No. IV.

ON MACHINERY, CONSIDERED IN RELATION TO THE WELFARE OF THE WORKING CLASSES. BY M. ARAGO.

*

Many persons, without calling in question the genius of Watt, look upon the inventions for which the world is indebted to him, and the impulse which

* In writing this chapter, I have felt myself quite at liberty to make use of many documents which I have collected, both in the course of various communications with my illustrious friend, Lord Brougham, and from the works which he has himself published, or which have appeared under his patronage.

If I were to believe the criticisms which various persons have put forth since this work was read in public, it would seem, that, in endeavouring to combat the opinion that machinery is hurtful to the working-classes, I have assailed an old prejudice which has no real existence,‚—a mere phantom. I should desire nothing better than to think that it were so, and then I would, with the utmost gladness, suppress all my reasonings on the matter, whether these be good or bad. Unhappily, the letters which well-disposed artisans frequently address to me, both as an Academician, and as a Member of the Chamber of Deputies; unhappily, the very recent dissertations, ex professo, of various economists, leave me not a doubt as to the necessity of now again asserting, and reiterating the assertion in every possible form, that machinery has never been the real and permanent cause of the sufferings of one of the most numerous and most interesting classes of society; that the destruction of machinery would make the present state of things far worse; and that it is in no-wise from that quarter that a remedy is to be expected, for evils which I most deeply compassionate.-M. ARAGO.

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these have given to manufactures, as an evil to society. To believe their account of the matter, one would fancy, that the adoption of every new machine inevitably increases the discomfort and misery of the artisans. Those marvellous mechanical combinations, which we are accustomed to admire in the regularity and harmony of their motions, in the magnitude and the delicacy of their effects, would be nothing better than instruments of mischief; and it would be the duty of the legislature to proscribe them with a just and implacable rigour.

Conscientious opinions, especially where they accompany praiseworthy feelings of philanthropy, have a right to receive an attentive examination. I have to add that, on my own part, this examination is an imperative duty. I must, in fact, have overlooked the point of view in which the labours of our illustrious fellow-member are most deserving of the public esteem, if, far from agreeing with the objection that they interfere with the rights of the working classes, I did not direct the attention of men of worth to labours such as those, as the means at once the most powerful, the most direct, and the most effectual, for rescuing workmen from great sufferings, and for calling them to share in numberless blessings, which seemed as if they must for ever have remained the exclusive inheritance of the rich.

When mathematicians have to choose between two diametrically opposite propositions; when, the one being true, the other is necessarily false; and

when it seems that nothing can, a priori, lead to a reasonable adoption of one rather than the other, they take these contradictory propositions; they follow them out, with the greatest minuteness, through all their ramifications; they deduce from them their most remote logical consequences; and then, the erroneous proposition, and it alone, hardly ever fails to lead, by this clue, to some results which a sound judgment could not admit. Let us for a moment make use of this kind of scrutiny, which Euclid has frequently employed, and which is appropriately styled the reductio ad absurdum.

The enemies of machinery would have it destroyed, or at least prevented from increasing, to keep, they say, more labour in the hands of the working classes. Let us for a moment look at it in this point of view, and it will be found that their anathema applies to much more than to machinery, properly so called.

At the very outset, for instance, we shall be led to tax our ancestors with very great want of foresight. If, in place of founding and so perseveringly extending the city of Paris on both banks of the Seine, they had established it in the midst of the plain of Villejuif,* the water-carriers would for ages have been the corporation at once the best employed, the most indispensable, and the most numerous. Then let our friends, the political economists, set to work to benefit the water-carriers.

*

A plain and village on the road from Paris to Lyons.-TR.

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To turn the Seine out of its course, is no impossibility; propose that this labour be commenced; open forthwith a subscription for laying Paris dry, and you will be taught by the universal ridicule, that the reductio ad absurdum is of some use even in political economy; in their plain common sense, the working classes will themselves tell you, that the river has created the immense capital in which they find such abundant resources; and that but for it, Paris might still, perhaps, have been nothing better than a Villejuif.

The honest citizens of Paris were hitherto wont to congratulate themselves on the proximity of those inexhaustible stone-quarries, from which, age after age, have been drawn materials for the construction of their temples, their palaces, their private dwelling-houses. It is a mere hallucination! The new economists will prove to you that it would have been very much better, if the lime, the hewn stones, and the rough blocks, could not have been procured nearer than Bourges, for instance. Count on your fingers the number of labourers that must have been employed, on this hypothesis, in bringing to the yards of the capital all the stones, which, for five centuries, our architects have there wrought; - you will find that the sum is quite enormous; and, if you think these new ideas are at all satisfactory, you may exult as you please, at the happiness which such a state of things would have diffused among the working classes!

As to this, let me hazard some doubts; though