It is hardly fair, however, to lay the whole explanation of Marie on her father, her husband, and herself.
A few years ago, in the churchyard of St. Philip’s Church at Birmingham, they set up a tombstone which had fallen down, and they reinscribed it in honor of the long-neglected memory of the man who had been resting beneath it for a century and a half. His name was Wyatt. John Wyatt. He had a good deal to do with making Marie what she was.
What toil, what tossing nights, what sweating days, what agonized wrenching of the imagination toward a still unreached idea, have 141 gone into the making of leisure—for other people!
Wyatt strained toward, and touched, the idea which was the real start of modern leisure.
In the year 1733, coming from the cathedral town of Lichfield, where the Middle Ages still lingered, he set up, in a small building near Sutton Coldfields, a certain machine. That machine inaugurated, and forever symbolizes, the long and glorious series of mechanical triumphs which has made a large degree of leisure possible, not for a few thousand women, as was previously the case, but for millions and millions of them.
It was only about two feet square. But it accomplished a thing never before accomplished. It spun the first thread ever spun in the history of the world without the intervention of human fingers.
On that night woman lost her oldest and most significant title and function. The Spinster ceased to be.
The mistress and her maid, spinning together in the Hall, their fingers drawing the roving from the distaff and stretching it out as the 142 spindle twisted it, were finally on the point of separating forever.
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.