"A Billion Wild Horses"
Men and Machines. By Stuart Chase. (Cape. 10s. 6d.) SINCE the publication of Erewhon, we have been constantly told that man has become the slave of the machine. That there is some truth in this indictment it is impossible to deny. In his stimulating and provocative new book, Men and Machines, Mr. Stuart Chase has set himself the task of analysing to what extent this statement is correct. It is only possible here to give the briefest summary of the many aspects of the mechanized life of to-day with which Mr. Stuart Chase deals, for his book covers an enormous field. It has no padding. On every page and, in fact, in every paragraph he has something significant to say ' about this momentous problem, and he says it in such a way that not only economists and politicians, but every man or woman, with the welfare of humanity at heart, will certainly find the book profitable reading.
The term " machine," according to Mr. Stuart Chase, signifies " any non-living contrivance to extend or modify the power of the body, or to refine the perception of the senses "—a comprehensive and, in our opinion, just definition. After discussing the " anatomy " of machines, he surveys briefly their development throughout the ages. " Engines did not come to save men the brutality of dull labour . . . they came because English traders wanted to increase their profits by making cheaper cotton to sell," their value to humanity was not at first considered, and the first effects of machines were, as Mr. Hammond's Town Labourer bears out, at first socially disastrous. But, from the middle of the last century, man has made an ever-growing attempt to control the slave-driving power of theinaehine. It is Clear, however, from the following quotation that the machine still enslaves, at any rate, some people :—
" In one of the great establishments manufacturing automobiles there is a room' filled' with put:telling maehines. In front of each machine stands a worker feeding it pieces of steel by hand. ' 'A lever. is geared to the mechanism, and to this-lever the Man is chained by a handcuff locked to his wrist. As the punch. copies dOwn, the lever 'moves back, taking the hand with it. If for any reason a- man wishes to leave 'the room, all the machinery must be stopped and his handcuffs unlocked by the foreman. 'To look down the long room is to see machines, levers, and men in unison —feed, punch, jerk back ; feed, punch, jerk back . . yet these workers were handcuffed partly out of consideration for their flesh and blood. Before the articulated levers were installed, they were despite the guards, continually losing their fingers and hands under the down-thrust of the punch."
Not that Mr. Stuart Chase considers that all machine-tending is physically and psychologically harmful. By means of that magic measure, statistics, he is able to argue that in America—and it is surely in America that the mechanization of life is developed most widely—only a possible 5 per cent. of a total population:of a hundred and five million are slaves to the machine., From the time when he is awakened in the morning by a patented alarm clock to the last tune on the gramophone before retiring to bed, Mr. Stuart. Chase reckons that his own direct contact with machines does not average much over two hours a day. Ile does not feel like a slave. And there are others whose direct contact with, machines is certainly less than his. There are yet others, however, as we have shown, whose serfdom is almost complete. It is also irrefutable that certain kinds of direct contact with machines are stimulating and " ego-inflating," for . instance, driving a motor-car through traffic, or flying an aeroplane Across the Atlantic : they satisfy our craving for power.
So little research has been done with regard to the psycho- logical effect of contact with machines on various types of people that generalizations cannot fail to be worthless, but they are, at any rate, thought-provoking, as, for instance, the following extraordinary statement :—
" In respect to inventing, inspecting and repairing machines we have a skilled, often a very highly skilled, occupation, where routine tends to be at a minimum, and one's creative faculties at a maximum It is replete with change of pace, and in many cases is as exciting as controlling a motor bus or a locomotive."
. Mr.- Stuart- Chase works out a balance-sheet in which he shows the effects of the machine which are partly good and partly evil, and also the wholly good effects and the wholly bad effects. This balance-sheet is only, of course, the opinion of one man who has studied the problem very widely, but by no means exhaustively. He finds on the whole that the evil effects outweigh the good. The three most terrifying seem to be the menace of mechanical warfare (Mr. Stuart Chase considers war in the air to be the obvious and only method which it is necessary to consider), the ever-growing tension of our modern interlocked industrial structure, and the fact that if the world's natural resources are wasted as they have hitherto been wasted, their supply must inevitably fail within a generation.
Mr. Stuart Chase is of the opinion that so far machines have brought more misery than happiness into the world. He does not consider, however, that man is—or need be—a slave of the " billion wild horses " which he has loosed upon the world—" he has allowed them to run unbridled, and his next great task is, by one method or another, to break them to his service."
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