INTRODUCTION

It was a revolutionary change in our ways of thinking when the idea of development, social as well as physical, really took hold of mankind.  But our minds are curiously stiff and slow to move, and we still mostly think of development as a process that has taken place, and that is going to take place—­in the future.  And that change is the very stuff of which life consists (not that change is taking place at this moment, but that this moment is change), that means another revolution in the world of thought, and it gives to life a fresh meaning.  No one has, as it appears to me, placed such emphasis upon this as has Henri Bergson.  It is not that he emphasizes the mere fact of the evolution of society and of all human relations.  That, he, and we, may well take for granted.  It has surely been amply demonstrated and illustrated by writers as widely separated in their interpretation of social evolution as Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx.  But with the further thought in mind that, alike in the lowliest physical organism or in the most complex social organism, life itself is change, we view every problem of life from another angle.  To see life steadily and see it whole is one stage.  Bergson bids us see life on the move, ever changing, growing, evolving, a creation new every moment.

For students of society this means that we are to aim at the understanding of social processes, rather than stop short with the consideration of facts; facts are to be studied because they go to make up processes.  We are not to stop short with the study of conditions, but go on to find out what tendencies certain conditions encourage.  All social and industrial questions therefore are to be interpreted in their dynamic rather than in their static aspects.

In the Labor Museum of Hull House is shown a very ingenious diagram, representing the development on the mechanical side of the process of spinning, one of the oldest of the arts.  It consists of a strip of cardboard, about a yard long, marked off into centuries and decades.  From 2000 B.C. up to A.D. 1500 the hand spindle was the only instrument used.  From 1500 up to the middle of the eighteenth century the spinning-wheel was used as well.  From the middle of the eighteenth century up till today has been the period of the application of steam to spinning machinery.

The profound symbolism expressed by the little chart goes beyond the interesting fact in the history of applied physics and mechanics which it tells, on to the tremendous changes which it sums up.  The textile industries were primarily women’s work, and with the mechanical changes in this group of primitive industries were inextricably bound up changes far more momentous in the social environment and the individual development of the worker.