OLD HAND LOOM AND MODERN POWER LOOM.
(By kind permission of Northrop Loom Co., Blackburn.)
AN OLD MAIL COACH.
But all this work done in the towns by the machines meant that less work was done in the villages, and the country cottages. There was no longer any profitable sale for the cloth woven at home by the little machines which the women used to work with hand and foot, because the very same, or almost the same, could be made so much more cheaply by the big steam-driven machines.
And while a machine attended by one man did the work formerly done by twenty, what about the other nineteen? Obviously, at first, they fell out of work. Therefore, when the steam-engines first came in they produced great hardship, great unemployment. The men rose up against them in organised gangs of machine-breakers. Very many machines were broken up.