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scientifically constructed machinery are taking the place of the simple

manipulation of the human hand--there has arisen, all the world over, a



large body of males who find that their ancient fields of labour have

slipped or are slipping from them, and who discover that the modern world



has no place or need for them. At the gates of our dockyards, in our

streets, and in our fields, are to be found everywhere, in proportion as



modern civilisation is really dominant, men whose bulk and mere animal

strength would have made them as warriors valuable" target="_blank" title="a.无价的,非常重要的">invaluable members of any



primitivecommunity, and who would have been valuable even in any simpler

civilisation than our own, as machines of toil; but who, owing to lack of



intellectual or delicatemanual training, have now no form of labour to

offer society which it stands really in need of, and who therefore tend to



form our Great Male Unemployed--a body which finds the only powers it

possesses so little needed by its fellows that, in return for its intensest



physical labour, it hardly earns the poorest sustenance. The material

conditions of life have been rapidly modified, and the man has not been



modified with them; machinery has largely filled his place in his old field

of labour, and he has found no new one.



It is from these men, men who, viewed from the broad humanitarian

standpoint, are often of the most lovable and interesting type, and who



might in a simpler state of society, where physical force was the

dominating factor, have been the heroes, leaders, and chiefs of their



people, that there arises in the modern world the bitter cry of the male

unemployed: "Give us labour or we die!" (The problem of the unemployed



male is, of course, not nearly so modern as that of the unemployed female.

It may be said in England to have taken its rise in almost its present form



as early as the fifteenth century, when economic changes began to sever the

agricultural labourer from the land, and rob him of his ancient forms of



social toil. Still, in its most acute form, it may be called a modern

problem.)



Yet it is only upon one, and a comparatively small, section of the males of

the modern civilised world that these changes in the material conditions of



life have told in such fashion as to take all useful occupation from them

and render them wholly or partlyworthless to society. If the modern man's



field of labour has contracted at one end (the physical), at the other (the

intellectual) it has immeasurably expanded! If machinery and the command



of inanimate motor-forces have rendered of comparatively little value the

male's mere physical motor-power, the demand upon his intellectual



faculties, the call for the expenditure of nervousenergy, and the exercise

of delicate manipulative skill in the labour of human life, have



immeasurably increased.

In a million new directions forms of honoured and remunerative social



labour are opening up before the feet of the modern man, which his

ancestors never dreamed of; and day by day they yet increase in numbers and



importance. The steamship, the hydraulic lift, the patent road-maker, the

railway-train, the electric tram-car, the steam-driven mill, the Maxim gun



and the torpedo boat, once made, may perform their labours with the

guidance and assistance of comparatively few hands; but a whole army of men



of science, engineers, clerks, and highly-trained workmen is necessary for

their invention, construction, and maintenance. In the domains of art, of



science, of literature, and above all in the field of politics and

government, an almost infiniteextension has taken place in the fields of



male labour. Where in primitive times woman was often the only builder,

and patterns she daubed on her hut walls or traced on her earthen vessels



the only attempts at domestic art; and where later but an individual here

and there was required to design a king's palace or a god's temple or to



ornament it with statues or paintings, today a mighty army of men, a

million strong, is employed in producing plastic art alone, both high and



low, from the traceries on wall-paper and the illustrations in penny

journals, to the production of the pictures and statues which adorn the



national collections, and a mighty new field of toil has opened before the

anciently hunting and fighting male. Where once one ancient witch-doctress



may have been the only creature in a whole district who studied the nature

of herbs and earths, or a solitarywizard experimenting on poisons was the



only individual in a whole territory interrogating nature; and where later,

a few score of alchemists and astrologers only were engaged in examining



the structure of substances, or the movement of planets, today thousands of

men in every civilised community are labouring to unravel the mysteries of



nature, and the practical chemist, the physician, the anatomist, the

engineer, the astronomer, the mathematician, the electrician, form a mighty






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