Note 68 — Chapter VIII · LABOUR AS A COMMODITY

If, at this point, any reader should pause to ask: “What, then, ought the Brothers Cheeryble to do? Ought they to leave the selling of safety pins to some less scrupulous persons? Or ought they to go on underpaying the cappers?” I reply that the worthy twins should follow neither of these courses, but should bend their minds to inventing or getting invented a machine that would cap the pins even more cheaply, because much more expeditiously, than the hand workers. The reduction in the cost of production would then allow the payment of decent wages to the operators. Mechanical operations should be done by machines, and hand work should be reserved for those which demand individual variation or peculiar and special perfection. The capping of safety pins, which falls under neither of these heads, is emphatically an operation to which the human brain and hand should not be put.