If, then, the capitalistic employment of machinery, on the one
 hand, supplies new and powerful motives to an excessive lengthening of
 the working-day, and radically changes, as well the methods of labour,
 as also the character of the social working organism, in such a manner
 as to break down all opposition to this tendency, on the other hand it
 produces, partly by opening out to the capitalist new strata of the working-class,
 previously inaccessible to him, partly by setting free the labourers it
 supplants, a surplus working population, [72] which
 is compelled to submit to the dictation of capital. Hence that remarkable
 phenomenon in the history of modern industry, that machinery sweeps away
 every moral and natural restriction on the length of the working-day. Hence,
 too, the economic paradox, that the most powerful instrument for shortening
 labour-time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment
 of the labourer’s time and that of his family, at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital. “If,” dreamed Aristotle,
 the greatest thinker of antiquity, “if every tool, when summoned, or even
 of its own accord, could do the work that befits it, just as the creations
 of Daedalus moved of themselves, or the tripods of Hephaestos went of their
 own accord to their sacred work, if the weavers’ shuttles were to weave
 of themselves, then there would be no need either of apprentices for the
 master workers, or of slaves for 385the lords.” [73] And Antipatros, a Greek poet of the time of Cicero, hailed the invention of the water-wheel for grinding corn, an invention that is the elementary
 form of all machinery, as the giver of freedom to female slaves, and the
 bringer back of the golden age. [74] Oh! those heathens! They understood, as the learned Bastiat, and before him the still wiser
 MacCulloch have discovered, nothing of Political Economy and Christianity.
 They did not, for example, comprehend that machinery is the surest means
 of lengthening the working-day. They perhaps excused the slavery of one
 on the ground that it was a means to the full development of another. But
 to preach slavery of the masses, in order that a few crude and half-educated
 parvenus, might become “eminent spinners,” “extensive sausage-makers,” 
 and “influential shoe-black dealers,” to do this, they lacked the bump
 of Christianity.