Thorstein Veblen
LEVASSEUR ON HAND AND MACHINE LABOR. (in Notes)
The Journal of Political Economy, vol. 9, No. 3. (Jun., 1901), pp. 441-442
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[441] Recently, before the Société Industrielle de L' Est, at Nancy, 
Professor Levasseur has summed up his views on the influence of machinery 
upon the welfare of the wage-earners. The address has an added interest to 
American readers in that its data are, in good part, of American origin, 
being based on Commissioner Wright's report on Hand and Machine Labor. They 
include also a considerable amount of fresh material.
As to the relative healthfulness of work-places since machine-labor became 
prevalent, "The Encyclopedia" gives an account of eighteenth-century 
factories, "from which," says M. Levasseur,

We have reason for thinking that hygienic conditions are much better observed 
now than formerly and that we concern ourselves with hygiene to a degree 
beyond even the imagination of our grandfathers. The Universal Exposition of 
1900 presented a similar comparison of mines in antiquity (not so very 
different, as to the point under discussion, from those of the sixteenth 
century) with the mine of today.
I have often cited in this connection two monuments of stone: a bas-relief 
(in the British Museum and also in the Louvre) representing the 
transportation of an obelisk or colossal statue by Assyrians or Egyptians, 
and, in the other case, a portrayal of the erection of the Luxor obelisk in 
the Place de la Concorde, which is engraved on its pedestal. In the later 
case were only capstans, cords, a problem in mechanics; the effort was in the 
head of the engineer much more than in the arms of the sailors who held the 
tackling. That was in 1836; today there would be no sailors at the cables; 
steam or electricity would do all the work. At the time of the Assyrians, 
hundreds of men clung to cords which they tugged laboriously, while others 
were busied in pushing the obelisk and placing the rollers upon which the 
mass was made to slide forward. ... Will anyone say that the work of carrying 
loads is more imbruting today than formerly?

[442] The complaint that machinery deprives workmen of employment is answered 
by showing that in the fourteen départements of France in which there is 
least use of the steam engine, the population has declined in sixty years 
from 2,600,000 to 2,500,000, while in the fourteen departments using steam 
power to the greatest extent population has grown from 8,000,000 to 
12,700,000.
M. Levasseur concludes with an incidental discussion of trusts in the United 
States, and especially the United States Steel and Iron Company, for which - 
as a competitor of European manufacturers - M. Levasseur expresses less dread 
than that which many Europeans are said to entertain.

If the resources of the company are formidable, it should still be considered 
that, to employ a capital of a thousand million dollars, the company must 
develop its production on a vast scale, while, by the complexity of its 
organization, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to take account of the 
real needs of the market; obliged to dispose of its products at any cost, it 
will at times compel low prices which will doubtless spread ruin around, but 
from which it will be the first to suffer.

This view is certainly open to question. The combination is certainly not 
more strongly impelled to produce in lavish quantities than were the smaller 
constituent companies. In fact one of the chief and indubitable advantages in 
such a combination is the possibility which it offers, not merely of 
increasing production through economizing material or labor, but the 
possibility also of restricting production if restriction seems for any 
reason advisable. It is hard, also, for one to understand why the management 
of such a company as this should not "take account of the real needs of the 
market" - foreign or domestic - at least as intelligently as smaller and, for 
the most part, less ably managed firms. The speaker is probably better 
justified in relying - for the security of European manufacturers against 
this new danger - upon the fact, which he reports, that the trust will 
continue to limit its output to certain staple forms of iron, so that there 
will still be a sufficient field for the European industry.
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