ABSTRACT
To many among the workers the obvious cause of their misery was the machines that displaced them from the wage labour they needed for their bread. Uprisings became commonplace in the Midlands, as bands of displaced workers broke into textile manufactories and hacked the dreaded machines to bits in response to the obvious threat to their livelihoods. It is significant that David Ricardo's initial difficulty with Adam Smith's doctrine of value, and the difficulty that would eventually lead to his own momentous reformulation, involved the special case of human labour in its relation to machinery. Ricardo had discovered a profound paradox involving the profitability of machinery. The chapter presents some enquiry respecting the influence of machinery on the interests of the different classes of society, a subject of great importance, and one which appears never to have been investigated in a manner to lead to any certain or satisfactory results.
