280101906 Harvard University, Dent of Social Ethics. VARD UNIVER LITTAUER LIBRARY APR 18 1951 OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION GRADUATE SCHOOL THE WALTER SCOTT PRESS, NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE. PREFACE. IN seeking to express and illustrate some of the laws of the structural changes in modern industry, I have chosen a focus of study between the wider philosophic survey of treatises on Social Evolution and the special studies of modern machine-industry contained in such works as Babbage's Economy of Manufactures and Ure's Philosophy of Manufactures, or more recently in Professor SchulzeGaevernitz's careful study of the cotton industry. By using the term "evolution " I have designed to mark the study as one of a subject-matter in process of organic change, and I have sought to trace in it some of those large movements which are characteristic of all natural growth. The sub-title, A Study of Machine-Production, indicates a further narrowing of the investigation. Selecting the operation of modern machinery and motors for special attention, I have sought to enforce a clearer recognition of organic unity, by dwelling upon the more material aspects of industrial change which mark off the last century and a half from all former industrial epochs. The position of central importance thus assigned to machinery as a factor in industrial evolution may be-to some extent must be— deceptive, but in bringing scientific analysis to bear upon phenomena so complex and so imperfectly explored, it is essential to select some single clearly appreciable standpoint, even at the risk of failing to present the full complexity of forces in their just but bewildering interaction. |