Let us look at the difficulty in the way of its soundness.
If it be true, _a priori_, that the domain of _invention_ and that of
labor cannot be extended, except at the expense of one or the other,
it is in the place where there are most machines, Lancaster or Lowell,
for example, that we shall meet with the fewest _workmen_. And if, on
the contrary, we prove _a fact_, that mechanical and hand work
co-exist in a greater degree among wealthy nations than among savages,
we must necessarily conclude that these two powers do not exclude each
other.
It is not easy to explain how a thinking being can taste repose in
presence of this dilemma:
Either--"The inventions of man do not injure labor, as general facts
attest, since there are more of both among the English and Americans
than among the Hottentots and Cherokees. In that case I have made a
false reckoning, though I know neither where nor when I got astray. I
should commit the crime of treason to humanity if I should introduce
my error into the legislation of my country."
Or else--"The discoveries of the mind limit the work of the arms, as
some particular facts seem to indicate; for I see daily a machine do
the labor of from twenty to a hundred workmen, and thus I am forced to
prove a flagrant, eternal, incurable antithesis between the
intellectual and physical ability of man; between his progress and his
comfort; and I cannot forbear saying that the Creator of man ought to
have given him either reason or arms, moral force, or brutal force,
but that he has played with him in conferring upon him opposing
faculties which destroy one another.
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