From Miss Martineau’s translation of the “Positive Philosophy.”

INDUSTRIAL evolution has gone on, as in natural course of prolongation from the preceding period. The revolutionary crisis assisted and confirmed the advance by completing the secular destruction of the ancient hierarchy, and raising to the first social rank, even to a degree of extravagance, the civic influence of wealth. Since the peace this process has gone on without interruption, and the technical progress of industry has kept pace with the social. I assigned the grand impetus of the movement to the time when mechanical forces were largely adopted in the place of human industry; and during the last half-century the systematic use of machinery, owing to the application of steam, has caused prodigious improvements in artificial locomotion, by land, river, and sea, to the great profit of industry. This progression has been caused by the union of science and industry, though the mental influence of this union has been unfavorable to the philosophy of science, for reasons which I shall explain. In recent times the industrial class, which is, by its superior generality, most capable of entertaining political views, has begun to show its capability, and to regulate its relations with the other branches by means of the system of public credit which has grown out of the inevitable extension of the national expenditure. In this connection we must take note, unhappily, of the growing seriousness of the deficiencies which I pointed out at the end of the last chapter. Agricultural industry has been further isolated through the stimulus given to manufacturing and commercial industry, and their engrossing interest under such circumstances. A worse and wholly unquestionable mischief is the deeper hostility which has arisen between the interest of employers and employed,—a state of things which shows how far we are from that industrial organization which is illustrated by the very use of those mechanical agencies, without which the practical expansion of industry could not have taken place. There is no doubt that the dissension has been aggravated by the arts of demagogues and sophists, who have alienated the working class from their natural industrial leaders; but I cannot but attribute this severance of the head and the hands much more to the political incapacity, the social indifference, and especially the blind selfishness of the employers, than to the unreasonable demands of the employed. The employers have taken no pains to guard the workmen from seduction by the organization of a broad popular education, the extension of which, on the contrary, they appear to dread; and they have evidently yielded to the old tendency to take the place of the feudal chiefs, whose fall they longed for, without inheriting their antique generosity towards inferiors. Unlike military superiors, who are bound to consider and protect their humblest brother soldiers, the industrial employers abuse the power of capital to carry their points in opposition to the employed; and they have done so in defiance of equity, while the law authorized or countenanced coalitions among the one party which it forbade to the other. Passing thus briefly over evils which are unquestionable, I must once more point out the pedantic blindness of that political economy which, in the presence of such conflicts, hides its organic helplessness under an irrational declaration of the necessity of delivering over modern industry to its unregulated course. The only consolation which hence arises is the vague but virtual admission of the insufficiency of popular measures, properly so called,—that is, of purely temporal resources,—for the solution of this vast difficulty, which can be disposed of by no means short of a true intellectual and moral reorganization.