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Title: The factory

Author: Jonathan Thayer Lincoln

Release date: February 5, 2023 [eBook #69958]
                Most recently updated: October 19, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Houghton Mifflin Company

Credits: Bob Taylor, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FACTORY ***

  Transcriber’s Note
  Italic text displayed as: _italic_




By Jonathan Thayer Lincoln


  THE FACTORY.
  THE CITY OF THE DINNER-PAIL.


  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
  BOSTON AND NEW YORK




THE FACTORY




  THE FACTORY

  BY
  JONATHAN THAYER LINCOLN


  [Illustration: decoration]


  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
  The Riverside Press Cambridge
  1912




  COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY JONATHAN THAYER LINCOLN

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  _Published January 1912_




TO MY FATHER




NOTE


This essay is based upon a course of lectures delivered before the
Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance associated with
Dartmouth College. These lectures were subsequently printed in _The
Mediator_, a magazine published in Cleveland, Ohio, and devoted to
establishing a better social understanding between the man who buys
and the man who sells labor.




BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


In preparing the historical part of this essay I have consulted many
authorities, and in particular I have made free use of the following
works.

DEFOE, Daniel

  A plan for the English Commerce, London, 1728.

BAINES, Edward

  History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain. London, 1835.

GUEST, Richard

  A Compendious History of the Cotton Manufacture. Manchester, 1823.

  The Theory and Practice of Cotton Spinning. Glasgow, 1833.

URE, Andrew, M.D.

  The Philosophy of Manufactures. London, 1835.

BABBAGE, Charles

  On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. London, 1822.

CARLYLE, Thomas

  Essay on Chartism.

TAYLOR, Richard Whately Cooke-

  The Modern Factory System. London, 1891.

ABRAM, Annie

  Social England in the Fifteenth Century. London, 1909.

Among the many articles printed in the periodical press the following
from the _Quarterly Review_ are especially helpful.

  Vol. XLI, 1829. Condition of the English Peasantry.

  Vol. LVII, 1836. The Factory System.

  Vol. LXVII, 1841. Infant Labour.




CONTENTS


    I. The Industrial Revolution                                     3

   II. Sir Richard Arkwright                                        16

  III. Mechanical Inventions                                        30

   IV. The Factory System                                           46

    V. The Factory Towns                                            64

   VI. Chartism                                                     85

  VII. The Factory and Social Progress                              99




INTRODUCTION


As you approach the City of the Dinner Pail from the west, the blue
waters of the harbor lie between you and the towering factories which
line the opposite shore. By day the factories are not attractive
to the eye, their massive granite walls, prison-like and unlovely,
suggest only the sordid side of toil,—the long day’s confinement of
twenty-seven thousand men and women amidst the monotonous roar of
grinding wheels. But should you thus approach the city late on a
winter afternoon the scene is marvelously changed; the myriad lights
of the factories shine through the early darkness, transforming
prison-walls into fairy palaces, castles of enchantment reflected
with mysterious beauty in the deep waters of the bay. There is
no suggestion now of sordid toil, the factory walls have become
ramparts of light and speak of some romantic story.

Realism and romance lie very near together, and we shall find the
factory, when we come to study the history of it, something more than
granite walls and grinding machinery; the factory, indeed, has been
an important instrument in the upward progress of mankind. There is
an ugly side to the story, especially in the beginning, for when the
craftsmen of the world were transformed into factory operatives,
thousands suffered a degree of poverty never known before, and many
perished in the transition to the new system of manufacturing; but in
the end that system revolutionized the whole social order, gave to
toil its rightful dignity, and, creating a new loyalty to the cause
of labor, became an element in the development of modern democracy.
It is this brighter side of the story that we have now to consider.




THE FACTORY




THE FACTORY




I

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION


In the fifteenth century the wealth of England, which until then had
been made up chiefly of raw products, was greatly increased by the
introduction of manufactures, the most important being the making
of cloth. Previous to this first extension of industry, it had been
impossible for the toiler to rise out of his class except by becoming
a priest or a soldier; but with the increase of manufactures wealth
became a means of social advancement, and thus industry not only
tended to break down the feudal order by tempting serfs away from
their masters, but the wealth created by manufactures became an
important element in the creation of the middle class.

The sudden and extensive introduction of machinery at the close of
the eighteenth century drove hand labor out of employment, and, for
a time, caused great suffering among the masses; but in the end it
created an ever increasing demand for labor—a new labor more skillful
than the old. Moreover, it concentrated the laboring population in
great centres of industry, thus creating a class consciousness which
demanded that attention should be given to the rights of labor,
created a new ideal of the dignity of toil and gave to the world that
vision of the inclusive cause of labor which was destined to advance
in a marvelous way to the social progress of mankind.

Slavery had been abolished in England long before the Industrial
Revolution, and yet, in the first quarter of the last century men
in chains worked in the British coal-mines and were bought and
sold when the property changed hands. For generations before the
Industrial Revolution, the lord of the manor had ceased to demand
the labor of the villein as his due, but while serfdom had been
abolished, the traditions of it still remained; and it was not until
the establishment of the factory that labor became free in fact as
for generations it had been in name.

The historical event, that great movement which led in our generation
to a complete reconstruction of the social order, we call the
“Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century.” It was an
extremely complex event, originating in economic, political, and
social conditions; but while it was the consequence of many causes,
it derived its chief influence in the beginning from a series of
remarkable inventions in the art of making textile fabrics.

This art is as old as civilization, originating when men, advancing
from barbarism, put aside the skins of beasts for raiment of their
own making; but from the days of the first rude distaff and the
simple bamboo loom until the time so recently past when, by a series
of the most brilliant inventions known to any craft, the art was
revolutionized, the implements remained unchanged. Up to the year
1769 the machines in use in the manufacture of cotton cloth in
England were practically the same as those which for centuries had
been employed in India. There were no factories as there are to-day:
the cotton was spun and woven into cloth by hand, and both the
spinning and the weaving were done in the cottages of the craftsmen.

The first of these inventions was a simple one, but it made necessary
all that followed. From the beginning of the art, one man could
weave into cloth all the yarn that several spinners could produce.
Indeed, it was seldom that a weaver’s family, his wife and children
all working at the spinning wheel, could supply sufficient weft for
his loom; and this difficulty was increased by the invention of the
fly-shuttle in the year 1738. This invention, made by John Kay,
consisted in giving motion to the shuttle by a mechanical device
which saved time and exertion to the weaver and nearly doubled the
daily product of his loom. The increased demand for yarn led to
many experiments, and at last a machine was produced upon which
many threads could be spun by a single pair of hands: the water
frame commonly attributed to Richard Arkwright. With this important
invention came many others in the same field, making famous the names
of Hargreaves, Crompton, and Cartwright.

The moment it became possible to accomplish by machinery what
formerly had been done entirely by hand, the first effect was to
increase the productive power of the workman and thus to add vastly
to the wealth of the nation, and secondly, to gather into the
factories the craftsmen who had formerly worked in their homes.

In the beginning of the eighteenth century the textile manufacturing
of England was carried on by craftsmen dwelling in the rural
districts, the master clothiers living in the greater towns, sending
out wool to be spun into yarn which, returned to them prepared for
the loom, was re-distributed among other hand workers in other
cottages. The Lancashire weaver worked in his cottage surrounded by
a bit of land, and generally combined small farming with domestic
manufacturing. Sometimes a single family performed all the labor,
the wife and daughters working at carding and spinning, the father
operating the loom; sometimes other craftsmen joined the household
and worked as members of one family. The extent of mercantile
establishments and the modes of doing business were very different
from what they were soon to become. It is quite true that a limited
number of individuals had, in previous ages, made fortunes by trade,
but until the very end of the seventeenth century the capital in the
hands of British merchants was small. Because of the bad condition
of the roads and the lack of inland navigation, goods were conveyed
by pack horses with which the Manchester chapmen traveled through
the principal towns, selling their goods to the shopkeepers, or at
the public fairs, and bringing back sheep’s wool to be sold to the
clothiers of the manufacturing districts.

In the writings of modern socialists we find the domestic system held
up for admiration as the ideal method of production. The dreamers
look back regretfully to the days when manufactures were combined
with farming, and they quote from Goldsmith’s _Deserted Village_.
Let us, however, turn to a more prosaic but more trustworthy
account, which is to be found in Daniel Defoe’s _Plan of the English
Commerce_. The author is writing enthusiastically in praise of
English manufactures, and, having pointed out how in the unemployed
counties women and children are seen idle and out of business, the
women sitting at their doors, the children playing in the street, he
continues: “Whereas, in the manufacturing counties, you see the wheel
going almost at every door, the wool and yarn hanging up at every
window; the looms, the winders, the combers, the carders, the dyers,
the dressers all busy; and the very children as well as the women
constantly employed ... indeed there is not a poor child in the town
above the age of four but can earn his own bread.”

When we come to study the brutalizing social conditions which
obtained in the manufacturing towns following the establishment of
the factory, we shall do well to keep in mind these words written by
an eighteenth century student in praise of the domestic system; when
we hear the socialists declare that the factory created wage slavery,
let us remember this earlier and more monstrous slavery.

Richard Arkwright, the inventor of the spinning-frame, was a man of
great genius. Endowed with the inventive faculty, and even more with
the ability to perfect the inventions of others, he possessed as well
extraordinary executive ability, and having brought his spinning
machinery to the point of practical efficiency, he organized the
modern factory system as the means of obtaining the highest results
from the new mechanisms. The spinning frame was too cumbersome to be
operated in the cottage, and, moreover, it required a greater power
to operate it than that of the human hand, so Arkwright built his
first factory which was run by horse power, and from this beginning
was evolved the factory as we know it to-day. But important as were
the inventions in cotton manufacture, the factory would never have
become the mighty power that it is, except for the steam engine; and
it is interesting to note that in the same year in which Arkwright
took out his patent for spinning by rollers, Watt invented his
device for lessening the consumption of fuel in fire engines, that
epoch-making invention by means of which the factory system as
perfected by Arkwright was to become the material basis of modern
life.

Like the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution was a movement
destined to change the very course of human thought. Mechanical
invention contributed to the force of the earlier movement—the
invention of printing and of the mariner’s compass—so that side by
side with the scholars restoring to the world its lost heritage of
learning, craftsmen and sailors played their parts in printing the
books by which the learning was disseminated, and in manning the
ships that discovered new continents. The Renaissance, however, was
essentially an intellectual movement to which mechanical invention
was merely an aid, while the Industrial Revolution was due in an
important measure to machinery. The movement began in the cotton
industry, but soon a similar expansion occurred in all other
manufactures. Machinery made possible a vast production; and the
steam engine, first applied to manufacture, later became the means of
distributing the commodities.

The Industrial Revolution, thus springing from the sudden growth in
the use of machinery, occasioned not only economic but political
and social results. On the economic side, the effect was to extend
old industries and to create new ones, as well as to revolutionize
the methods of the production and distribution of wealth. On the
social side it created new classes of men, breaking down the barriers
of ancient feudalism, and on the political side it led to the
enfranchisement of the working classes. The Industrial Revolution
accomplished for England what the political revolution did for
France, but by more peaceful means. Yet not alone in France was
the event achieved in blood—for the Factory as well as the Terror
had its victims. The history of the factory is no dry summary of
patent rights and inventions, inventories of cotton and cotton
goods, abstracts of ledgers, journals, cash-books, and pay-rolls,—it
is a human story,—_laissez-faire_, over-production, enlightened
selfishness, were no abstract terms, but vital human problems.

Because the Industrial Revolution profoundly influenced the social
and political life of England, and later of the whole world, the
history of the factory, which contributed so much to its influence,
becomes of vast importance. The first chapter relates to brilliant
achievements in the field of mechanical invention. Then follows the
dismal story of how a multitude of craftsmen were transformed into
factory operatives—the untold suffering of oppressed workingmen.
Later we see the English yeoman replaced by the master manufacturer
who soon became a force in the political life of the nation, finding
his way into Parliament and even into the Peerage. For the common
people the revolution began with great suffering, but ended in
opening new avenues for their social and political advancement.
Antagonistic in the beginning to the welfare of the masses, it aided
powerfully, in the end, the fulfillment of those ideals of liberty,
equality, and fraternity which at that moment had taken such a mighty
hold upon the thoughts of men.




II

SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT


The _Shaving of Shagpat_, that remarkable allegory with the writing
of which George Meredith commenced his literary career, has been
given several interpretations; without seriously venturing another,
it has seemed to me that this fanciful story deals with the chief
events in the Industrial Revolution.

“So there was feasting in the hall and in the city, and over earth”:
we read towards the end of the tale, “great pledging the sovereign
of Barbers, who had mastered an event and become the benefactor of
his craft and of his kind. ’Tis sure the race of Bagarags endured for
many centuries, and his seed were the rulers of men, and the seal of
their empire stamped on mighty wax the Tackle of Barbers.”

Shibli Bagarag,—could he not well have been Richard Arkwright, the
barber, inventor of the spinning-frame, master of an event? In
Shagpat the Clothier, we discover the smug and comfortable British
aristocracy; in the Identical, that magic hair in Shagpat’s beard
which gave him a position of power greater even than the King, we
observe Feudal Privilege; the sword of Aklis, with the steel of which
the Identical was cut, may well stand for the factory, a weapon
gained after many trials by Arkwright, so that of him it might be
written as it was of Shibli Bagarag: “Thou, even thou will be master
of the event, so named in anecdotes, and histories, and records, to
all succeeding generations.”

Richard Arkwright, who first saw the light of day at Preston on the
23d of December, 1732, was the youngest of thirteen children born
to humble parents, and he grew to manhood without education, being
barely able to read and write. At an early age he was apprenticed
to a Preston barber and when he became a journeyman he established
himself in the same business.

Fate was in a jesting mood when she decreed that the chief actor in
that remarkable social drama, the Industrial Revolution, should be a
penny barber; and we may wonder if the governing classes appreciated
the irony, when twenty years later, in recognition of his genius, the
barber was raised to the honor of knighthood and his lady privileged
to walk before the wives of the untitled gentry.

Richard Arkwright, at the age of twenty-eight, was not content day
after day to shave the stolid faces of lower class Englishmen, but,
having gained a knowledge of a chemical process for dyeing human
hair, he commenced to make wigs for upper class Englishmen—wigs
dyed to suit any complexion. This occupation took him away from the
barber’s chair and sent him traveling about the country. On such a
tour in 1761, he met a lady in the city of Leigh,—Margaret Biggins
was her name,—and he married her; and in the same city at a somewhat
later date he heard of certain experiments which had been made by a
man named High in constructing a machine for spinning yarn. He gained
this secret from a clock-maker named Kay, with whom he afterwards
formed a partnership, by getting Kay—so the gossips said—loquaciously
drunk at a public-house. Concerning his wife, history has little to
say except that she quarreled with him because of the interest he
took in High’s machine; and commencing to make experiments on his own
account he became so absorbed in his workshop that his lady, fearing
that they might be thrown upon the parish for support, begged him to
return to his razor, and because he refused smashed the first model
of the spinning-machine and thus precipitated a tremendous family
row.

Arkwright is commonly credited with the invention of spinning by
rollers, but while to him is undoubtedly due the success of that
invention he did not originate it. The inventor of that ingenious
process was neither Arkwright nor High, but John Wyatt of Birmingham,
who in 1738 took out a patent in the name of Lewis Paul. In 1741 or
1742 these two men set up in Birmingham a mill “turned by two asses
walking around an axis,” and in which ten girls were employed; while
later a larger mill containing two hundred and fifty spindles and
giving employment to twenty-five operatives was built. Wyatt wrote a
pamphlet entitled, _A Systematic Essay on the Business of Spinning_,
in which he showed the great profits which would attend the
establishment of a plant of three hundred spindles. Wyatt’s factory,
however, did not prosper and it seems probable that his machinery
also passed into the hands of Arkwright.

It was in the year 1767 that Hargreaves invented the spinning-jenny,
and two years later Arkwright took out his patent claiming that he
had “by great study and long application invented a new piece of
machinery, never before found out, practiced or used, for the making
of weft or yarn from cotton, flax, and wool; which would be of great
utility to a great many manufacturers, as well as to His Majesty’s
subjects in general, by employing a great number of poor people in
working the said machinery and in making the said weft or yarn much
superior in quality to any heretofore manufactured or made.” However
lacking in originality this famous invention may have been, however
great may have been the debt which Arkwright owed to Wyatt and Paul,
to John Kay and to High, nevertheless, to him belongs all the credit
of the first successful introduction of spinning by machinery.

Having obtained this patent, Arkwright found himself without the
capital necessary for carrying out his plans; and he returned to
his native city of Preston and there applied to a friend, Mr.
John Smalley, a liquor merchant, for assistance. So reduced were
his circumstances at this time that going to vote at a contested
election, which occurred during his visit to Preston, his wardrobe
was in so tattered a condition that a number of his friends advanced
the money to purchase decent clothes in which he might appear in
the poll-room; and once during this period he having applied for
pecuniary aid to a Mr. Atherton, that gentleman refused to entertain
Arkwright’s plan because of the rags in which the inventor was
dressed.

It was in Preston, then, that Arkwright first fitted up his perfected
spinning machine, in the parlor of a house belonging to the free
grammar school. Here Arkwright successfully demonstrated the
utility of his invention and first received financial support. In
consequence of the riots which had taken place in the neighborhood
of Blackburn on the invention of Hargreaves’s spinning-jenny, by
which many of the machines were destroyed and the inventor driven
from his native county to Nottingham, Arkwright and Smalley, fearing
similar outrages, also went to Nottingham accompanied by John Kay,
the loquacious clock-maker; so that Nottingham became the cradle of
the two great inventions in cotton spinning. Here, Arkwright also
applied for aid to the Messrs. Wright, Bankers, who made advances on
the condition that they should share in the profits of the invention;
but as the machine was not perfected as soon as they had hoped they
withdrew their support and he turned to Mr. Samuel Need, a partner of
Jedidiah Strutt, the inventor of the stocking frame. Strutt examined
Arkwright’s mechanism, declared it to be an admirable invention,
and the two men of wealth agreed to a partnership with the Preston
barber; and a mill was erected at Nottingham.

It was an unpretentious establishment, that first little cotton mill;
it gave employment to not more than a dozen operatives, and the
machinery was turned not by a great steam engine, but by a pair of
patient horses harnessed to a treadmill,—yet it contained the germ of
the modern factory and the modern factory system. Later, Arkwright
built another and larger factory at Cromford in Derbyshire, driven by
water power—from which circumstance his spinning-machine came to be
called the water-frame.

The cotton industry of England which Arkwright established developed
slowly; in the five years, ending with 1775, the annual import of
cotton into Great Britain was only four times the average import at
the beginning of the century. But when in the year 1785 Arkwright’s
patent was finally set aside and his spinning machinery became
public property, a great extension of cotton manufacture followed,
accompanied by a marvelous national prosperity. Arkwright, although
deprived of his monopoly, was by this time so firmly established in
the industry that he remained the dominant figure in the yarn market,
fixing the price of the commodity for all other spinners; and thus he
accumulated a great fortune.

While Arkwright was without doubt perfectly familiar with the
experiments of both Wyatt and High, nevertheless it was the Preston
barber and not the original inventors who first produced yarn fit
for weaving. It is proverbial that inventors seldom reap the harvest
of wealth which they sow; they are the dreamers and their reward is
in beholding a perfected mechanism—their work of art. So it was with
Wyatt and High. They dreamed of spindles turned by power and saw
their spindles turn; but Arkwright dreamed of a nation made rich
and powerful by these same inventions, and he, too, lived to see his
dream come true.

Sir Richard Arkwright possessed all the qualities essential
to success—tireless energy, enthusiasm, perseverance, and
self-confidence. He believed in himself and so he compelled others
to believe in him. His usual working day began at five o’clock in
the morning and did not end until nine at night; when he was fifty
years of age he lengthened this day by two hours, which he devoted
to acquiring the education denied him in his youth. He had unbounded
confidence in the success of his adventures and was accustomed to say
that he would pay the national debt—an interesting circumstance, for
surely by his genius the national debt was paid many times over.

In the year 1786 he was appointed high sheriff of Derbyshire, and
when about that time the King narrowly escaped assassination at the
hands of Margaret Nicholson, Arkwright, having presented an address
of congratulation from his county to the King, received the honor
of knighthood. He died on the 3d of August, 1792, at the age of
sixty. The _Annual Register_ recording that event says not so much
as a single word concerning Arkwright’s masterful genius which even
then had set in motion a mighty social revolution. It mentions only
the great fortune which he had acquired as a manufacturer of cotton
yarn,—so difficult it is for the critic to place a true value on the
life work of a contemporary.

As you approach the City of the Dinner Pail from the west and
gaze across the blue waters of the harbor, the eye rests upon the
towering factories which line the opposite shore. Within those
walls twenty-seven thousand men and women living in a degree of
comfort never known before to the spinners and weavers of the world,
earn their daily bread. Those towering factories are, every one,
monuments to the genius of Richard Arkwright, the penny barber of
Preston. If he appropriated the inventions of others, he perfected
these inventions and made them of permanent value to mankind; and
moreover, he arranged the machinery into series, organized the
factory system, and revolutionized industry.

Says Carlyle: “Richard Arkwright, it would seem, was not a beautiful
man; no romance hero with haughty eyes, Apollo lip, and gesture like
the herald Mercury; a plain, almost gross, bag-cheeked, pot-bellied
Lancashire man, with an air of painful reflection, yet also of
copious free digestion;—a man stationed by the community to shave
certain dusty beards in the northern parts of England at halfpenny
each.... Nevertheless, in strapping razors, in lathering of dusty
beards, and the contradictions and confusions attendant thereon the
man had notions in that rough head of his; spindles, shuttles,
wheels and contrivances plying ideally within the same, rather
hopeless looking, which, however, he did at last bring to bear. Not
without great difficulty! his townsfolk rose in mob against him,
for threatening to shorten labor, to shorten wages; so that he had
to fly, with broken wash pots, scattered household, and seek refuge
elsewhere. Nay, his wife, too, rebelled; burned his wooden model of
his spinning wheel; resolute that he should stick to his razors,
rather;—for which, however, he decisively, as thou wilt rejoice to
understand, packed her out of doors. Oh! reader, what a Historical
Phenomenon is that bag-cheeked, pot-bellied, much-enduring,
much-inventing barber! French revolutions were a-brewing, to resist
the same in any measure, Imperial Kaisers were impotent without the
cotton and cloth of England; and it was this man who gave to England
the power of cotton.”




III

MECHANICAL INVENTIONS


A distinction should be made between the factory and the factory
system. The latter was not new to England, having been employed
during the Roman occupation; and with the introduction of the
woolen industry under Edward III, we again find the factory system
established on an extensive scale.

John Winchcombe, commonly called Jack of Newbury, who died about the
year 1520, made use of the factory system on a very extensive scale.
In Fuller’s _Worthies_ you may read how he “was the most considerable
clothier without fancy or fiction England ever beheld,” and how “his
looms were his lands, whereof he kept one hundred in his house,
each managed by a man and a boy.” Jack of Newbury was celebrated in
a metrical romance, and the following lines taken from it contain an
interesting description of his famous industrial establishment.

    “Within one room, being large and long,
    There stood two hundred looms full strong:
    Two hundred men the truth is so,
    Wrought in these looms all in a row;
    By every one a pretty boy
    Sat making quills with mickle joy.
    And in another place hard by
    A hundred women merily
    Were carding hard with joyful cheer
    Who, singing sat with voices clear;
    And in a chamber close beside
    Two hundred maidens did abide,

           *       *       *       *       *

    These pretty maids did never lin
    But in their place all day did spin:

           *       *       *       *       *

    Then to another room came they
    Where children were in poor array,
    And every one sat picking wool,
    The finest from the coarse to cull:
    The number was seven score and ten
    The children of poor silly men,
    Within another place likewise
    Full fifty proper men he spied,
    And these were sheer men every one,
    Whose skill and cunning there was shown:

           *       *       *       *       *

    A dyehouse likewise he had then
    Wherein he kept full forty men:
    And also in his fulling mill,
    Full twenty persons kept he still.”

Here, indeed, we have the factory system—in which the division of
labor is a conspicuous feature—employed with all its modern details;
but not the steam-driven factory, building great cities and changing
the whole social life of the kingdom.

The original mode of converting cotton into yarn was by the use of
distaff and spindle, a method still employed in the remote parts of
India. The distaff is a wooden rod to which a bundle of cotton is
tied loosely at one end, and which the spinner holds between the left
arm and the body while with his right hand he draws out and twists
the cotton into a thread. This simple process is the basis of all the
complicated spinning machinery in use at the present time.

In a modern cotton factory there are three departments of labor,
carding, spinning, and weaving; and we have now to consider briefly
these three processes. The purpose of carding is to clean the
cotton and lay the fibres in a uniform direction. This was at first
accomplished by hand, the implement employed being little different
from an ordinary comb; later an improved device was used consisting
of a pair of large wire brushes. This, we must observe, was a
primitive operation, and the amount of cotton which one person could
thus prepare for spinning was very small.

We have already seen that the invention of the fly-shuttle so
increased the demand for yarn that ingenious men were induced to
make mechanical experiments for the purpose of supplying this
demand—experiments which, in the end, led to the invention of the
spinning-frame. The spinning-frame, in turn, increased the demand for
carded cotton and skillful mechanics again set about to meet this new
requirement, and the result was the building of the carding-engine.
This invention was not made at once, nor by any particular
individual; but was the result of a number of improvements made
at different times and by different persons. One of these men was
Thomas High, the inventor of the spinning-jenny; another was James
Hargreaves who so improved the jenny that he is commonly called the
inventor of it; and finally, Richard Arkwright himself took the crude
machine devised by these men and perfected it. Thus it came about
that the modern carding-engine as well as the spinning-frame, was
made of practical value by this much-enduring, much-inventing barber.

The invention of the fly-shuttle, as we have seen, led to an
increased demand for yarn, and this demand was further augmented
about the year 1760 when the Manchester merchants began to export
cotton goods in considerable quantities to Italy, Germany, and the
North American colonies. It was then no uncommon thing for a weaver
to walk three or four miles in the morning, and call on five or six
spinners, before he could collect yarn enough to serve him for the
remainder of the day.

Ingenious mechanics set about the task of producing more yarn. The
first of these was Thomas High, a reed maker, residing in the town of
Leigh, who engaged one Kay, a clock-maker, and this is the same Kay
who was afterwards employed by Arkwright to make the wheels and other
apparatus for a spinning-machine. This machine was set up in the
garret of High’s house. Now, Thomas High had a daughter who watched
with keen interest the progress of his experiments—her name was
Jane—and in honor of her he called the machine the spinning-jenny.
It is commonly stated—even in so authoritative a history as Baines’s
we find the error—that the credit for the original invention of
the spinning-jenny is due to Hargreaves, he having made the first
machine in 1767. But Guest has shown quite conclusively by the sworn
statement of one Thomas Leather, a neighbor of High, that the latter
completed a similar machine in 1764.

However this may be, James Hargreaves, a weaver of Stand-Hill, near
Blackburn, perfected the original jenny and made it a practical
working machine so that history has quite justly named him the
author. From the first Hargreaves was aware of the value of his
invention, but not having the ambition to obtain a patent he kept the
machine as secret as possible, using it only to spin yarn for his own
weaving. An unprotected invention of such importance, however, could
not remain long the private property of a single weaver, and soon
a knowledge of his achievement spread throughout the neighborhood;
but instead of gaining admiration and gratitude for Hargreaves, the
spinners raised the cry that the invention would throw multitudes out
of employment and a mob broke into his house and destroyed his jenny.

After this, Hargreaves moved to Nottingham, where, with a Mr. Thomas
James, he raised sufficient capital to erect a small mill; here he
took out a patent in 1770,—one year after Arkwright had patented the
water-frame. Before leaving Lancashire, Hargreaves made and sold to
other weavers a number of jennies; and in spite of all opposition the
importance of the invention led to its general use.

A desperate effort was made in 1779, during a period of distress,
to put down the machine. A mob scoured the country for miles around
Blackburn demolishing jennies and with them all carding-engines,
water-frames, and other machinery; but the rioters spared the
jennies which had only twenty spindles, as these were by this time
admitted to be useful to the craftsmen. Not only the working classes,
but the middle and even the upper classes entertained at this time a
profound dread of machinery. The result of these riots was to drive
spinners and other capitalists from the neighborhood of Blackburn to
Manchester, increasing the importance of that rapidly growing town
which was destined to become the world centre of the cotton industry.

The story of this early opposition to the introduction of machinery
deserves attention not only as an interesting episode in the history
of the factory, but because even to-day a similar opposition comes to
the surface with each new improvement in the method of manufacture.
It is also an interesting fact that Lord Byron made his maiden
speech in the House of Lords in opposition to the Nottingham Riot
Bills, introduced into Parliament for the protection of owners of
machinery. There were two of these bills, one “for the more exemplary
punishment of persons destroying or injurying any stocking- or
lace-frames, or other machines or engines used in the frame-work
knitting manufactory, or any articles or goods in such frames or
machines”; the other “for the more effectual preservation of the
peace within the county of Nottingham.”

These two bills were the result of rioting among the lacemakers of
this county and their object was to increase the penalty for breaking
machinery, from transportation to death, to permit the appointment of
special constables in times of disturbance, and to establish watch
and ward throughout the disturbed parts. These bills and the debates
upon them throw a strong light upon the extent of the disturbances,
and indicate the attitude of the government, at that time, toward the
laboring poor.

The important inventions in carding and spinning led to a rapid
advance in cotton manufacture; the new machines not only turned off a
greater quantity of yarn than had been produced by hand, but the yarn
was also of a superior quality. The water-frame spun a hard, firm
yarn, well adapted for warps, while the jenny produced a soft yarn
suitable for spinning weft; but the yarn produced on neither of these
machines could be advantageously used for making the finer qualities
of goods.

This defect in the spinning-machinery was remedied by still another
device called the mule jenny, but now termed simply the mule,
so named because it combined the principles of both Arkwright’s
water-frame and Hargreaves’ jenny. The mule was invented by Samuel
Crompton, a weaver living at Hall-in-the-Wood near Bolton. He
commenced his experiments in 1774, but it was five years before
he completed the machine. Crompton took out no patent and only
regretted that public curiosity would not allow him to keep his
little invention for himself. The mule was first known as the
Hall-in-the-Wood wheel, then as the muslin wheel because it made yarn
sufficiently fine for weaving that fabric, and finally by its present
name.

As the inventor made no effort to secure a patent, the mule became
public property, and was generally adopted by manufacturers, but
Crompton himself received no other reward than a grant of five
thousand pounds voted him by Parliament in 1812. Although his means
were small, he was always in easy circumstances, until the latter
part of his life, when, being no longer able to work, he was reduced
to poverty. Certain manufacturers who had profited by his invention
then subscribed for the purchase of a life annuity, to which fund
foreign as well as English spinners contributed. Crompton died on
January 26, 1827.

Having considered the inventions in the art of spinning, we now turn
to the power loom built in 1785 by the Reverend Edmund Cartwright,
of Hollander House, Kent. A loom moved by water power had been
contrived as early as the seventeenth century by one De Gennes, and
described as “a new engine to make linen cloth without the help of
an artificer.” But the machine never came into general use; and in
about the middle of the eighteenth century there is record of another
power loom, also a French invention, which suffered a similar fate.
Describing his own loom Cartwright says that in the summer of 1784 he
fell in company with some gentlemen of Manchester who were discussing
Arkwright’s spinning-machinery. One of the company observed that, as
soon as Arkwright’s patents expired, so many mills would be erected
and so much cotton spun that hands could not be found to weave it.

To this observation the ingenious clergyman replied that Arkwright
should set his wits to work to invent a weaving-mill. But the
Manchester gentlemen unanimously agreed that the thing was
impractical. Cartwright argued, however, that, having seen exhibited
in London an automaton figure which played at chess, he did not
believe it more difficult to construct a machine which would weave.
He kept this conversation in mind and later employed a carpenter and
a blacksmith to carry his ideas into effect. Thus he built a loom
which, to his own delight, produced a piece of cloth. The machine,
however, required two powerful men to work it, but Cartwright, who
was entirely unfamiliar with the art of weaving, believed that he had
accomplished all that was required, and on the 4th of April, 1785,
he secured a patent. It was only then that he commenced to study the
method by which the craftsmen wove cloth, and he was astonished when
he compared the easy working of the hand loom with his own ponderous
engine. Profiting by his study, however, he produced a loom which in
its general principles is precisely the same as the looms used to-day.

Thus was invented the machinery of the cotton mill; but there
remains to be considered the one other contrivance without which the
vast extension of manufactures would have been impossible and the
manufacturing towns, which we are about to consider, would never have
attained the size and importance which enabled them to become factors
in the political life of England. I refer to the steam engine.

In 1763, James Watt was employed in repairing a model of Newcomen’s
steam engine, and, noting certain basic defects, undertook to remedy
them. He perceived the vast possibilities of a properly constructed
engine and, after years of patient labor he gave to the world the
mighty power of steam. Previous to this time, and indeed until the
year 1782, the steam engine had been used almost exclusively to pump
water out of mines, but with Watt’s improvements it became possible
for the engine to give rotary motion to machinery.

The first cotton mill to install a steam engine made by
Boulton and Watt was the one owned by the Messrs. Robinson in
Nottinghamshire—this was about the year 1785. Two years earlier,
Arkwright had made use of an atmospheric engine in his Manchester
factory, but it was not until 1789 that an improved steam engine was
set up in that city and it was a year later when Arkwright adopted
the device.

The invention of spinning-machinery created the cotton manufacture of
England, but the industry would never have reached the proportions
which it presently did except for the genius of Watt.




IV

THE FACTORY SYSTEM


When the cotton manufacture was in its infancy, all the operations,
from dressing the raw material to folding the finished fabric, were
completed under the roof of the weaver’s cottage. With Arkwright’s
invention it became the custom to spin the yarn in factories and
weave it by hand in cottages. With the invention of the power loom,
it again became the practice to perform all the processes in a single
building.

The weaver’s cottage, then, with its rude apparatus of peg warping,
hand cards, spinning-wheels, and wooden looms, was the steam
factory in miniature; but the amount of labor performed in a single
factory was as great as that which formerly gave occupation to the
inhabitants of an entire district. A good hand-loom weaver could
produce two pieces of shirtings each week; by 1823, a power-loom
weaver produced seven such pieces in the same time.

A factory containing two hundred looms was operated by one
hundred persons who wove seven hundred pieces a week, and it was
estimated that under the domestic system at least eight hundred and
seventy-five looms would have been required to weave this amount of
cloth, because the women of the household had their home duties to
perform while the men were required to devote a considerable portion
of their time to farming. It was therefore further estimated that
the work done in a steam factory containing two hundred looms would,
if performed by hand, give employment and support to a population of
more than two thousand persons. It is interesting here to note, that,
whereas a hand-loom weaver could produce two pieces of shirtings
a week, an ordinary weaver is now able to turn off eight or ten
pieces of equal length every ten hours; so that a modern weave room
containing two hundred power looms operated by twenty-five weavers
represents the labor of a community of sixty thousand craftsmen,
their wives and their children. A population of thirty million would
be required to perform by hand the work now produced by the Fall
River factories alone.

“Watt,” said a celebrated French engineer, “improves the steam
engine, and this single improvement causes the industry of England
to make an immense stride. This machine, at the present time [about
1830], represents the power of three hundred thousand horses or
of two million men, strong and well fitted for labor, who should
work night and day without an interruption and without repose....
A hairdresser invents, or at least brings into action, a machine
for spinning cotton; this alone gives the British industry immense
superiority. Fifty years only, after this great discovery, more than
one million of the inhabitants of England are employed in those
operations which depend, directly or indirectly, on the action of
this machine. Lastly, England exports cotton, spun and woven by an
admirable system of machinery, to the value of four hundred million
francs yearly.... The British navigator travels in quest of the
cotton of India, brings it from a distance of four thousand leagues,
commits it to an operation of the machines of Arkwright, carries back
their products to the East, making them again to travel four thousand
leagues, and in spite of the loss of time—in spite of the enormous
expense incurred by this voyage of eight thousand leagues, the cotton
manufactured by the machinery of England becomes less costly than the
cotton of India, spun and woven by hand near the field that produced
it, and sold at the nearest market. So great is the power of the
progress of machinery.”

Two distinct systems of production preceded the factory. First,
the system of isolated handicraft labor, and second, the system of
cottage industry, which we have already considered and in which the
several members of a family participated,—this, too, was handicraft.
The craftsman, as we have seen, worked with his family in his own
cottage; he owned his loom and the other simple machinery necessary
for the production of cloth, and either he owned his raw material or
received it from the master manufacturer to be returned in the form
of finished fabric. But in either case, the craftsman was his own
master and sold cloth not labor.

With the establishment of the factory, these conditions were
completely changed. The master manufacturer not only owned the
factory building and the machinery, but he owned the raw material.
Moreover to him the operative sold his labor which thereby became
a commodity quite as completely as the cotton he wove into cloth.
This latter circumstance is important because it became the source
of the vast social discontent which, in the end, aided powerfully in
revolutionizing the structure of British society.

To the consideration of this event we shall soon return. For the
moment we must consider briefly the most characteristic distinction
in the process of manufacture under the new system—the extension of
the principle of division of labor.

The principle itself was in no wise new, for the first application
of it was made in a very early stage in the evolution of society. At
the very dawn of civilization it must have become apparent that more
comforts and conveniences could be acquired by one man restricting
his occupation to a single craft—and the development of independent
arts was in itself a division of labor. The same principle was then
carried into the different trades, and at last we find it fully
developed in the cottage system of industry. Thus we find carding,
spinning, and weaving carried on by separate members of the family.
Carding and spinning, which required less bodily strength, was
performed by the women, while the more laborious work of weaving was
given over to the men. With the establishment of the factory and the
introduction of machinery, means were supplied by which this system
could attain its highest development.

The advantages resulting from the division of labor are evident. When
the whole work in any art is executed by one person, that person
must possess sufficient skill to perform the most difficult, and
sufficient strength to perform the most laborious, of the processes;
but by employing a division of labor several persons may be kept at
work executing that part of the whole for which he is best fitted.

The further advantages may be most briefly stated in the familiar
words of Adam Smith: “The great increase in the quantity of work,
which, in consequence of the division of labor, the same number
of people are capable of performing, is owing to three different
circumstances: first, to the increase of dexterity in every
particular workingman; secondly, to the saving of time, which is
commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another,
and, lastly, to the invention of a great number of machines which
facilitate and abridge labor and enable one man to do the work of
many.”

It should be noted that the factory was, in the beginning, not the
creation of capital, but of labor. The early master manufacturers
were risen workingmen. Sir Richard Arkwright, the creator of the
factory, the man who dominated industrial activities in the first
great period of expansion, was a penny barber; but he died a Knight
Bachelor with an income greater than that of many a prince. The
process of social elevation by means of trade began back in the
fifteenth century with the first extension of manufactures. By the
beginning of the eighteenth century it was possible to name five
hundred great estates within a hundred miles of London, which, at
no remote time, had been possessions of the ancient English gentry,
but had later been bought up by tradesmen and manufacturers. The
ancestors of these new landed proprietors had been, less than three
hundred years before, not soldiers, but serfs.

Moreover, generations before the establishment of the factory,
important towns had been raised by manufactures—towns of which
Manchester and Birmingham were examples, in which there were few or
no families of the gentry, yet which were full of families richer
by far than many a noble house. And side by side with this process
of tradesmen rising to the gentry had gone the other process of
declining gentry placing their sons in trade. So, as Defoe pithily
said, “Tradesmen became gentlemen by gentlemen becoming tradesmen.”

The successful artisan under the domestic system became in time
master clothier, and when the factory became the means of further
increase to their fortunes the capital which this class had already
amassed was utilized in building mills and machinery. To this class
belonged the grandfather of Sir Robert Peel, a resident of Blackburn,
who supported himself from the profits of a farm in the neighborhood
and devoted his spare time to mechanical experiments. From this he
came to operate a print-works, and later commenced the manufacture of
cloth.

His son, the first Sir Robert,—the father of the Prime Minister,—was
apprenticed to the trade and came to manhood at the time when the
impulse given to manufactures in England, through the introduction
of machinery, led to a more rapid accumulation of wealth than
had been known in any previous period of history. It is said that
in his youth Robert Peel entertained a presentiment that he would
become the founder of a family. By means of the factory, he amassed
a fortune, was raised to the honor of knighthood, and realized his
presentiment—for in the next generation no name is more famous in the
annals of government than that of Sir Robert Peel, the grandson of a
domestic manufacturer.

As the number of factories increased it became possible for
operatives to rise, first to positions of trust within the factory,
and later to the rank of master manufacturer—so that many a bobbin
boy became a cotton lord.

Within the factory the effect was to intensify that spirit of
discontent which presently arose among the workers—for risen
workingmen are apt to prove the hardest task masters. A graphic
picture of this aspect of factory life as it existed in Manchester
in the first half of the last century, when discontent had become
articulate and the great Chartist movement reached its height is to
be found in Dickens’s _Hard Times_. In that story Josiah Bounderby
of Coketown is typical of this class of risen workingmen—the early
employers of labor under the factory system; Josiah Bounderby, who
learnt his letters from the outside of shops and was first able to
tell time from studying the steeple clock at St. Giles’s Church,
London; Josiah Bounderby, vagabond, errand boy, laborer, porter,
clerk, chief manager, small partner, merchant, banker, manufacturer.
There was very little in the training of Josiah Bounderby, or any
of his class to make them humane employers of labor—and among the
several causes which made the early relation of employer and employee
under the factory system one of bitter strife, this cause, so
strictly social in its origin, is one of the most important.

The establishment of the factory altered completely the relation
between employer and employee. Indeed in the modern sense these
relations were then first established. Labor became a commodity which
the master manufacturer, who was also the capitalist, bought and
which the workingman sold. When in the year 1785 Arkwright’s patents
were set aside and the use of his perfected spinning machinery became
free to all manufacturers, a great extension of the cotton industry
followed. Factories were built throughout Lancashire and about these
factories important cities sprang up in which the modern problem of
the relation of employer and employee had its beginning.

The factory produced cloth more cheaply and in far greater quantity
than was possible under the domestic system. Hand workers sought
employment in the factories. Vast numbers of purely agricultural
laborers left the rural districts for the manufacturing towns. And,
augmenting this great supply of labor, came thousands of children—for
an eight-year-old child was capable of operating a spinning-frame,
in which, for this very reason, the spindles were set near to the
floor. With an unlimited supply of labor, the cotton masters had
only the cost of production to consider, and so it came about that
they thought only of their profits and forgot the human hands
which operated the machinery. England had fallen under the sway of
a book—Adam Smith’s _Wealth of Nations_, which, as Southey said,
“considers man as a manufacturing animal, estimating his importance
not by the goodness and knowledge he possesses, not by his virtues
and charities, not by the happiness of which he may be the source and
centre, not by the duties to which he is called, not by the immortal
destinies for which he is created, but by the gain that may be
extracted from him or of which he may be made the instrument.”

The crowding of this vast laboring population into great industrial
centres, however, gave rise to a class-consciousness which
demanded that attention should be paid to the human element which
distinguished labor from all other commodities, demanded that the
cotton masters should no longer regard the workingman as a slave,
or as merely a part of the machine, but as a free man, and which
demanded further that this free man should be recognized as a citizen
and given the right of suffrage.

It would be interesting for us to follow the history of the factory
where we now leave it, firmly established as the cornerstone of Great
Britain’s wealth, down to the present time, and trace its development
not only in England and America but throughout the civilized world.
It is a surprising story of industrial progress, an important chapter
in the social progress of mankind. But enough has already been
said to prepare us for the consideration of the way in which the
establishment of the factory affected England’s laboring poor. The
actual development of the cotton industry surpasses any dream that
even the barber of Preston could have imagined when he exclaimed that
he, unaided, would pay the national debt.

Less than a century and a half ago, Richard Arkwright built his
first little mill at Nottingham which gave employment to a dozen
operatives. To-day there are one hundred great cotton factories in
the city of Fall River alone, operating three and one half million
spindles, nearly one hundred thousand looms, and giving employment
to twenty-seven thousand operatives. There are more than twenty-five
million spindles in daily operation in the United States, and even
a greater number on the continent of Europe, while Great Britain
contains over fifty million; and when to these we add the spindles of
India, Japan, and China, we have a total of one hundred and twenty
million spindles giving employment to an army of workers as great as
the entire population of England when Arkwright took out his patents
for spinning by rollers. Nor is this all. The factory system first
applied to the cotton industry has been applied to all manufactures
as well as to agriculture and has become the central fact in modern
industrial life.

We are now to take up the question of how the establishment of the
factory affected England’s laboring poor, and to study a little
more in detail the social effects of the Industrial Revolution. In
preparing the way for this discussion we should remember that the
factory was not the sole cause of the Industrial Revolution, although
it was a very important one. Other elements besides the introduction
of machinery had gradually made possible production on a large scale.
Chief among these was the decline of state regulation of industry,
the development of rationalism quickening the scientific spirit,
the growth of the empire and prestige of England which opened great
export markets for the goods of British manufacture, the extension
of banking facilities, and the construction of roads and canals.
All these were elements in producing the Industrial Revolution. But
what gave the movement force to revolutionize the social life of
the common people was the factory, which gathered great masses of
the population into industrial centres in which became possible the
development of class consciousness.




V

THE FACTORY TOWNS


The dictionary contains the history of the race, if you search deep
into its mysteries; every word tells its own story and bears its
present meaning because men, at different times, thought precisely as
they did and not otherwise.

Servius Tullius made six divisions of the citizens of Rome for the
purposes of taxation and these divisions were called classes. A
seventh included the mass of the population, those who were not
possessed of any taxable property—that is to say the laboring
poor. It is from this circumstance that our word “class” derives
its peculiar meaning. Now it is significant that before the great
extension of manufactures occasioned by the factory, we find no
reference in our language to the working classes. The laboring
poor belonged to no class; but when great cities grew up about
the factories, populated by toilers whose interests in life were
identical, the masses suddenly became conscious of their common
life, their common needs, their common hopes. Blindly at first, and
then more surely, they struggled for recognition as a class, and at
last the struggle found expression in the language of their time.
The arousing of this class consciousness amongst the workers I take
to be the chief contribution of the factory to the social progress
of mankind; and for this reason the rise of the manufacturing towns
becomes a subject of great importance.

In the town hall at Manchester there is a fresco by Ford Maddox
Brown which bears the title of “The Establishment of Flemish Weavers
in Manchester,” and shows Queen Philippa visiting the colony which
she founded in 1363. Mr. George Saintsbury, in his history of
Manchester, questions the historical accuracy of the event portrayed;
“but,” he adds, “Queen Philippa did many things which we should
all be sorry to give up as art and literature and which, yet, are
somewhat dubious history.”

No one knows when Manchester first became a manufacturing town,
and the introduction of Flemish artificers in the reign of Edward
III is rather a probable than a certain starting-point. Nothing
is distinctly known of the progress of woolen manufacture, until
the reign of Henry VIII, at which time it had evidently grown into
considerable importance. In the statute of the thirty-third year of
his reign it appears that the inhabitants of Manchester carried on
a considerable manufacture both of linens and woolens by which they
were acquiring great wealth; but no mention has yet been found of
cotton manufacture in that city earlier than the year 1641. By this
time, however, it had become well established.

The labor was entirely handicraft; and it was not until the
establishment of the factory by Arkwright that Manchester and the
other manufacturing towns of England came into prominence in the
political life of the nation; indeed it was not until the nineteenth
century was well advanced that the inhabitants of these cities were
represented in Parliament.

It has been held that the factory is an episode, not an element, in
modern sociological development, and in a strict sense this is true.
But because the factory led to the growth of great manufacturing
towns and caused the migration thither of a vast population from the
agricultural districts, and because it was among this population
that the social discontent, which for a long period had existed in
the lower classes, first became articulate, the factory directly
contributed to the development of modern democracy.

The factory transformed not only craftsmen into operatives, but
agricultural laborers as well, the latter becoming for the first
time free to dispose of their own labor; for while serfdom had been
declared illegal long before the establishment of the factory, yet
the peasant remained dependent, in a large measure, upon the good
will of his employer and he was bound by custom if not by law to the
soil he tilled. The migration of this vast laboring population from
the fields to the towns led to far-reaching social results.

    “Meanwhile, at social Industry’s command
    How quick and fast an increase! From the germ
    Of some poor hamlet, rapidly produced,
    Here a large town, continuous and compact,
    Hiding the face of earth for leagues—and there,
    Where not a habitation stood before,
    Abodes of men irregularly massed
    Like trees in forests—spread through spacious tracts,
    O’er which the smoke of unremitting fires
    Hangs permanent, and plentiful as wreaths
    Of vapor glittering in the morning sun.”

Thus Wordsworth in _The Excursion_ describes the rise of the
manufacturing towns.

Our first concern is with the social conditions existing in these
great manufacturing cities. The factory system was first applied
to the spinning of yarn; but weaving continued, for a time, as a
handicraft. This period was one of great prosperity to the hand-loom
weavers. Before the invention of spinning-machinery, several spinners
were required to furnish one loom with yarn; and one half of the
weaver’s time was spent in waiting for work. This time was employed
in farming. But with the establishment of the spinning-mills the
situation was reversed, and the weaver, plentifully supplied with
yarn, ceased to cultivate the soil and devoted his whole time to the
loom, a far more profitable occupation.

Villages of hand-loom weavers sprang up throughout the country
adjacent to the manufacturing towns, and hither the master spinners
sent their yarn and received back the finished cloth; while sometimes
the weaving was done in “dandy” shops containing eight or ten and
often as many as twenty looms. These little factories were usually
owned by a single weaver who hired others to assist him in his work;
but whatever the method, the profits from the business were always
great.

“One of the happiest sights in Lancashire life at this time,” writes
a contemporary historian, “was the home of a family of weavers....
There could be heard the merry song to the tune of the clacking
shuttles and the bumping of the lathes; the cottage surrounded with
a garden filled with flowers and situated in the midst of green
fields where the larks sang and the throstles whistled their morning
adoration to the rising sun. The weaving thus carried on at home,
where several persons of the same family and apprentices were
employed, made them prosperous small manufacturers and a proud lot of
people.” This was about 1800.

“The trade of muslin weaver,” says a Bolton manufacturer of the same
period, “was that of a gentleman. The weavers brought home their work
in top boots and ruffled shirts; they had a cane and took a coach
in some instances, and appeared as well as military officers of the
first degree. They used to walk about the streets with a five-pound
Bank of England note spread out under their hat-bands; they would
smoke none but long churchwarden pipes, and objected to the intrusion
of any other craftsman into the particular rooms of the public-houses
which they frequented.” This abnormal prosperity, however, preceded
their downfall. Two events were preparing it,—the invention of the
power loom and the application of steam power to all the processes of
manufacture.

Before considering the condition of the laboring population after
the establishment of factories for weaving as well as for spinning,
we should glance backward into the previous history of the laboring
poor. During the prevalence of the feudal system the population
of England was purely agricultural. The chief landed proprietors
possessed a certain number of slaves who were employed generally in
domestic service, but who also manufactured the wearing apparel and
household furniture. “Priests are set apart for prayer,” says an
ancient chronicle, “but it is fit that noble chevaliers should enjoy
all ease, and taste all pleasures, while the laborer toils, in order
that they may be nourished in abundance—they, and their horse, and
their dogs.” This class of laborers, however, was never very large.

The great body of the peasantry was composed, first, of persons who
rented small farms, and who paid their rent either in kind or in
agricultural labor; and secondly, of cottagers, each of whom had
a small parcel of land attached to his dwelling, and the privilege
of turning out a cow, or pigs, or a few sheep into the woods,
commons and wastes of the manor. During this whole period the entire
population derived its subsistence immediately from the land. The
mechanics of each village, not having time to cultivate a sufficient
quantity of land to yield them a sustenance, received a fixed annual
allowance of produce from each tenant. The peasantry worked hard and
fared scantily enough, but still there was never an absolute want of
food; the whole body was poor, but it contained no paupers.

During the fourteenth century the demand for wool not only to supply
the markets of the Netherlands, but also the newly established
manufacture of England, rapidly increased and the owners of the land
found sheep-feeding more profitable than husbandry; and the sudden
extension of manufacture in the fifteenth century greatly increased
the demand. This circumstance led to an important change in the
distribution of the population and the peasants previously employed
in tillage were turned adrift upon the world. The allotments of
arable land which had formerly afforded them the means of subsistence
were converted into sheep walks and this policy greatly accelerated
a social revolution which had already commenced. It eventually
led to a complete severance between the English peasantry and the
English soil; and with the exception of those employed in domestic
manufacture, the little farmers and cottiers of the country were
converted into day laborers depending entirely upon wages for their
subsistence.

Thus when we come to consider the pitiable condition of the working
classes, following the establishment of the factory, we must remember
this underlying cause of the poverty and suffering, holding in mind
the fact that from the beginning the increase of English poor rates
kept pace visibly with the progress of the enclosure of the common
land. Complaints against vagrancy and idleness, and the difficulty of
providing for the poor increased proportionately with the progress of
the system of consolidating farms, and abstracting from the English
cottager his crofts and rights to the common lands. Upon the factory
has fallen the blame for social conditions which had their source
in causes long antedating its establishment—but the factory has
sufficient misery for which to answer.

Arkwright’s inventions, as we have seen, took manufactures out
of the cottages and farm houses of England and assembled them in
factories. Thousands of hands were suddenly required especially in
Lancashire, which until then was comparatively thinly populated.
A great migration of population from the rural districts to the
manufacturing towns was set in motion, thousands of families leaving
the quiet life of the country for the intenser life of the city, but
still the new demand for labor was unsatisfied. The custom sprang
up of procuring apprentices from the parish workhouses of London,
Birmingham, and elsewhere; and many thousand children between the
ages of seven and fourteen years were thus sent to swell the numbers
of the laboring population. Beside the factories stood apprentice
houses in which the children were lodged and fed; and it was also the
custom for the master manufacturer to furnish the apprentice with
clothes.

The work required of the children was exacting. The pay of
the overseers was fixed in proportion to the work produced, a
circumstance which bore hard on the apprentices. The greatest
cruelties were practiced to spur the children to excessive labor;
they were flogged, fettered, and in many cases they were starved
and some were driven to commit suicide. We have it on the authority
of Mr. John Fielding, himself, a master manufacturer and member of
Parliament for Oldham, that the happiest moments in the lives of many
of these children were those passed in the workhouse.

The profits of manufacturing were enormous and so was the greed of
the newborn manufacturing aristocracy. Night work was begun, the day
shift going to sleep in the same beds that the night shift had just
quitted, so that it was a common saying in Lancashire that the beds
never got cold. Although the master manufacturers were unmoved by
the dictates of humanity, they were not proof against the malignant
fevers which broke out in the congested districts and spread their
ravages throughout the manufacturing towns.

Public opinion was soon aroused which led to the institution in
Manchester of a board of health which in the year 1796 made an
interesting report. It appeared that the children and others working
in the cotton factories were peculiarly disposed to the contagion of
fever; and that large factories were generally injurious to those
employed in them even when no particular disease prevailed, not only
on account of the close confinement and the debilitating effect of
the hot and impure air, but on account of the untimely labor of the
night and the protracted hours of the working day.

These conditions with respect to the children not only tended to
diminish the sum of life by destroying the health and thus affecting
the vital stamina of the rising generation; but it also encouraged
idleness and profligacy in the parents, who, in many instances,
lived upon the labor of their children. It further appeared that the
children employed in factories were debarred from all opportunities
of education as well as from moral and religious instruction. The
investigation produced this report and nothing more—“when the dangers
of infection were removed the precautions of mercy were forgotten.”

Later, in the Parliamentary debate of 1815, Mr. Horner, one of the
early factory reformers, graphically described the practices of the
apprentice system. He told how, with a bankrupt’s effects, a gang of
workhouse children were put up for sale and publicly advertised as a
part of the property; how a number of boys apprenticed by a parish
in London to one manufacturer, had been transferred to another and
in the process were left in a starving condition; how an agreement
had been made between a London parish and a Lancashire manufacturer
by which it was stipulated that with every twenty sound children one
idiot should be taken.

Among the master manufacturers who had been incredulous concerning
these conditions until the alarm of contagion arose, was the
first Sir Robert Peel. He made a personal investigation and saw
the abominations of the system; he declared his convictions and
introduced into Parliament the first legislative measure for the
protection of children. This was in the year 1802, and after many
reverses he ultimately obtained the act known as the 42d Geo. III,
“for the preservation of the Health and Morals of Apprentices and
others, employed in Cotton and other mills.”

This act is chiefly interesting because it established the principle
of factory legislation, a principle which later in the century
was greatly to promote the welfare of the masses. His first bill,
however, referred only to apprentices and after its enactment
children instead of being imported from the workhouses as formerly
were nevertheless hired from their parents. Their services were
dignified by the name of free labor, but because they were not
accorded the protection given to apprentices their condition was
little better than that of actual slavery.

The next step in the progress of factory legislation was to extend
the protection to young persons engaged in manual employment whether
apprentices or not. Time does not permit us to follow the interesting
history of factory legislation, under the devoted leadership of Mr.
Horner, Sir John Hobhouse (afterwards Lord Broughton), Mr. Saddler,
and Lord Astley (afterwards the Earl of Shaftesbury). But the
evidences of the social condition of the toilers brought out by the
Parliamentary debates of 1816, 1818, 1819, and 1832, are all of the
same nature and reveal a state of human misery without a parallel in
history.

We turn now from child labor to the sanitary conditions of the
manufacturing towns. The report printed by Doctor Kay in 1832,
is an astounding document; it shows that out of six hundred and
eighty-seven streets inspected, more than one half contained
heaps of refuse or stagnant pools; and of nearly seven thousand
houses inspected, more than one third were out of repair, damp, or
ill-ventilated, and an equally large proportion lacked all sanitary
conveniences, even of the most primitive kind.

The population lived on the simplest diet. Breakfast consisted of tea
or coffee with a little bread, while sometimes the men had oatmeal
porridge; dinner consisted generally of boiled potatoes heaped into
one large dish over which melted lard was poured and sometimes a few
pieces of fried fat bacon were added. Those who obtained higher wages
or families whose aggregate income was large added a greater portion
of animal food to this meal at least three times a week, but the
quantity of meat consumed by the laboring population was not large.

The typical family sat around the table, plunging their spoons into
the common dish and with animal eagerness satisfied the cravings of
their appetite. The evening meal consisted of tea, often mingled
with spirits and accompanied by a little bread. The population
thus scantily nourished was crowded in one dense mass in cottages,
separated by narrow, unpaved streets, in an atmosphere loaded with
smoke. Engaged in an employment which unremittingly exhausted their
physical energies, these men and women lacked every moral and
intellectual stimulus; living in squalid wretchedness and on meagre
food it was small wonder that their superfluous gains were spent
in debauchery. With domestic economy neglected, domestic comfort
unknown, home had no other relation to the factory operative than
that of a shelter. At this period the number of operatives above the
age of forty was incredibly small.

In a pamphlet printed during a great turnout in 1831, we find
certain very interesting statistics concerning 1665 persons whose
ages ranged between fifteen and sixty. Of these 1584 were under
forty-five years of age, only fifty-one between forty-five and
fifty were counted as fit for work, while only three had lived to
be sixty years old. Such figures make it evident that large numbers
of workers, prematurely unfitted for labor, came to live upon the
toil of their own children. Nor was this all, for “puny and sickly
parents gave birth to puny and sickly children, and thus the mischief
continued its progress, one generation transmitting its accumulated
evils to the next.”




VI

CHARTISM


Such was the condition of the manufacturing population of England
in the early days of the factory system. It is evident that these
conditions must inevitably give rise to a deep social discontent
which sooner or later must become articulate, and we find from the
very beginning of the factory system the records of innumerable riots.

The history of these disturbances begins with the opposition to the
introduction of new machinery. Rebellious craftsmen bound themselves
by fearful oaths into secret organizations, the members of which were
known as Luddites, from the name of their legendary leader—Ben Ludd.
His name was the password to their secret meetings, at which plans
were made for the destruction of property, plans afterwards carried
out with open violence. Then followed innumerable riots arising
from that growing social discontent which led in the beginning to
factory legislation, and later to Parliamentary reform. It must not
be thought that only the factory folk were discontented. The unrest
was general throughout the lower classes; it was felt, moreover, in
the ranks of the rapidly growing middle class, and the justice of the
demand for better conditions was admitted now and then by individuals
in the governing class—men of the broader vision. I have in my
possession an interesting pamphlet containing the proceedings in the
trial of indictment against Thomas Walker, a merchant of Manchester,
and others, for a conspiracy to overthrow the constitution and
government and to assist the French, the King’s enemies, should they
invade the Kingdom. The case was tried at the Assizes at Lancaster,
in 1794, and the account throws light upon the true state of the
public mind in Manchester at that time.

Thomas Walker, so it appeared to his accusers, was a pernicious,
seditious, and ill-disposed person, greatly disaffected to the King,
and who did in the hearing of divers liege subjects utter the words:
“What are kings! Damn the King!” Moreover, Mr. Thomas Walker was a
member of the Manchester Reformation Society, a body composed chiefly
of working people. They met at a public house—the Old Boar’s Head,
where the works of Tom Paine were read aloud over innumerable pots
of ale; and a correspondence was carried on with the Society of the
Friends of the People in London and with other more questionable
organizations. The publican, warned by the magistrates that he must
no longer give entertainment to this society, turned the reformers
into the streets, whereupon they sought shelter in the warehouse
of Mr. Walker. Here it was alleged they were trained in the use of
firearms; and here one night they were attacked by members of the
Church and King Club, and a riot ensued. The Reformation Society,
however, maintained that the sole object of their meetings was to
obtain, by constitutional means, an adequate representation of the
people in Parliament.

Discontent continues rife in Manchester, increasing with each year,
and at last we come to an event which typifies to all time this
upward struggle of toiling humanity—the massacre on St. Peter’s Field
which occurred on the 16th of August, 1819. Throughout the whole
preceding summer, on account of the distressed condition of trade,
discontent had been rife in the manufacturing towns; agitation was
at white heat; and the voice of the demagogue was heard with that of
the conscientious reformer. It was proposed to hold at Manchester on
the 9th of August an immense meeting to consider the election by the
unrepresented inhabitants of Manchester of a Parliamentary delegate;
but the purpose of this meeting was declared illegal and it was
prohibited by the authorities. Then another meeting was advertised to
take place on the 16th of August, the stated object being to consider
the most legal and effectual means of obtaining Parliamentary reform.
It was said that this meeting was attended by over one hundred
thousand persons.

Several of the divisions that composed the assembly came upon the
field in regular military formations, accompanied by bands of music
and preceded by banners bearing such mottoes as “Equal Representation
or Death.” Many of the marchers were armed with bludgeons. Most of
the columns, however, marched in silence; and except for the loud
shouts of defiance on the appearance of the yeomen cavalry, sent to
disperse the meeting, there was no disturbance on the part of the
populace.

The assembly was in charge of Henry Hunt, the famous radical, who,
mounting the platform which had been erected upon a cart had just
commenced his opening speech when the civil authorities attempted
to arrest him. This the mob resisted, whereupon the yeoman cavalry
shouting, “Have down with their banners!” charged upon the field, put
the crowds to flight, and in the disorder which followed, a number
were killed and many were wounded.

Says Carlyle: “Who shall compute the waste and loss, the obstruction
of every sort, that was produced in the Manchester region by Peterloo
alone. Some thirteen unarmed men and women cut down—the number of the
slain and maimed is very countable; but the treasury of rage, burning
hidden or visible in all hearts ever since, is of unknown extent.
‘How ye came among us, in your cruel armed blindness, ye unspeakable
County Yeomanry, sabres flourishing, hoofs prancing, and slashed us
down at your brute pleasure; deaf, blind to all our claims, and woes
and wrongs; of quick sight and sense to your own claims only. There
lie poor sallow, workworn weavers, and complain no more now; women
themselves are slashed and sabred, howling terror fills the air; and
ye ride prosperous, very victorious,—ye unspeakable: Give us sabres
too and then come on a little!’”

The treasury of rage burning hidden became visible to all.
Chartism—the demand of the people for equal political rights—sprang
into being; the outward and visible sign of inward suppressed
discontent filled the manufacturing towns with unrestrained
murmurings, and government felt the castle of privilege trembling at
its foundation. Some days later Sidmouth, writing from Whitehall,
congratulated the yeomanry in the name of the Prince Regent for
their effective services in preserving public tranquillity. Public
tranquillity indeed! The cries of those stricken weavers shall yet
shake the empire of Britain.

Peterloo was typical of the discontent which had spread throughout
the laboring population of England. Parliament was assembled in
special session to consider the state of the country and to enact
measures for the suppression of disorder. Lord Grenfell in a
brilliant speech discussed sedition, declaring that the whole nation
was inundated with inflammatory publications intended to stimulate
the multitude to acts of savage violence against all who were eminent
for birth or rank, for talent or virtue. Mr. Canning placed the blame
entirely upon discontented radicals, underrating the wide-spread
demand for parliamentary reform, and advocated the acts which were
passed prohibiting meetings like the one held in Manchester, and in
other ways restricting the liberties of the masses in discussing
social conditions. All of these acts tended to increase the
discontent and hasten forward that reform which alone could save
England from revolution.

All famous Englishmen, however, did not view Peterloo with the eyes
of Lord Grenfell or Mr. Canning. Writing to Thomas Love Peacock,
Shelley said: “Many thanks for your attention in sending the papers
which contained the terrible and important news of Manchester. These
are, as it were, the distant thunders of the terrible storm which
is approaching. The tyrants here, as in the French Revolution, have
first shed blood. May their execrable lessons not be learnt with
equal docility.” Inspired by the Manchester massacre, Shelley wrote
“The Masque of Anarchy,” the spirit of which is summed up in these
stanzas:—

    “Men of England, heirs of Glory,
    Heroes of unwritten story,
    Nurselings of one mighty Mother,
    Hopes of her, and one another;

    “Rise like Lions after slumber
    In unvanquishable number,
    Shake your chains to earth like dew
    Which in sleep has fallen on you—
    Ye are many—they are few.”

And in the same year he wrote:—

    “Men of England, wherefore plough
    For the Lords who lay ye low?
    Wherefore weave with toil and care
    The rich robes your tyrants wear?

    “Wherefore feed, and clothe, and save,
    From the cradle to the grave,
    Those ungrateful drones who would
    Drain your sweat—nay, drink your blood?

    “The seed ye sow, another reaps;
    The wealth ye find, another keeps;
    The robes ye weave, another wears;
    The arms ye forge, another bears.

    “Sow seed,—but let no tyrant reap;
    Find wealth,—let no impostor heap;
    Weave robes,—let not the idle wear;
    Forge arms,—in your defense to bear.”

Fortunately the appeal to arms was unnecessary. The working classes
of England were destined to exemplify Shelley’s lesson,—but by
peaceful means,—were destined to teach the world the great truth that
the many, if accordant and resolute, can always control the few. And
this peaceful conquest is recorded in the history of Chartism.

I have known many labor agitators living in the City of the Dinner
Pail, and almost without exception these men were the sons of English
Chartists. From them I had learned to honor the early British
labor agitator, and to give to the name of pothouse politician
something more than a contemptuous meaning. At the Old Boar’s Head,
in Manchester, and at many another less famous public house in the
manufacturing cities, groups of workingmen gathered, evening after
evening to discuss their wrongs; and over many a pot of ale, and
through many a cloud of tobacco smoke, there emerged at last certain
definite demands for reform.

Workingmen and radicals joined hands; liberal leaders combined with
working-class leaders, and presently there was issued the famous
Charter with its six points,—manhood suffrage, annual parliaments,
the ballot, abolition of property qualifications, payment of members,
and equality of electoral districts. A very sober programme this, but
popular leaders like Fergus O’Connor and Ernest Jones with incendiary
oratory gave it a revolutionary aspect.

So the discontent grew year by year, and year by year it gathered
force. Events in France and elsewhere on the continent excited the
imagination of the governing classes, and every meeting place of
workingmen appeared to be bristling with firearms, but still the
movement grew, and at last the workingmen were ready with their
petition to Parliament. When, on the morning of the 10th of April,
1848, bands of Chartists began to gather on Kennington Common,
carrying red banners and tricolors, all London was astir with
excitement. Government had taken precaution for its defense; the guns
of the Tower were manned and loaded; the employees of the post-office
were supplied with two thousand rifles; the bank was surrounded with
artillery; and behind sand-bags piled upon its roof stood a regiment
of infantry. The bridges and approaches to Westminster were defended
by an army of ten thousand horse, foot, and artillery, while the six
thousand police of London lined the streets, supported by an army of
special constables. And in command of this elaborate defense of the
city against four thousand unarmed workingmen assembled on Kennington
Common to bear a petition to Parliament, was none other than the Iron
Duke himself—Wellington. Surely the voice of the pothouse politicians
had been heard throughout England; it had penetrated the halls of
government—what need had the reformers for powder and shot? And
must we not believe that when five years later the great reform
was enacted, credit for that event was in some measure due to the
resolute and accordant factory folk? Yes, the wheels and spindles of
which Arkwright dreamed brought something more than material wealth
to England; his vision made the nation rich and powerful and his
vision likewise gave to the masses equal political rights.




VII

THE FACTORY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS


We have now traced the history of the factory, from its beginning
with the inventions of Arkwright down to its permanent establishment
in the first half of the last century, and we have noted its
influence upon the social life of England. We have seen how, as early
as the fifteenth century, the introduction of manufactures assisted
in breaking down the feudal system, and how, by making possible the
accumulation of wealth by men of humble birth, it contributed to the
rise of the middle class. We have further seen that at the close of
the eighteenth century the introduction of machinery intensified
these tendencies and exerted a powerful influence on the development
of our modern democracy.

We have, however, confined our attention to a single industry as it
developed in a particular nation,—we have taken the cotton factory as
typical of all factories and its growth in England as typical of its
growth throughout the Western world. But the factory has developed
differently in each industry and its social influence has never been
quite alike in any two nations. When, for instance, Samuel Slater
introduced cotton manufacturing into America, he set up in Rhode
Island an exact counterpart of the English factory. When, later,
other factories were built in New England there took place the same
transition of a vast laboring population from the rural districts
to the manufacturing towns;—but this population was very unlike the
manufacturing population of England. The American factories were
operated by the sons and daughters of Yankee farmers, reared in the
atmosphere of democracy and springing from a race unaffected by the
traditions of feudalism; for them political equality had been already
won, yet even in America the factory became an instrument for social
progress. In the rapidly growing manufacturing towns these country
folk found a new life of opportunity for social advancement; they
did not remain operatives long, but advanced to higher callings;
and to take the places which they left, thousands of workers came
from Lancashire here to enjoy that civic freedom for which their
brothers in the Old World were still contending. To-day in our
Southern States we see a similar process at work,—another race of
men advancing in the social scale by means of the factory; from the
mountains of the Carolinas thousands of young men and women, reared
in a civilization almost unbelievably primitive, are flocking to the
manufacturing towns, there to enjoy the advantages of modern life.
But however varied have been the phases of the development of the
factory in different parts of the world there has always been this
common phenomenon—the concentration of the laboring population in
manufacturing cities and the development of social discontent leading
to social progress.

The nineteenth century was the age of Power Discovered; mechanical
inventions, the concentration of industry, the extension of the
factory system, new means of transportation destroyed the last
vestige of the feudal world and left the democratic ideal triumphant
but unfulfilled: a new century dawns,—the age of Power Humanized.
The industrial world in which we live, with all its peculiar
characteristics, has been built upon the ruins of the feudal order,
and in due time will give place to a newer and better civilization.
Radicals of to-day see visions of to-morrow; reformers fired by the
visions seek to make them real; while conservatives, clinging to the
traditions of a dead past, strive to stay the inevitable progress of
mankind. Truth never changes, but the knowledge of truth grows deeper
with each age; no political institution, no social institution is
sacred unless it is founded upon some eternal truth, and all human
institutions must change with the increasing knowledge of mankind.
Everywhere in the Western world the condition of the laboring
population is vastly better to-day than when, a century and a half
ago, the factory was established; vastly better than when, sixty
years ago, the governments of Europe trembled before a working-class
revolt,—when British Chartism triumphed in reform; when Karl Marx,
exiled from Prussia, called upon the workingmen of the world to
unite; when Mazzini, another exile in London, preached to the toilers
of Italy the gospel of God and humanity, of progress through
education. But the evolution is incomplete, and the discontent of
the laboring population still remains a vital force in the upward
progress of mankind.

To-day we in America are confronted by the amazing spread of
Socialism; Socialism which the radicals preach, the reformers seek
to establish, and the conservatives fear. We cannot evade its
issues, for Socialism is something more than a political creed,—it
is the modern expression of that same spirit of human progress which
destroyed slavery in the ancient world, serfdom in the middle ages
and, creating modern democracy, cannot rest until it has guaranteed
to all men not only equal political rights but equal social rights.
Two men, smoke-room companions of mine during a Pacific voyage, stand
for the contending ideals of the feudal and the modern world. One
was a noble earl, the other a British tea merchant; both were men
of wealth,—the one of large but unproductive estates, the other of a
great business giving employment to thousands of men. Of the two, the
tea merchant, though lacking in fine manners, was the more important
person; yet he would not have exchanged those hours of familiar
gossip with the noble earl for more chests of tea than would fill the
hold of the ship. And there was a reason for this feeling, because
the Groom of the Bedchamber stood for that aristocracy of culture and
good manners which has an important value in any society. Under the
militant structure of society this value belonged to the few; in our
present democracy it has become increasingly the privilege of the
many. Public education, public libraries, public art galleries, the
perfected art of printing have opened the highest culture to children
of the humblest birth. May we not, then, look forward to the time
when “the best that has anywhere been in the world shall be the lot
of every man born into it”—that is to say, the lot of every man who
desires the best?

Every thinking man must admit that there is something wrong in our
present industrial régime. The progress of avowed Socialism and
the more rapid progress of particular socialistic ideas indicate
quite clearly that we Americans are alive to the unequal social
conditions which now exist and are anxious to find a remedy. But
whatever may be the utopian dreams of the reformers, all immediate
progress must be made in the industrial world as we find it to-day;
the industrial state of the Socialist is too remote in time,—our task
is with social conditions as they now exist. The splendid machinery
of production created during the last century must not be destroyed,
but utilized for the benefit of mankind. The question which we have
now to ask ourselves is this: What is the ultimate purpose for which
the business of the world is conducted, what the real purpose
of all this planting and reaping, this mining and manufacturing,
this exchanging of commodities? Is it not, primarily, to furnish
each human creature with food, shelter, and clothing,—the means of
supporting life? Men require something more than the mere means of
subsistence; but before the individual can cultivate his mind and
soul his body must be made comfortable, and this, after all, is the
whole end of our complex commercial régime. The test of right and
wrong conduct in business refers to this fundamental purpose,—that
conduct only is praiseworthy which advances the time when every man
capable of industry shall be rewarded for his labor, not only with a
loaf of bread, but with hours of fruitful leisure.

Captains of Industry! that was a noble title Carlyle gave to the
prosaic business man, when gazing beyond the squalid turmoil of
his day with its dominant industrialism, triumphant mercantilism,
doctrines of _laissez-faire_, overproduction, surplus population,
he with clear vision foresaw the future freedom of the masses won
through their own strength and the ability of their leaders. Until
Richard Arkwright was born, the leaders of men in their progress
towards human freedom had been soldiers; henceforward they were to
be men of affairs. Great soldiers won their victory by the loyalty
they inspired in their followers; no adventurer seeking personal
glory ever won a lasting victory, but only those heroes, forgetful
of themselves who consecrated their service to the cause of freedom.
In such wise must Captains of Industry win their victories; the
adventurer can but for a time prevail; fame is secure only to those
leaders who see in wealth accumulated a treasure held in trust from
which they are to feed and clothe the armies that they lead to
peaceful conquests. Social reformers of sentimental temper have
deemed the comparison between the modern employer of labor and the
feudal lord as ill-chosen, but history seems to justify it. Yet we
have, indeed, gone far since the Middle Ages. When the feudal lord
demanded loyalty from his retainers the demand was alone sufficient,
but the Captain of Industry, in order to obtain the loyalty of the
toilers, must not only demand but deserve it; he too must be loyal to
the great cause he serves—the eternal cause of human freedom.


THE END




  The Riverside Press
  CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
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  Transcriber’s Notes

  pg 54 Added period after: three hundred years before, not soldiers,
          but serfs
  pg 72 Changed who paid their rent either in kind or in agicrultural
          to: agricultural
  Many hyphenated and non-hyphenated word combinations left as written.



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