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.”