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Such clamour scarcely ever fails to be made when the extension of machinery, the application of inanimate power, and the abridgment of labour consequent on either, is a matter proposed. We are then sure to be told that the scheme of mechanical or chemical improvement is pointed against the human species, that it tends to drive them out of the system of beneficial employment and that, on the whole, the sum of the improvement is not only a less proportion of good to society, but a positive accession of misery to the unemployed poor.

The misfortune of this argument is that to be good for any thing, it would prove a great deal too much. It is not confined in its scope to any particular species or defined extent of improvement, but is equally proscriptive of all improvements whatever. It is a principle for savage life, not for a state of civilization. It takes for its basis that it is an advantage to perpetuate that necessity for hard and incessant labour under which man finds himself originally placed by nature, with all the wants, privations, ignorance and ferocity, which are attendant on that condition, and that every discovery, invention, or improvement which tends to abridge the quantity required of human labour, and to augment the resources for living and enjoyment is a serious injury to society. The advocates of this narrow theory do not go the whole length of maintaining that diminishing labour, and increase of substance, are in themselves positive evils, a position too absurd perhaps for any one to uphold; but they maintain what ends in a consequence nearly as untrue, namely, that neither the one nor the other is of any advantage to society at large. The palpable error of this theory is, that it supposes that all improvements which tend to supersede human labour, are necessarily made for the benefit of a few, and not for the common benefit of the many; that instead of lessening to each individual the share of labour requisite to obtain the means of his subsistence, their only tendency is to lessen the value of each personas labour, and to oblige him to work more in order to live equally well.