THE IRON MAN
IT has often been thought strange that any human being should fall down and worship the work of his own hands.
Modern man has found how little strange that is. He is a greater being than the savage ; and to him too it has been given to stand before his own creations overawed, browbeaten, mystified.
His creation is the Industrial System. The powers he has marshalled in it have so far kept their places and done his bidding. But they grow apace. As they grow, their aspect waxes more distant, self-centred, mysterious ; increas- ingly suggestive of something alien, which might at any time begin to threaten and demand to be propitiated. There is a mood which even now is ready to take fright before it, and cry out in a kind of hysteria, What shall we do ?
We take it that the balanced and penetrating writer of The Iron Man would deprecate such a mood. It may be impossible to say what to do. We should not be asking that.
Worthier of us, and more to the point, is the other question, What is really happening ? And what is happening—or the key to it—lies, he submits, in the spread of the automatic tool in industry. Automatic machinery has begun to over- run the whole face of manufacture with amazing rapidity, and it has but one ideal before it : to be so deadly efficient that no amount of stupidity in the operator can make it go wrong ; to be " fool-proof," in the expressive shop phrase ; and thus, incidentally, to become the breaker of the tie between the man and his job ; the maker of anybody fit for anything ; the instigator, therefore, of a new nomadic habit in the people ; and the ultimate source of that " army of homeless, wifeless men and foot-loose women " which Labour in America is said to be fast becoming.
The picture may be overdrawn. Obviously enough the author's problem is the whole principle of specialization, the principle of " divide and rule." But his metaphor comes down with arresting precision upon the essence of the thing we have to reckon with. The only excuse for stating it more prosaically as a principle is that, so stated, the light of a wider knowledge comes more easily into it ; and the spectre of the Iron Man as the enigmatic, implacable idol fades the more easily away- For this manner of thing, of course, only fades in light. The hope for the benighted savage, prostrate like us before the work of his own hands, lies in his knowing that thing before which he falls for what it is ; and our hope
for speedy deliverance from our own Juggernaut depends similarly on our knowing it for what it is ; namely, a principle of. human nature, and one with a place in our mental as well as our industrial'economy, if only we could find it.
Science and Labour has its interest from this point of view. A slim, well-edited volume of papers by an unusually strong cast of prominent speakers at the Conference lately held between the British Science Guild and the Labour- Party, it reveals no fact more interesting than this—that " Science," who made the Iron Man, is definitely bent on seeing that he does not unmake us. Witness, especially, the section on " Science and the human factor." And even the dexterously- made book on industrial psychology before us can hardly well be read without the additional impression being left that this concern on the part of Science for the human factor is n growingly genuine humane concern. Relevant here is this competent and well-posted writer's almost anxious carefulness to emphasize the difference between old and new, in industrial psychology ; the difference between the pioneer American brand which made straight for industrial efficiency and the newer British school of Dr. Myers and his. colleagues, which is out to protect the victims of efficiency. It would seem that we at least mean to know our Juggernaut, and know what he does with us.
And how distant is the day of full and saving knowledge ? How long is it going to take before we find the angle from which to approach our Iron Man and find that he is no Jugger naut ? Doubtless, a long time. Yet it might have been interesting to pause and glean what symptoms there are, even in these books, of its approach. Prominent among them is a most curious bewilderment as to whether mechanized pro- duction is really. enemy or friend. We have certainly been taught to regard it as the sworn enemy of the soul. But is not " motion study " 'for the soul ? And what is it but the more perfect mechanizing of production ? The machines themselves, moreover, surely struck a fetter from the soul when they took the cramping, crushing toil away. And so with many other of the incidents of industrial mechanization. We cannot develop these points further here. But if they are any true indication, then it would seem that all the lines are laid for a tolerable issue out of our perplexities, and only some fertilizing touch of circumstance is wanting, for even the Iron Man to turn at length and greet us with a not unfriendly face.
J. W. Score
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