Note 140 — Chapter VII · The Machine Industry
Reading edition
It follows also, among other secondary consequences, that the effective industrial life of the skilled workman will, in order to the best average effect, begin at an appreciably more advanced age, and will therefore be shortened by that much. The period of preparation becomes more protracted, more exacting and more costly, and the effective life cycle of the workman grows shorter. Although it does not, perhaps, belong in precisely this connection, it may not be out of place to recall that the increasingly exacting requirements of the machine industry, particularly in the way of accurate, alert and facile conformity to the requirements of the machine process, interrupt the industrial life of the skilled workman at an earlier point in the course of senile decay. So that the industrial life-cycle of the workman is shortened both at its beginning and at its close, at the same time that the commonplace preparation for work grows more costly and exacting.
Child labour, which once may, industrially speaking, have been an economical method of consuming the available human material, is no longer compatible with the highest industrial efficiency, even apart from any question of hardship or deterioration incident to an excessive or abusive recourse to child labour; it is incompatible with the community’s material interests. Therefore the business community—the body of businessmen at large—for whose behoof the industries of the country are carried on, have a direct interest not only in extending the age of exemption from industrial employment but also in procuring an adequate schooling of the incoming generation of workmen. The business community is evidently coming to appreciate this state of the case, at least in some degree, as is evidenced by their inclination to favour instruction in the “practical” branches in the public schools, at the public expense, as well as by the wide-reaching movement that aims to equip private and state schools that shall prepare the youth for work in the various lines of industrial employment.