TECHNOLOGY, CLASS-CONFLICT, EMPLOYMENT 567
imposition upon them by their employers, and this tragic paradox was
a demonstration of a rampant Technology's unholy power to regiment
human souls by hook or by crook.

The workers had been moved to resist regimentation by the same
spirit of freedom, inherited from a pre-industrial past, that had inspired
the entrepreneurs to make the Industrial Revolution and thereby to put
the workers under pressure; and this pre-industrial ethos had been the
psychic counterpart of an economic dispensation in which each indi-
vidual worker had at least seen the results of his labours, even when he
had not reaped the reward, and had therefore found himself able to
work with zest—not because he had been able to count upon pocketing
an equitable share of the profits of his own exertions, but because, even
when he had been sweated and fleeced, his work had been intrinsically
effective and significant and therefore psychologically satisfying. By
contrast, under an industrial economic dispensation under which the
pressure of the work upon the worker had, as we have seen, become
overwhelming owing to the removal of ancient automatic safeguards,
the chefs-cTceuvre of Technology that had swept those safeguards away
had mechanized the processes of Industry to so high a degree, and had
carried the Division of Labour to such extremes, that the factory hand's
work had become intrinsically impersonal, monotonous, and infantile.

'We invent the machinery of mass-production, and, for the sake of
cheapening the unit, we develop output on a gigantic scale. Almost auto-
matically the machine delivers a stream of articles in the creation of which
the workman has had little part. He has lost the joy of craftsmanship, the
old satisfaction in something accomplished through the conscientious
exercise of care and skill.'1

The effect of these psychologically untoward technological improve-
ments had been, inevitably, to make a worker's attitude towards his
work defensive and negative, like a schoolboy's attitude towards an
uncongenial imposition.2

Thus the workers* resistance to reg;imentation at the hands of an
external power had driven them into regimenting themselves. Infighting
against the fate of being turned into robots in the factory, they had
imposed on themselves the fate of serving as soldiers in a trade-union
phalanx; and at the time of writing it was not easy to see how either
fate could be exorcized, for by this time it was already evident that the
external pressure on the industrial workers could not be relieved by the

1 Sir Alfred Ewing in a presidential address delivered on the sist August, 1932, at
York, to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Another passage of this
address has been quoted already in this Study in III. ixi. axx.

2 Professor William McNeil! comments: 'Is there not an instinct of workmanship
that may act as an antidote to the trade unionist and civil servant spirit?' The present
writer -would not deny either the existence of this instinct or its pertinacity. He would
merely suggest that, in a mechanized twentieth-century Westernizing World, Techno-
logy was tilting the balance adversely for the instinct of workmanship and favourably
for a workers* resistance movement against the social effect of physical machinery which,
at the current power of its 'drive', was threatening to serve as an instrument for placing
the would-be craftsman at the mercy of a collective human social pressure instead of
promising to serve as a tool for enabling him to express his own individuality in and
through his work.