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were beginning to spread, its decline was interspersed with aggressive recoveries, and in any case it
has been and is remarkably slow. I could cite innumerable further examples.
This lack of similarity between progression and regression is due to the fact that regression is
caused, not by a corresponding progression or progressions, but by alien and consequently different
ones, whose rhythm it reproduces in reverse. If the retreat or rather the rout of the diligence by the
train was much more rapid than had been its previous development, this was the effect of the
development of railroads, which advanced at quite a different pace than had the development of the
diligence. If religious or general faith fades from and weakens among the masses much less quickly
than it spread out and took root among them, if its ebb is much slower than was the sudden overflow
of its rising tide, it is because the ebb is due to the antireligious elements in scientific or
philosophical ideas whose propagation among the people is slow. If the sole reason or principal for
regression lay in the corresponding progression, that is, if regression had an intrinsic cause, the
dissimilarity I am pointing out would not occur.
From the above it follows that a regression can be as regular as a progression if it depends on a
single progression of which it is the upside-down translation, as it were. Thus the decrease in the
consumption of rye in certain countries shows about the same regularity as the increase in the
consumption of wheat. In all countries having only two political parties electoral statistics indicate
the same gradual character of gains by one and losses by the other. According to navigation statistics,
sailing vessels decreased in fleet size and total tonnage carried just about as regularly as steamships
increased. The marking of steel by the ancient process of tempering subsided after Bessemer’s
discovery quite as gradually as the making of steel by the new process increased, and so forth. But
this case is exceptional because it assumes the direct and complete engagement of an old invention
and a new one, a battle limited to these two adversaries, a battle to the death, with no other old or
new invention intervening during the battle to give aid to the side that is attacked, to strengthen it or
help it find refuge elsewhere. In general, an already established invention is only partially dislodged
from its place, and after the relative upset of its departure, it finds somewhere else to flourish. Or
else it retrenches and, impregnable, immures itself in a part of its old domain, like the art of the
copyists, printing notwithstanding, or hand sewing despite the sewing machine. By confining itself to
a more limited area, it sometimes regains in depth what it has lost in breadth; by shifting about (as
perhaps will be the case with religious faith which moves more than it declines), it encounters new
allies and new aggressors and, supported by the former, attacked by the latter, it seems to follow a
fortuitous course, which visibly transcribes the picturesque statistical curves with their irregularity
alternating rises, plateaux and falls. 8 In short, even where the conditions of the duel to the death
indicated above seem to obtain, it is rare that the regression is as regular as the progression whose
the sequel it is. No statistics have been compiled on this subject, but has the work of copyists
decreased as regularly as that of typographers has increased? Has the work of seamstresses
decreased as regularly as that of sewing machines has increased, or that of coachman decreased (if
indeed it has decreased) as regularly as that of train conductors has increased?
We can see that the question we are treating touches on the much debated one concerning the
competition of machines with men for jobs, and our solution may be not without usefulness in
resolving this debate or in better understanding the problem as well as many other economic
problems related to it. What is important to see clearly is that an old invention, represented by the
workers who incarnate its imitation, tends to increase by itself, as does its corresponding need among
the public; the fatal or wounding confrontation with a new invention, represented by a machine, is