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.
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 144 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.
And his son was England’s richest commoner.
It was the dawn of the day of common richness.