◆1 The history of the cotton industry is a remarkable illustration of this.
◆¹ I have taken an imaginary case of drawing and pumping water, because the operation is of an exceedingly simple kind. We will now turn from the imaginary world to the real, and clench what has been said by an illustration from the history of our own country—and from that period which at present we specially have in view—namely the close of the last century.
From the year 1795 to the year 1800, the amount of cotton manufactured in this country was on the average about thirty-seven million pounds weight annually: ten years before it was only ten million pounds; ten years before that, only four million pounds; and during the previous fifty years it had been less than two and a half million pounds. The amount manufactured, up to the end of this last-named period, was limited by the fact that spinning was a much slower process than weaving. It was performed by means of an apparatus known as “the one-thread wheel.” No other spinning-machine existed; and it was the opinion of experts, about the year 1770, that it would hardly be possible in the course of the next thirty years, by collecting and training to the spinning trade every hand that could be secured for such a purpose, to raise the annual total to so much as five million pounds. As a matter of fact, however, five million pounds were spun in the year 1776. In six years’ time, the original product had been doubled. In ten years, it had been more than quadrupled; in twenty years, it had increased nearly elevenfold; and in five and twenty years, it had increased fifteenfold.[27]
◆1 For every pound of cotton spun by labour, Arkwright’s machinery spun fourteen pounds.
◆¹ To what, then, was this extraordinary increase due? It was due to the invention and introduction of new spinning machinery—especially to the machines invented by Hargreaves and Arkwright, and the successive application of horse-power, water-power, and lastly of steam-power, to driving them. Previous to the year 1770, such a thing as a cotton-mill was unknown. During the ten following years, about forty were erected in Great Britain; in the six years following there were erected a hundred more; and from that time forward their number increased rapidly, till they first absorbed, and then more than absorbed, the whole population that had previously conducted the industry in their own homes. As we follow the history of the manufacture into the present century, a large part of the increasing gross produce is to be set down to the increase in the employed population; but during the twenty-five years with which we have just been dealing, the number of hands employed in spinning had not more than doubled,[28] whilst the amount of cotton manufactured had increased by fifteen hundred per cent. It is therefore evident that the increase during this period is due almost entirely, not to human exertion, but to machinery.[29]
◆1 The manufacture of iron offers a similar example.
◆¹ And next, with more brevity, let us consider the manufacture of iron. By and by we shall come back to the subject; so it will be enough here to mention a single fact connected with it. From about the year 1740, when a careful and comprehensive inquiry into the matter was made, up to the year 1780, the average produce of each smelting furnace in the country was two hundred and ninety-four tons of iron annually. Towards the close of this period machinery had been invented by which a blast was produced of a strength that had been unknown previously; and in the year 1788, the average product of each of these same furnaces was five hundred and ninety-five tons, or very nearly double what it had been previously. An extra two hundred and fifty tons was produced from each furnace annually: and if we attribute the whole of the former product to human exertion, two hundred and fifty tons at all events was the product of the new machinery; since if that had been destroyed, the product, in proportion to the expenditure of exertion, would at once have sunk back to what it had been forty-eight years earlier.
◆1 The products, then, of Capital embodied in machinery are easily distinguishable from the products of Labour.
◆¹ Here, then, we have before us the two principal manufactures of this country, as they were during the closing years of the last century; and we have seen that in each a definite portion of the product was due to a certain kind of capital, as distinct from human exertion—distinct from human exertion in precisely the same way, as we have already seen land to be, when we find it producing rent; and we have seen further that the products both of this kind of Capital and of Land, are to be distinguished from those of Human Exertion on precisely similar principles.[30]
◆1 In the next chapter we will consider the products of Wage Capital.