What is it that injures the man who turns a crank all day? It is an evil both of omission and commission, involving a waste of cerebral energy in compelling the attention of the human brain to a point of execution so narrow and uninteresting, and also the lack of development involved in doing nothing else. To forcibly focus the attention on a detail for a long time is a ruinous expense of nerve force, and it is this which makes the employment of children in such work so doubly damnable. To concentrate and hold attention is not natural to childhood; that is why they fail to do it and are so frequently killed and injured by their machines. Accidents to working children happen mostly toward the end of the day’s work, as they grow more unequal to the unnatural strain. And when the child does prematurely muster all his powers and display as a child the concentration of a man, he is thereby ruined for life, prematurely aged, a wasted and broken thing before he is grown. In the work of the Chicago Settlements a case was found where an honest, industrious man of thirty broke down and died, and the doctor’s verdict was that _he died of old age_; every part of him was used up by excessive labour from early childhood. It is bad enough for the adult. The paralysing effects of twelve hours’ repetition of some one small mechanical effort is painfully clear to any observer. Does it follow, therefore, that we must discontinue the machine and go back to the period where “one man makes one thing,” the ideal of our well-meaning reversionists? Is it so much more noble for one man to make one canoe than for a thousand men to make an ocean steamer? Must we go without the ocean steamer and go back to the canoe period of civilisation because it is better to be an all-around savage than a man who makes rivets by machinery? Is there no way of saving the individual life of the rivet-maker without “giving up the ship”? Assuredly there is. The evil effects of this complex, modern work do not lie in its complexity, or its delicate mechanical accuracy, but may be traced straight to the door of our existing economic fallacies and errors; to the overwork and underpay and general evil conditions based on those errors. Approach the blissful savage making his own canoe and hire him at a minimum wage to make canoes for you all day and every day for the weary years of a short, worn-out life; the fact that he made a whole thing would not suffice to make him happy or develop that so desirable globularity. If the riveter took the same interest in his steamer that the savage did in his canoe, and worked no longer at his riveting than the savage at his cutting and sewing, his fractional production of an enormous common engine for common good would give him more pleasure than the savage’s unitary production of a tiny private engine for private good.