The indictment of the dominion of machinery by Ruskin, Morris, and other humanist reformers, was primarily based upon the degradation of the worker's manhood by denying him the conditions of good work.'It is a sad account,' said Ruskin, 'for a man to give of himself that he has spent his life in opening a valve, and never made anything but the eighteenth part of a pin.' But, important as is this charge of degraded and joyless work, we must begin our analysis of the costs of mechanical or factory labour at a lower level.
From the great body of the factory labour which goes to the provision of our national income, the first great human cost that emerges is the burden of injurious fatigue which results from muscular or nervous overstrain, and from the other physical and moral injuries which are the natural accompaniments of this overstrain.
Modern physiology and pathology have done much to give plain meanings to these costs.Physical fatigue is not of necessity an injury to the body, nor is all feeling of fatigue a pain.The ideally correct conduct of the organism may, indeed, appear to preserve an exact and a continuous balance between the anabolic and the catabolic, the nutrition of cell life and the expenditure in function.Sir Michael Foster gives the following classical description of this process.1'Did we possess some optic aid which should overcome the grossness of our vision, so that we might watch the dance of atoms in this double process of making and unmaking in the human body, we should see the commonplace living things which are brought by the blood, and which we call the food, caught up into and made part of the molecular whorls of the living muscle, linked together for awhile in the intricate figures of the dance of life;and then we should see how, loosing hands, they slipped back into the blood, as dead, inert, used-up matter.In every tiny block of muscle there is a part which is really alive, there are parts which are becoming alive, there are parts which have been alive but are now dying or dead; there is an upward rush from the lifeless to the living, a downward rush from the living to the dead.This is always going on, whether the muscle be quiet and at rest, or whether it be active and moving.Some of the capital of living material is always being spent, changed into dead waste, some of the new food is always being raised into living capital.
'Thus nutritive materials are carried by the blood to the tissues, and the dead materials of used-up and broken-up tissues are carried away for destruction or ejection.Under normal conditions of healthy activity this metabolic balance is preserved by the alternation of work and repose, the tissue and energy built up out of food during periods of rest forming a fund for expenditure during periods of work, while the same periods of rest enable the destructive and evacuative processes to get rid of any accumulation of dead tissue due to the previous period of work.Abnormally intense or unduly prolonged activity of any portion of the body uses up tissue so fast that its dead material cannot be got rid of at the proper pace.It accumulates in the blood or in the kidneys, liver or lungs, and operates as a poison throughout the whole system.Over-fatigue thus means poisoning the organism.
'The poisons are more and more heaped-up, poisoning the muscles, poisoning the brain, poisoning the heart, poisoning at last the blood itself, starting in the intricate machinery of the body new poisons in addition to themselves.
The hunted hare, run to death, dies not because he is choked for want of breath, nor because his heart stands still, its store of energy having given out, but because a poisoned blood poisons his brain, poisons his whole body.'2The Italian biologist Mosso has demonstrated that the depressing effect of fatigue is not confined to the local centre where it is produced, but is carried to all parts of the body.When the blood of a dog fatigued by continued running is injected into the vessels of a sound dog, the latter exhibits all the signs of fatigue.The inability of the system to dispose of the used-up tissue, which thus accumulates and poisons the system, is one injurious factor in fatigue.Another is the undue depletion of the stores of glycogen and oxygen, which the organism provides for the output of muscular activity.Glycogen is a compound of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen made by muscle tissue out of the sugar or dextrine supplied to it by the blood.'The stored glycogen of the muscles keeps uniting chemically with the oxygen of the blood.The glycogen is broken down into a simpler chemical form, giving off the gas carbon dioxide and other acid wastes, and releasing heat and mechanical energy in the process.With the released energy contraction of the muscles takes place and hence ultimately the industrial labour which is our special theme.'3'Glycogen is, as it were, stored for use.It is always being replenished, always being depleted....But when the muscle is active and contracts energetically, there is a run upon our glycogen.It is used up faster than it is built in muscle.The glycogen is spent so rapidly that there is not time for the blood-stream to bring back to the tissue the potential material for its repair.'4 Though the liver furnishes an extra store of glycogen, this too may be depleted by undue muscular activity.
