The direct results of this excessive tendency to specialization, whereby not only the work but the worker becomes divided into mere fragments, are threefold.  Hobson, in his work on John Ruskin, thus classifies them.  In the first place, narrowness, due to the confinement to a single action in which the elements of human skill or strength are largely eliminated; secondly, monotony, in the assimilation of man to a machine, whereby seemingly the machine dominates man and not man the machine, and, thirdly, irrationality, in that work became dissociated in the mind of the worker with any complete or satisfying achievement.  The worker does not see the fruit of his travail, and cannot therefore be truly satisfied.  To spend one’s life in opening a valve to make a part of a pin is, as Ruskin pointed out, demoralizing in its tendencies.  The clerk who only operates an adding machine has little opportunity for self-expression.

Thus, millions of men have lost both the opportunity for real physical exertion, the incentive to work in the joyous competition of skill, and finally the reward of work in the sense of achievement.

More serious than this, however, has been the destructive effort of quantity, the great object of the mechanical age, at the expense of quality.

Take, for example, the printing-press:  No one can question the immense advantages which have flowed from the increased facility for transmitting ideas.  But may it not be true that the thousandfold increase in such transmission by the rotary press has also tended to muddy the current thought of the time?  True it is that the printing-press has piled up great treasures of human knowledge which make this age the richest in accessible information.  I am not speaking of knowledge, but rather of the current thought of the living generation.

I gravely question whether it has the same clarity as the brain of the generation which fashioned the Constitution of the United States.  Our fathers could not talk over the telephone for three thousand miles, but have we surpassed them in thoughts of enduring value?  Washington and Franklin could not travel sixty miles an hour in a railroad train, or twice that speed in an aeroplane, but does it follow that they did not travel to as good purpose as we, who scurry to and fro like the ants in a disordered ant-heap?

Unquestionably, man of to-day has a thousand ideas suggested to him by the newspaper and the library where our ancestors had one; but have we the same spirit of calm inquiry and do we co-ordinate the facts we know as wisely as our ancestors did?

Athens in the days of Pericles had but thirty thousand people and few mechanical inventions; but she produced philosophers, poets and artists, whose work after more than twenty centuries still remain the despair of the would-be imitators.

Shakespeare had a theatre with the ground as its floor and the sky as its ceiling; but New York, which has fifty theatres and annually spends $100,000,000 in the box offices of its varied amusement resorts, has rarely in two centuries produced a play that has lived.