The Industrial Revolution.
“The period which opened with Arkwright’s mechanical inventions has been the commencement of a new era in the economic history, not only of England, but of the whole world”—a new era indeed! The mind stumbles over the multitude of forms which this introduction of new agencies into human endeavor took, the infinite ramifications of influences set in motion by machinery. The young of to-day, satiated, glutted though they are with machinery, take an interest they could hardly be expected to feel in more remote matters in the genesis of the age on whose still advancing crest we ride: an interest, however, which is very superficial, very unconscious of the deeper significance of the industrial revolution. Some of the “leads” of that significance are surely to be established as we approach the subject in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Text-books vary greatly in the amount of information they give as to the first inventions and the spread of water power devices, followed by the still greater developments in the stationary steam engine. In fact much of the history of invention is obscure, and the details are entirely too numerous to give in a school history. Nevertheless I think the teacher may improve on the accounts in most of the school books, both in the way of lucidity and of vividness. Try a careful study of pp. 505-519 of Beard’s Introduction (which will take comparatively little of a busy man’s time), and see how lively and realistic a tale you can weave out of it—you will surprise yourself at the improvement you can make on your text-book! I say this not that I honor the text-book less, but the freedom of oral expression more. Then, too, one may lead naturally from a sketch of the changed face of the land to the changes these new factories wrought in old England, so stable since the days of the Conqueror, invaded at last by a ruthless force irreverent of tradition, triumphing in disturbing the established order.
But let us beware of resting on generalizations. “A new era in economic history” is perfectly worthless as an entrant into the youthful mind. As well speak of the cosmic forces in conflict with new physical entities, or other “Olympian” abstractions. No, we must descend to the hard pan of concrete things—the massing of population, the rise of a new kind of commerce and a new kind of market, the making of roads and canals to serve that commerce and that market, the changed conditions of the laborer, and so on. Here, too, is a chance for “vivid narration,” as the old rhetorics used to call it, and of all the wiles of a wise simplicity in instruction.