Transcriber's Note:
Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has been preserved.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.For a complete list, please see the end of this document.
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THE CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE SERIES.
Edited by HAVELOCK ELLIS.
In seeking to express and illustrate some of the laws of thestructural changes in modern industry, I have chosen a focus of studybetween the wider philosophic survey of treatises on Social Evolutionand the special studies of modern machine-industry contained in suchworks as Babbage's Economy of Manufactures and Ure's Philosophy ofManufactures, or more recently in Professor Schulze-Gaevernitz'scareful study of the cotton industry. By using the term "evolution" Ihave designed to mark the study as one of a subject-matter in processof organic change, and I have sought to trace in it some of thoselarge movements which are characteristic of all natural growth.
The sub-title, A Study of Machine-Production, indicates a furthernarrowing of the investigation. Selecting the operation of modernmachinery and motors for special attention, I have sought to enforce aclearer recognition of organic unity, by dwelling upon the morematerial aspects of industrial change which mark off the last centuryand a half from all former industrial epochs. The position of centralimportance thus assigned to machinery as a factor in industrialevolution may be—to some extent must be—deceptive, but in bringingscientific analysis to bear upon phenomena so complex and soimperfectly explored, it is essential to select some single clearlyappreciable standpoint, even at the risk of failing to present thefull complexity of forces in their just but bewildering interaction.
[vi]In tracing through the Business, the Trade, and the IndustrialOrganism the chief structural and functional changes which accompanymachine-development, I have not attempted to follow out the numerousbranches of social investigation which diverge from the main line ofinquiry. Two studies, however, of "the competitive system" in itsmodern working are presented; one examining the process ofrestriction, by which competition of capitals gives way to differentforms of combination; the other tracing in periodic Trade Depressionsthe natural outcome of unrestricted competition in private capitalistproduction.
In some final chapters I have sought to indicate the chief bearings ofthe changes of industrial structure upon a few of the deeper issues ofsocial life, in particular upon the problem of the Industrial Town,and the position of woman as an industrial