The smoke rising from factory chimneys over England's cities seemed a sign of humankind's unheard-of power — and so it was. But this power had its own idol: the machine and the profit that everything else was made to serve. At the loom and the spinning frame, the human being ceased to be human and became a pair of "working hands" — an appendage of the mechanism, a line of expense best trimmed to the bone. Not the machine for the human, but the human for the machine: this was the reversal quietly accomplished at the weaving and spinning benches.
The catastrophe of this age did not thunder with cannon, yet it broke the lives of millions. Children of seven and eight, and women, worked twelve to sixteen hours amid noise and dust, losing their health and their childhood. Cities swelled into slums where crowding and filth bred epidemics of typhus and cholera. The old crafts died, unable to compete with the factory; the centuries-old peasant way of life, which had fed people and held them together, fell apart, and in its place grew a life ruled by the factory whistle.
The captivity was a dependence of a new kind. The worker was chained not to the land but to the factory: without it there was no bread, and yet at any moment it could turn him out at the gate. The labor a man poured into a thing that passed straight out of his hands to the market became a stranger's — alienated from the very one who had performed it. And over it all hung the cyclical crises: the machines would run day and night, then fall silent — and hunger and unemployment would engulf whole districts.
The return ripened slowly but surely. The state was forced to intervene: factory acts, beginning with the act of 1833, limited child labor and the working day and required that children be given at least a little schooling. Workers learned to unite — trade unions were born, and a man no longer had to face the master alone. And the Church gave voice to conscience: the encyclical "Rerum novarum" (1891) for the first time, in the name of Christianity, stood up for the dignity of the laborer and for a just wage. This very alienation of the human from his labor was described by Marx — and from his analysis would grow the ideologies of the twentieth century, which would try to solve the problem in ways that gave birth to new captivities. But the first lesson had been learned: even in a world of machines, a human being cannot be reduced once and for all to "working hands."