We all see what Wyatt's machine did to the maids. We all understand that when he started his mill at Birmingham and hired his working force of TEN GIRLS, he prophesied the factory "slum."
We do not yet realize what he did to the mistresses, how he utterly changed their character and how he marvelously increased their number.
But look! His machine, with the countless machines which followed it, in the spinning industry and in all other industries, made it possible to organize masses of individuals into industrial regiments which required captains and majors and colonels and generals. It created the need of leadership, of MULTITUDINOUS leadership. And with leadership came the rewards of leadership. And the wives and daughters of the leaders (a race of men previously, by comparison, nonexistent) arose in thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions to live in leisure and semi-leisure on the fruits of the new system.
While the maids went to the "slums," the mistresses went to the suburbs.
Looking at it in that way, one sometimes doesn't feel so sorry for the maids.
What did Wyatt get out of it? Imprisonment for debt and the buzz of antiquarians above his rotted corpse.
Wyatt and his equally humble successors in genius, Hargreaves and Crompton, artisans! Where in history shall we find men the world took more from, gave less to?
To Hargreaves, inventing the spinning jenny, a mob and a flight from Lancashire, a wrecked machine and a sacked house! To Crompton, inventing the spinning-mule (which, in simulating, surpassed the delicate pulling motion of the spinster's arm)—to Crompton, poverty so complete that the mule, patient bearer of innumerable fortunes to investors, was surrendered to them unpatented, while its maker retired to his "Hall-in-the-Wood" and his workman wages!
Little did Wyatt and Hargreaves and Crompton eat of the bread of idleness they built the oven for.
But Arkwright! There was the man who foreshadowed, in his own career, the new aristocracy about to be evoked by the new machinery. He made spinning devices of his own. He used everybody else's devices. He patented them all. He lied in the patents. He sued infringers of them. He overlooked his defeats in the courts. He bit and gouged and endured and invented and organized till, from being a barber and dealing in hair-dyes and bargaining for the curls of pretty girls at country fairs, he ended up Sir Richard Arkwright and—last perfect touch in a fighting career—was building a church when he died.