grandfather perchance stood by and saw it in the making. A hundred years and more it stood a monument to Tom Smith's muscles and his mastery of his trade.

It may be that the fender upon which you are resting your feet at this minute, and whose composition, as a thing of no interest, you have not before noticed to be of cast iron and brass, came from Birmingham. On the other hand, perhaps it didn't. It may very well be, for all I know, that they make these things in Germany. At any rate wheresoever was the mould in whose womb machinery conceived it, along with some hundreds of its fellows all as alike, and much more so, than a lot of peas, it serves the purpose for which fenders were originally intended as well as the old hand-made article. It does so, but-and to my mind there is no end to this but-we have lost our old friend Tom Smith, and the cogwheels and gangs of machinetenders possibly now on strike in Birmingham-or Germany was it?are in his stead. If you like the change there is nothing more to be said, but how should you like to be one of these same machinetenders ?

In the making of most of our household goods machinery has