MAN VERSUS MACHINE.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 5075, 14 January 1927, Page 4

MAN VERSUS MACHINE.

AN UNEQUAL CONTEST. PRICE OF A HUMAN SOUL. “The greatest problem in the. world to-day,” says Sir lan Hamilton, “is between man and the machine.’’ It seems to be his opinion that unless man masters the machinery he has created, with enormous powers of destruction, man himself will be mastered and at last destroyed by those senseless monsters. That thought o'f his, which I certainly share, is. directed mainly to war (writes Sir Philip Gibbs). Our engines oof destruction have become so powerful in annihilation that if they were fully used in another world war there would not be much left in civilisation or humanity. But there is another aspect of this conflict, between man and machines, and that is applied to peace. It is illustrated by the remarkable adventure of Mr Ford—“ Our Henry,” as the Americans call him —in 'reducing the. working hours of the employees in his motor-car industry to a fiveday week of forty hours all told. At first -sight.it seems very splendid for the men, especially as they are being paid at the rate o'f five dollars a day. They will, get Saturday and Sunday off for rest and recreation. It is, Mr Ford’s theory that with that extra leisure they will not only, be capable of more intense activity during working hours, enabling him to speed up output, but that they will develop new tastes and desires in order to fill their leisure which will stimulate all kinds of industry in the United States, and make money circuate more rapidly. ‘

There is something very startling about this at a time when our miners have been 'forced back to an increase of hours, and personally I think that Henry Ford, and thousands o'f other American business pion, have more vision with their eyes shut than many of our industrialists who imagine- they have their eyes wide open.

One touch of Henry Ford would do us all a lot of good in ©very department of business, which is a humiliating avowal for the patriotic Englishman.

But this question o’f the man and the machine raises the. whole, problem of our ‘future world, and the Ford system is not without itsi critics and its victims. It is the most advanced demonstration of mechanical efficiency. S

The man does very little. ■ It is the machinery that does the hardest work, and when I .went through s* great American factory a 'few years ago and saw motor-cars —not Fords.— manufactured from the first stage to the; last, until they were driven round a yard and ready for the market, between breakfast and lunch, I realised with a sense, of awe, and even of fear, that the machinery counted for jnore than the human element which served it. The men there, in those works were the slaves of the machine. On a moving platform, speeded up a little day by day, t<he parts travelled towards them, and they fitted in nuts and bolts, and did little things with a, rapid gesture, repeated with a deadening regularity, as though the human hand were itself but a mechanical tool, as the machine passed on to anothei- human being and then to another and another all down the track. The men were not talking te each other, or singing or whistling. They had a strained, intense look. They were keeping pace with the everquickening movement of that mechanical framework. They were speeding up output in order to enable the master of the machines to pay them five dollars a day.

“For how long ?” I asked that quegr tion of my guide, who was proud of iiis system. “Well,” he said slowly, “four years is about the time one of our men can stand the strain. After that he has to be put on another kind of job, or scrapped.” This mechanical efficiency, speeded up to the finest pitch of standardisation, is nerve-wearing and perhaps soul-destroying. Fve dollars a day is not a fair price for a man’s soul. There is an alternative to .that, ma-chine-made tyranny. It is so to adjust our lives that we can use all these scientific for the service of mankind, instead of being enslaved by them.

In this country we can, I am convinced, learn a lesson from the methods of Henry Ford while avoiding the: dangers that lurk in them.