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.