The natural conditions of social specialisation are these: In proportion to the degree of specialisation the time of work should be shortened and the interest of the worker extended. It does not hurt the human mind—a strong, healthy, well-developed mind—to make rivets for a little while. “Ah, but,” you will reply, “if the riveter only worked a little while he could not earn enough to live on.” Here is where our economic fallacies come in. The man with the machine can turn out as many rivets in an hour as the man working by hand could in a day. Therefore his hour’s work is equal to what was a day’s work. That is the value of machinery. It gives more wealth for less effort, the maximum product with the minimum expense of nerve force and of time. Every step of our elaborate mechanical specialisation should have relieved the worker of more and more hours of labour and set that much time and strength free for other use. The infinite multiplication of wealth by machinery meets its own problem of overspecialisation. Here are a hundred men, making cloth alone on a hundred hand looms, and earning thereby a dollar a day each—one hundred dollars. Here are these hundred men organised, specialised; ten of them run machine looms, turning out cloth tenfold, equal to a thousand dollars a day. Other ten, specialised, run the mill and its business; twenty of them with machines earning ten times what the hundred did, or forty of them working half a day each, or eighty of them working quarter of a day. The earning power of the man plus the machine is so enormously multiplied that he is richly able to take the needed rest and variety of exercise which will enable him to do his wearing work without injury, and at the same time give society the benefit of the extreme specialisation. “But—but,” cries the offended reader, “the man does not own the machine! he did own the loom. It takes capital to run a mill, and capital has to be paid!” The question of property rights comes in later, in Chapter XV. This is all a question of men, of human beings, and how they best work together, doing the most for Society with the least injury to themselves. This chapter is not taking up the question of capital nor of property, but simply seeking to show that specialisation, as such, need not injure the worker, because the very nature of specialisation is to reduce man’s work. Why we have also made it reduce man’s pay is not so easily explained. That the greatest multiplier of wealth should impoverish the producer surely indicates some defect in our methods.