In former days, the boy who left school and took up employment in a factory learned a trade. He became a shoe-maker, or a harness-maker, or a wheelwright, or a gun-maker. To-day, however, the work on all of these articles has been so subdivided that the boy perhaps becomes stranded in front of a machine which does nothing but punch out the covers for tin cans, or cut pieces of leather for the heels of shoes, or some other finer operation in manufacture. Once he has mastered the comparatively simple method of operating his particular machine, the boy is likely to remain there for all time. His employer--perhaps short-sighted--has no desire to advance him, because this would mean breaking in another boy to handle his machine. Also, it would mean paying more money. Al Priddy, in his illuminating book, "Man or Machine--Which?"[9] thus describes the case of the slave to the machine: [Footnote 9: The Pilgrim Press, Boston.] "The workingman has been taught that his chief asset is skill. It has been his stocks, his bonds, the pride of his life. Poor as to purse and impoverished in his household; his cupboard bare, his last penny spent on a bread crust, he is not humbled; no, he merely stretches out his ten fingers and two callous palms, exactly as a proud king extends his diamond-tipped sceptre, to show you that which upholds him in his birthright. 'My skill is my portion given to the world,' he says. 'I shall not want. See, I am without a penny. I touch this bar of steel, and it becomes a scissors blade. My skill did it. I take this stick of oak and it becomes a chair rung. My skill is the grandest magic on earth, the common magic of every day. By it I live and because of it I hold my head royal high.' "But the machine now attacks and displaces this skill. The cunning of trained fingers is transferred to cranks, cogs and belts. The trade secrets are objectified in mechanical form; able to mix the product, compound the chemicals, or make the notch at the right place. "Besides this loss of skill, the workman loses, in the grind of the machine, his sense of the value of his work. Next to his pride of skill the workman has always been proud to be the connoisseur: stand back near the light with his product on his upraised hand, showing to all passers-by what he has done. Perhaps it was a red morocco slipper for a dancer, or a pearl button to go on the cloak of a little child, or maybe it was a horseshoe to go on the mayor's carriage horse. On a day a party of visitors would come to the little shop and the owner would pick up a hand-forged hammer and say, 'See what John made!' But, in our modern industry, no one man ever completes a task. Each task is subdivided into twenty, forty, a hundred or more portions, and a workingman is given just one to work on, day by day, year after year, for a working generation. "After the time has come when the workman can find no distinct esthetic pleasure in his work, his loyalty to his employers suffers a shock.