The factory

by Jonathan Thayer Lincoln

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.