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^8p ^Tonatbati C^aper Ltntoln 
 
 THE FACTORY. 
 
 THE CITY OF THE DINNER-PAIL. 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 Boston and New York 
 
THE FACTORY 
 
THE FACTORY 
 
 BY 
 
 JONATHAN THAYER LINCOLN 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 ®l)e StiberiTitie pniifi Camtititige 
 
 191Z 
 
^.^,b^«^%v 
 
 COPynlGHT, 191*1 BY JONATHAN THAYER LINCOLN 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published January rgta 
 
TO MY FATHER 
 
NOTE 
 
 This essay Is based upon a course of lectures 
 delivered before the Amos Tuck School of 
 Administration and Finance associated with 
 Dartmouth College. These lectures were sub- 
 sequently printed in 'The Mediator, a magazine 
 published in Cleveland, Ohio, and devoted to 
 establishing a better social understanding be- 
 tween the man who buys and the man who sells 
 labor. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 In preparing the historical part of this essay I have 
 consulted many authorities, and in particular I have 
 made free use of the following works. 
 
 DEFOE, Daniel 
 
 A plan for the English Commerce, London, 1728. 
 
 BAINES, Edward 
 
 History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great 
 Britain. London, 1835. 
 
 GUEST, Richard 
 
 A Compendious History of the Cotton Manu- 
 facture. Manchester, 1823. 
 
 The Theory and Practice of Cotton Spinning. Glas- 
 gow, 1833. 
 
 URE, Andrew, M.D. 
 
 ThePhilosophy of Manufactures. London, 1835. 
 
 BABBAGE, Charles 
 
 On the Economy of Machinery and Manufac- 
 tures. London, 1822. 
 
 CARLYLE, Thomas 
 Essay on Chartism. 
 
X NOTE 
 
 TAYLOR, Richard Whately Cooke- 
 
 The Modern Factory System. London, 1891. 
 
 ABRAM, Annie 
 
 Social England in the Fifteenth Century. Lon- 
 don, 1909. 
 
 Among the many articles printed in the periodical 
 press the following from the Quarterly Review are 
 especially helpful. 
 
 Vol. XLI, 1829. Condition of the English 
 Peasantry. 
 
 Vol. LVII, 1836. The Factory System. 
 
 Vol. LXVII, 1841. Infant Labour. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. The Industrial Revolution 3 
 
 II. Sir Richard Arkwright 16 
 
 III. Mechanical Inventions 30 
 
 IV. The Factory System 46 
 V. The Factory Towns 64 
 
 VI. Chartism g^ 
 
 VII. The Factory and Social Progress 99 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 AS you approach the City of the Din- 
 ner Pail from the west, the blue 
 waters of the harbor lie between you and 
 the towering factories which line the op- 
 posite shore. By day the factories are not 
 attractive to the eye, their massive granite 
 walls, prison-like and unlovely, suggest only 
 the sordid side of toil, — the long day's con- 
 finement of twenty-seven thousand men and 
 women amidst the monotonous roar of 
 grinding wheels. But should you thus ap- 
 proach the city late on a winter afternoon 
 the scene is marvelously changed; the myr- 
 iad lights of the factories shine through the 
 early darkness, transforming prison-walls 
 into fairy palaces, castles of enchantment 
 reflected with mysterious beauty in the deep 
 waters of the bay. There is no suggestion 
 now of sordid toil, the factory walls have 
 
xiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 become ramparts of light and speak of some 
 romantic story. 
 
 Realism and romance lie very near to- 
 gether, and we shall find the factory, when 
 we come to study the history of it, some- 
 thing more than granite walls and grinding 
 machinery ; the factory, indeed, has been an 
 important instrument in the upward pro- 
 gress of mankind. There is an ugly side to 
 the story, especially in the beginning, for 
 when the craftsmen of the world were trans- 
 formed into factory operatives, thousands 
 suffered a degree of poverty never known 
 before, and many perished in the transition 
 to the new system of manufacturing ; but 
 in the end that system revolutionized the 
 whole social order, gave to toil its right- 
 ful dignity, and, creating a new loyalty to 
 the cause of labor, became an element in 
 the development of modern democracy. 
 It is this brighter side of the story that 
 we have now to consider. 
 
THE FACTORY 
 
THE FACTORY 
 I 
 
 THE INDUSTRIAL 
 REVOLUTION 
 
 IN the fifteenth century the wealth of 
 England, which until then had been 
 made up chiefly of raw products, was 
 greatly increased by the introduction of 
 manufactures, the most important being 
 the making of cloth. Previous to this first 
 extension of industry, it had been impos- 
 sible for the toiler to rise out of his class 
 except by becoming a priest or a soldier ; 
 but with the increase of manufactures wealth 
 became a means of social advancement, and 
 thus industry not only tended to break down 
 the feudal order by tempting serfs away 
 from their masters, but the wealth created 
 
4 THE FACTORY 
 
 by manufactures became an important ele- 
 ment in the creation of the middle class. 
 
 The sudden and extensive introduction 
 of machinery at the close of the eighteenth 
 century drove hand labor out of employ- 
 ment, and, for a time, caused great suffer- 
 ing among the masses ; but in the end it 
 created an ever increasing demand for 
 labor — a new^ labor more skillful than the 
 old. Moreover, it concentrated the labor- 
 ing population in great centres of industry, 
 thus creating a class consciousness w^hich 
 demanded that attention should be given 
 to the rights of labor, created a new ideal 
 of the dignity of toil and gave to the world 
 that vision of the inclusive cause of labor 
 which was destined to advance in a mar- 
 velous way to the social progress of man- 
 kind. 
 
 Slavery had been abolished in England 
 long before the Industrial Revolution, and 
 yet, in the first quarter of the last century 
 men in chains worked in the British coal- 
 
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 5 
 
 mines and were bought and sold when the 
 property changed hands. For generations 
 before the Industrial Revolution, the lord 
 of the manor had ceased to demand the 
 labor of the villein as his due, but while serf- 
 dom had been abolished, the traditions of it 
 still remained ; and it was not until the es- 
 tablishment of the factory that labor be- 
 came free in fact as for generations it had 
 been in name. 
 
 The historical event, that great move- 
 ment which led in our generation to a 
 complete reconstruction of the social or- 
 der, 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, origin- 
 
6 THE FACTORY 
 
 ating 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 revolution- 
 ized, 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 sim- 
 ple 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 
 
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 7 
 
 family, his wife and children all working 
 at the spinning wheel, could supply suf- 
 ficient 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 de- 
 vice which saved time and exertion to the 
 weaver and nearly doubled the daily pro- 
 duct 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 Cart- 
 wright. 
 
 The moment it became possible to ac- 
 complish by machinery what formerly had 
 been done entirely by hand, the first effect 
 was to increase the productive power of 
 
8 THE FACTORY 
 
 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 cen- 
 tury the textile manufacturing of England 
 was carried on by craftsmen dwelling in 
 the rural districts, the master clothiers liv- 
 ing in the greater towns, sending out wool 
 to be spun into yarn which, returned to 
 them prepared for the loom, was re-dis- 
 tributed 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 es- 
 tablishments and the modes of doing busi- 
 
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 9 
 
 ness were very different from what they 
 were soon to become. It is quite true that a 
 limited number of individuals had, in pre- 
 vious 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 ad- 
 miration as the ideal method of production. 
 The dreamers look back regretfully to the 
 days when manufactures were combined 
 with farming, and they quote from Gold- 
 smith's Deserted Village. Let us, however, 
 turn to a more prosaic but more trustworthy 
 
lo THE FACTORY 
 
 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 coun- 
 ties 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 manufactur- 
 ing counties, you see the wheel going almost 
 at every door, the wool and yarn hanging 
 up at every window; the looms, the wind- 
 ers, 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 estab- 
 lishment of the factory, we shall do well 
 to keep in mind these words written by an 
 
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION ii 
 
 eighteenth century student in praise of the 
 domestic system ; when we hear the social- 
 ists 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 be- 
 ginning was evolved the factory as we know 
 it to-day. But important as were the in- 
 
12 THE FACTORY 
 
 ventions in cotton manufacture, the fac- 
 tory 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 con- 
 sumption 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 mod- 
 ern 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 in- 
 vention of printing and of the mariner's 
 compass — so that side by side with the 
 scholars restoring to the world its lost herit- 
 age of learning, craftsmen and sailors played 
 their parts in printing the books by which 
 the learning was disseminated, and in man- 
 
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 13 
 
 ning the ships that discovered new conti- 
 nents. 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 indus- 
 try, 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 com- 
 modities. 
 
 The Industrial Revolution, thus spring- 
 ing from the sudden growth in the use of 
 machinery, occasioned not only economic 
 but political and social results. On the eco- 
 nomic side, the effect was to extend old in- 
 dustries 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 
 
14 THE FACTORY 
 
 on the political side it led to the enfran- 
 chisement of the working classes. The In- 
 dustrial Revolution accomplished for Eng- 
 land 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, jour- 
 nals, cash-books, and pay-rolls, — it is a hu- 
 man story, — laissez-faire, over-production, 
 enlightened selfishness, were no abstract 
 terms, but vital human problems. 
 
 Because the Industrial Revolution pro- 
 foundly influenced the social and political 
 life of England, and later of the whole 
 world, the history of the factory, which 
 contributed so much to its influence, be- 
 comes of vast importance. The first chap- 
 ter relates to brilliant achievements in the 
 field of mechanical invention. Then fol- 
 
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 15 
 
 lows the dismal story of how a multitude 
 of craftsmen were transformed into factory- 
 operatives — the untold suffering of op- 
 pressed workingmen. Later we see the Eng- 
 lish yeoman replaced by the master manu- 
 facturer who soon became a force in the 
 political life of the nation, finding his way 
 into Parliament and even into the Peerage. 
 For the common people the revolution be- 
 gan with great suffering, but ended in open- 
 ing new avenues for their social and political 
 advancement. Antagonistic in the begin- 
 ning to the welfare of the masses, it aided 
 powerfully, in the end, the fulfillment of 
 those ideals of liberty, equality, and frater- 
 nity which at that moment had taken such 
 a mighty hold upon the thoughts of men. 
 
II 
 
 SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT 
 
 THE Shaving ofShagpat, that remark- 
 able allegory with the writing of 
 which George Meredith commenced his 
 literary career, has been given several in- 
 terpretations ; without seriously venturing 
 another, it has seemed to me that this fan- 
 ciful story deals with the chief events in 
 the Industrial Revolution. 
 
 " So there was feasting in the hall and in 
 the city, and over earth " : we read towards 
 the end of the tale, " great pledging the 
 sovereign of Barbers, who had mastered an 
 event and become the benefactor of his craft 
 and of his kind. 'T is sure the race of Bag- 
 arags endured for many centuries, and his 
 seed were the rulers of men, and the seal 
 of their empire stamped on mighty wax 
 the Tackle of Barbers." 
 
SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT 17 
 
 Shibli Bagarag, — could he not well 
 have been Richard Arkwright, the barber, 
 inventor of the spinning-frame, master of 
 an event? In Shagpat the Clothier, vv^e 
 discover the smug and comfortable Brit- 
 ish aristocracy ; in the Identical, that magic 
 hair in Shagpat's beard which gave him 
 a position of power greater even than the 
 King, we observe Feudal Privilege ; the 
 sword of Aklis, with the steel of which 
 the Identical was cut, may well stand for 
 the factory, a weapon gained after many 
 trials by Arkwright, so that of him it might 
 be written as it was of Shibli Bagarag : 
 " Thou, even thou will be master of the 
 event, so named in anecdotes, and histories, 
 and records, to all succeeding generations." 
 
 Richard Arkwright, who first saw the 
 light of day at Preston on the 23d of 
 December, 1732, was the youngest of thir- 
 teen children born to humble parents, and 
 he grew to manhood without education, 
 being barely able to read and write. At an 
 
1 8 THE FACTORY 
 
 early age he was apprenticed to a Preston 
 barber and when he became a journeyman 
 he estabhshed himself in the same business. 
 
 Fate was in a jesting mood when she 
 decreed that the chief actor in that re- 
 markable social drama, the Industrial Rev- 
 olution, should be a penny barber ; and we 
 may wonder if the governing classes appre- 
 ciated the irony, when twenty years later, 
 in recognition of his genius, the barber was 
 raised to the honor of knighthood and his 
 lady privileged to walk before the wives of 
 the untitled gentry. 
 
 Richard Arkwright, at the age of twen- 
 ty-eight, was not content day after day to 
 shave the stolid faces of lower class Eng- 
 lishmen, but, having gained a knowledge 
 of a chemical process for dyeing human 
 hair, he commenced to make wigs for up- 
 per class Englishmen — wigs dyed to suit 
 any complexion. This occupation took 
 him away from the barber's chair and sent 
 him traveling about the country. On such 
 
SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT 19 
 
 a tour in 1761, he met a lady in the city 
 of Leigh, — Margaret Biggins was her 
 name, — and he married her ; and in the 
 same city at a somewhat later date he heard 
 of certain experiments which had been 
 made by a man named High in construct- 
 ing a machine for spinning yarn. He gained 
 this secret from a clock-maker named Kay, 
 with whom he afterwards formed a part- 
 nership, by getting Kay — so the gossips 
 said — loquaciously drunk at a public- 
 house. Concerning his wife, history has 
 little to say except that she quarreled with 
 him because of the interest he took in 
 High's machine ; and commencing to make 
 experiments on his own account he be- 
 came so absorbed in his workshop that his 
 lady, fearing that they might be thrown 
 upon the parish for support, begged him to 
 return to his razor, and because he refused 
 smashed the first model of the spinning- 
 machine and thus precipitated a tremen- 
 dous family row. 
 
20 THE FACTORY 
 
 Arkwright is commonly credited with 
 the invention of spinning by rollers, but 
 while to him is undoubtedly due the suc- 
 cess of that invention he did not originate 
 it. The inventor of that ingenious process 
 was neither Arkwright nor High, but John 
 Wyatt of Birmingham, who in 1738 took 
 out a patent in the name of Lewis Paul. 
 In 1 74 1 or 1742 these two men set up in 
 Birmingham a mill " turned by two asses 
 walking around an axis," and in which ten 
 girls were employed ; while later a larger 
 mill containing two hundred and fifty spin- 
 dles and giving employment to twenty-five 
 operatives was built. Wyatt wrote a pam- 
 phlet entitled, A Systematic Essay on the 
 Business of Spinning, in which he showed 
 the great profits which would attend the 
 establishment of a plant of three hundred 
 spindles. Wyatt's factory, however, did not 
 prosper and it seems probable that his ma- 
 chinery also passed into the hands of Ark- 
 wright. 
 
SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT 21 
 
 It was in the year 1767 that Hargreaves 
 invented the spinning-jenny, and two years 
 later Arkwright took out his patent claim- 
 ing that he had " by great study and long 
 application invented a new piece of ma- 
 chinery, never before found out, practiced 
 or used, for the making of weft or yarn 
 from cotton, flax, and wool ; which would 
 be of great utility to a great many manu- 
 facturers, as well as to His Majesty's sub- 
 jects in general, by employing a great num- 
 ber of poor people in working the said 
 machinery and in making the said weft or 
 yarn much superior in quality to any here- 
 tofore manufactured or made. " However 
 lacking in originality this famous invention 
 may have been, however great may have 
 been the debt which Arkwright owed to 
 Wyatt and Paul, to John Kay and to High, 
 nevertheless, to him belongs all the credit 
 of the first successful introduction of spin- 
 ning by machinery. 
 
 Having obtained this patent, Arkwright 
 
22 THE FACTORY 
 
 found himself without the capital neces- 
 sary for carrying out his plans ; and he re- 
 turned to his native city of Preston and there 
 applied to a friend, Mr, John Smalley, a 
 liquor merchant, for assistance. So reduced 
 were his circumstances at this time that 
 going to vote at a contested election, which 
 occurred during his visit to Preston, his 
 wardrobe was in so tattered a condition that 
 a number of his friends advanced the money 
 to purchase decent clothes in which he 
 might appear in the poll-room ; and once 
 during this period he having applied for 
 pecuniary aid to a Mr. Atherton, that gen- 
 tleman refused to entertain Arkwright's 
 plan because of the rags in which the in- 
 ventor was dressed. 
 
 It was in Preston, then, that Arkwright 
 first fitted up his perfected spinning ma- 
 chine, in the parlor of a house belonging to 
 the free grammar school. Here Arkwright 
 successfully demonstrated the utility of his 
 invention and first received financial sup- 
 
SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT 23 
 
 port. In consequence of the riots which had 
 taken place in the neighborhood of Black- 
 burn on the invention of Hargreaves's spin- 
 ning-jenny, by which many of the ma- 
 chines were destroyed and the inventor 
 driven from his native county to Notting- 
 ham, Arkwright and Smalley, fearing sim- 
 ilar outrages, also went to Nottingham 
 accompanied by John Kay, the loquacious 
 clock-maker ; so that Nottingham became 
 the cradle of the two great inventions in 
 cotton spinning. Here, Arkwright also 
 applied for aid to the Messrs. Wright, 
 Bankers, who made advances on the con- 
 dition that they should share in the profits 
 of the invention ; but as the machine was 
 not perfected as soon as they had hoped 
 they withdrew their support and he turned 
 to Mr. Samuel Need, a partner of Jedidiah 
 Strutt, the inventor of the stocking frame. 
 Strutt examined Arkwright's mechanism, 
 declared it to be an admirable invention, 
 and the two men of wealth agreed to a 
 
24 THE FACTORY 
 
 partnership with the Preston barber; and 
 a mill was erected at Nottingham. 
 
 It was an unpretentious establishment, 
 that first little cotton mill; it gave em- 
 ployment to not more than a dozen opera- 
 tives, and the machinery was turned not 
 by a great steam engine, but by a pair of 
 patient horses harnessed to a treadmill, — 
 yet it contained the germ of the modern 
 factory and the modern factory system. 
 Later, Arkwright built another and larger 
 factory at Cromford in Derbyshire, driven 
 by water power — from which circum- 
 stance his spinning-machine came to be 
 called the water-frame. 
 
 The cotton industry of England which 
 Arkwright established developed slowly ; 
 in the five years, ending with 1775, the 
 annual import of cotton into Great Britain 
 was only four times the average import at 
 the beginning of the century. But when 
 in the year 1785 Arkwright's patent was 
 finally set aside and his spinning machinery 
 
SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT 25 
 
 became public property, a great extension 
 of cotton manufacture followed, accom- 
 panied by a marvelous national prosperity. 
 Arkwright, although deprived of his mo- 
 nopoly, vi^as by this time so firmly estab- 
 lished in the industry that he remained the 
 dominant figure in the yarn market, fix- 
 ing the price of the commodity for all 
 other spinners ; and thus he accumulated a 
 great fortune. 
 
 While Arkvi^right was w^ithout doubt 
 perfectly familiar w^ith the experiments of 
 both Wyatt and High, nevertheless it was 
 the Preston barber and not the original 
 inventors w^ho first produced yarn fit for 
 weaving. It is proverbial that inventors sel- 
 dom reap the harvest of wealth which they 
 sow ; they are the dreamers and their re- 
 ward is in beholding a perfected mech- 
 anism — their work of art. So it was 
 with Wyatt and High. They dreamed of 
 spindles turned by power and saw their 
 spindles turn ; but Arkwright dreamed of 
 
26 THE FACTORY 
 
 a nation made rich and powerful by these 
 same inventions, and he, too, lived to see 
 his dream come true. 
 
 Sir Richard Arkw^right possessed all the 
 qualities essential to success — tireless en- 
 ergy, enthusiasm, perseverance, and self- 
 confidence. He believed in himself and so 
 he compelled others to believe in him. 
 His usual working day began at five o'clock 
 in the morning and did not end until nine 
 at night ; when he was fifty years of age 
 he lengthened this day by two hours, 
 which he devoted to acquiring the educa- 
 tion denied him in his youth. He had un- 
 bounded confidence in the success of his ad- 
 ventures and was accustomed to say that he 
 would pay the national debt — an interest- 
 ing circumstance, for surely by his genius 
 the national debt was paid many times over. 
 
 In the year 1786 he was appointed 
 high sheriff^ of Derbyshire, and when 
 about that time the King narrowly escaped 
 assassination at the hands of Margaret 
 
SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT 27 
 
 Nicholson, Arkwright, having presented 
 an address of congratulation from his 
 county to the King, received the honor 
 of knighthood. He died on the 3d of Au- 
 gust, 1792, at the age of sixty. The Annual 
 Register recording that event says not so 
 much as a single w^ord concerning Ark- 
 w^right's masterful genius w^hich even then 
 had set in motion a mighty social revolu- 
 tion. It mentions only the great fortune 
 v^hich he had acquired as a manufacturer 
 of cotton yarn, — so difficult it is for the 
 critic to place a true value on the life 
 Vi^ork of a contemporary. 
 
 As you approach the City of the Din- 
 ner Pail from the vilest and gaze across the 
 blue w^aters of the harbor, the eye rests 
 upon the towering factories which line 
 the opposite shore. Within those walls 
 twenty-seven thousand men and women 
 living in a degree of comfort never 
 known before to the spinners and weav- 
 ers of the world, earn their daily bread. 
 
28 THE FACTORY 
 
 Those towering factories are, every one, 
 monuments to the genius of Richard Ark- 
 wright, the penny barber of Preston. If 
 he appropriated the inventions of others, 
 he perfected these inventions and made 
 them of permanent value to mankind ; 
 and moreover, he arranged the machinery 
 into series, organized the factory system, 
 and revolutionized industry. 
 
 Says Carlyle: "Richard Arkw^right, it 
 vi^ould seem, v^as not a beautiful man ; no 
 romance hero vs^ith haughty eyes, Apollo 
 lip, and gesture like the herald Mercury; 
 a plain, almost gross, bag-cheeked, pot- 
 bellied Lancashire man, with an air of 
 painful reflection, yet also of copious free 
 digestion ; — a man stationed by the com- 
 munity to shave certain dusty beards in the 
 northern parts of England at halfpenny 
 each. . . . Nevertheless, in strapping 
 razors, in lathering of dusty beards, and 
 the contradictions and confusions attend- 
 ant thereon the man had notions in that 
 
SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT 29 
 
 rough head of his; spindles, shuttles, 
 wheels and contrivances plying ideally 
 within the same, rather hopeless looking, 
 which, however, he did at last bring to 
 bear. Not without great difficulty! his 
 townsfolk rose in mob against him, for 
 threatening to shorten labor, to shorten 
 wages ; so that he had to fly, with broken 
 wash pots, scattered household, and seek 
 refuge elsewhere. Nay, his wife, too, re- 
 belled ; burned his wooden model of his 
 spinning wheel ; resolute that he should 
 stick to his razors, rather ; — for which, 
 however, he decisively, as thou wilt rejoice 
 to understand, packed her out of doors. 
 Oh ! reader, what a Historical Phenom- " 
 enon is that bag-cheeked, pot-bellied, 
 much-enduring, much-inventing barber ! 
 French revolutions were a-brewing, to re- 
 sist the same in any measure. Imperial 
 Kaisers were impotent without the cotton 
 and cloth of England ; and it was this man 
 who gave to England the power of cotton." 
 
Ill 
 
 MECHANICAL INVEN- 
 TIONS 
 
 A DISTINCTION should be made be- 
 tween the factory and the factory- 
 system. The latter was not new to England, 
 having been employed during the Roman 
 occupation ; and with the introduction of 
 the woolen industry under Edward III, we 
 again find the factory system established on 
 an extensive scale. 
 
 John Winchcombe, commonly called 
 Jackof Newbury, who died about the year 
 1 520, made use of the factory system on a 
 very extensive scale. In Fuller's Worthies yon 
 may read how he "was the most consider- 
 able clothier without fancy or fiction Eng- 
 land ever beheld," and how "his looms were 
 his lands, whereof he kept one hundred in 
 
MECHANICAL INVENTIONS 31 
 
 his house, each managed by a man and a 
 boy." Jack of Newbury was celebrated in 
 a metrical romance, and the following lines 
 taken from it contain an interesting de- 
 scription of his famous industrial establish- 
 ment. 
 
 " Within one room, being large and long, 
 There stood two hundred looms full strong: 
 Two hundred men the truth is so, 
 Wrought in these looms all in a row ; 
 By every one a pretty boy 
 Sat making quills with mickle joy. 
 And in another place hard by 
 A hundred women merily 
 Were carding hard with joyful cheer 
 Who, singing sat with voices clear; 
 And in a chamber close beside 
 Two hundred maidens did abide. 
 
 These pretty maids did never lin 
 But in their place all day did spin : 
 
 Then to another room came they 
 Where children were in poor array. 
 And every one sat picking wool. 
 The finest from the coarse to cull : 
 
32 THE FACTORY 
 
 The number was seven score and ten 
 
 The children of poor silly men. 
 
 Within another place likewise 
 
 Full fifty proper men he spied, 
 
 And these were sheer men every one. 
 
 Whose skill and cunning there was shown : 
 
 A dyehousc likewise he had then 
 Wherein he kept full forty men : 
 And also in his fulling mill, 
 Full twenty persons kept he still." 
 
 Here, indeed, we have the factory sys- 
 tem — in which the division of labor is a 
 conspicuous feature — employed with all 
 its modern details ; but not the steam-driven 
 factory, building great cities and changing 
 the whole social life of the kingdom. 
 
 The original mode of converting cotton 
 into yarn was by the use of distafFand spindle, 
 a method still employed in the remote parts 
 of India. The distaff is a wooden rod to 
 which a bundle of cotton is tied loosely at 
 one end, and which the spinner holds be- 
 tween the left arm and the body while with 
 
MECHANICAL INVENTIONS 33 
 
 his right hand he draws out and twists the 
 cotton into a thread. This simple process 
 is the basis of all the complicated spinning 
 machinery in use at the present time. 
 
 In a modern cotton factory there are 
 three departments of labor, carding, spin- 
 ning, and weaving; and we have now to 
 consider briefly these three processes. The 
 purpose of carding is to clean the cotton and 
 lay the fibres in a uniform direction. This 
 was at first accomplished by hand, the im- 
 plement employed being little different 
 from an ordinary comb ; later an improved 
 device was used consisting of a pair of large 
 wire brushes. This, we must observe, was 
 a primitive operation, and the amount of 
 cotton which one person could thus pre- 
 pare for spinning was very small. 
 
 We have already seen that the invention 
 of the fly-shuttle so increased the demand 
 for yarn that ingenious men were induced 
 to make mechanical experiments for the 
 purpose of supplying this demand — ex- 
 
34 THE FACTORY 
 
 periments which, in the end, led to the 
 invention of the spinning-frame. The spin- 
 ning-frame, in turn, increased the demand 
 for carded cotton and skillful mechanics 
 again set about to meet this new require- 
 ment, and the result was the building of the 
 carding-engine. This invention was not 
 made at once, nor by any particular indi- 
 vidual ; but was the result of a number of 
 improvements made at different times and 
 by different persons. One of these men 
 was Thomas High, the inventor of the 
 spinning-jenny; another was James Har- 
 greaves who so improved the jenny that he 
 is commonly called the inventor of it; and 
 finally, Richard Arkwright himself took the 
 crude machine devised by these men and per- 
 fected it. Thus it came about that the mod- 
 ern carding-engine as well as the spinning- 
 frame, was made of practical value by this 
 much-enduring, much-inventing barber. 
 
 The invention of the fly-shuttle, as we 
 have seen, led to an increased demand for 
 
MECHANICAL INVENTIONS 35 
 
 yarn, and this demand was further aug- 
 mented about the year 1760 when the 
 Manchester merchants began to export 
 cotton goods in considerable quantities to 
 Italy, Germany, and the North American 
 colonies. It was then no uncommon thing 
 for a weaver to walk three or four miles 
 in the morning, and call on five or six spin- 
 ners, before he could collect yarn enough 
 to serve him for the remainder of the day. 
 Ingenious mechanics set about the task 
 of producing more yarn. The first of these 
 was Thomas High, a reed maker, residing 
 in the town of Leigh, who engaged one 
 Kay, a clock-maker, and this is the same 
 Kay who was afterwards employed by Ark- 
 wright to make the wheels and other appa- 
 ratus for a spinning-machine. This machine 
 was set up in the garret of High's house. 
 Now, Thomas High had a daughter who 
 watched with keen interest the progress of 
 his experiments — her name was Jane — 
 and in honor of her he called the machine 
 
36 THE FACTORY 
 
 the spinning-jenny. It is commonly stated 
 — even in so authoritative a history as 
 Baines's vv^e find the error — that the credit 
 for the original invention of the spinning- 
 jenny is due to Hargreaves, he having made 
 the first machine in 1767. But Guest has 
 shown quite conclusively by the sworn state- 
 ment of one Thomas Leather, a neighbor 
 of High, that the latter completed a sim- 
 ilar machine in 1764. 
 
 However this may be, James Hargreaves, 
 a weaver of Stand-Hill, near Blackburn, 
 perfected the original jenny and made it a 
 practical working machine so that history 
 has quite justly named him the author. 
 From the first Hargreaves was aware of 
 the value of his invention, but not having 
 the ambition to obtain a patent he kept the 
 machine as secret as possible, using it only 
 to spin yarn for his own weaving. An un- 
 protected invention of such importance, 
 however, could not remain long the pri- 
 vate property of a single weaver, and soon 
 
MECHANICAL INVENTIONS 37 
 
 a knowledge of his achievement spread 
 throughout the neighborhood; but instead 
 of gaining admiration and gratitude for 
 Hargreaves, the spinners raised the cry that 
 the invention would throw multitudes out 
 of employment and a mob broke into his 
 house and destroyed his jenny. 
 
 After this, Hargreaves moved to Notting- 
 ham, where, with a Mr. Thomas James, 
 he raised sufficient capital to erect a small 
 mill ; here he took out a patent in 1 770, — 
 one year after Arkwright had patented the 
 water-frame. Before leaving Lancashire, 
 Hargreaves made and sold to other weavers 
 a number of jennies ; and in spite of all 
 opposition the importance of the invention 
 led to its general use. 
 
 A desperate effort was made in 1779, 
 during a period of distress, to put down 
 the machine. A mob scoured the country 
 for miles around Blackburn demolishing 
 jennies and with them all carding-engines, 
 water-frames, and other machinery; but 
 
38 THE FACTORY 
 
 the rioters spared thejennies which had only- 
 twenty spindles, as these were by this time 
 admitted to be useful to the craftsmen. Not 
 only the working classes, but the middle and 
 even the upper classes entertained at this 
 time a profound dread of machinery. The 
 result of these riots was to drive spinners and 
 other capitalists from the neighborhood of 
 Blackburn to Manchester, increasing the 
 importance of that rapidly growing town 
 which was destined to become the world 
 centre of the cotton industry. 
 
 The story of this early opposition to the 
 introduction of machinery deserves atten- 
 tion not only as an interesting episode in 
 the history of the factory, but because 
 even to-day a similar opposition comes to 
 the surface with each new improvement in 
 the method of manufacture. It is also an 
 interesting fact that Lord Byron made his 
 maiden speech in the House of Lords in 
 opposition to the Nottingham Riot Bills, 
 introduced into Parliament for the protec- 
 
MECHANICAL INVENTIONS 39 
 
 tion of owners of machinery. There were 
 two of these bills, one " for the more ex- 
 emplary punishment of persons destroying 
 or injurying any stocking- or lace-frames, 
 or other machines or engines used in the 
 frame-work knitting manufactory, or any 
 articles or goods in such frames or ma- 
 chines"; the other "for the more effect- 
 ual preservation of the peace within the 
 county of Nottingham." 
 
 These two bills were the result of riot- 
 ing among the lacemakers of this county 
 and their object was to increase the 
 penalty for breaking machinery, from 
 transportation to death, to permit the 
 appointment of special constables in times 
 of disturbance, and to establish watch and 
 ward throughout the disturbed parts. These 
 bills and the debates upon them throw a 
 strong light upon the extent of the dis- 
 turbances, and indicate the attitude of the 
 government, at that time, toward the labor- 
 ing poor. 
 
40 THE FACTORY 
 
 The important inventions in carding and 
 spinning led to a rapid advance in cotton 
 manufacture; the new machines not only 
 turned off a greater quantity of yarn than 
 had been produced by hand, but the yarn 
 vv^as also of a superior quality. The water- 
 frame spun a hard, firm yarn, well adapted 
 for warps, while the jenny produced a soft 
 yarn suitable for spinning weft ; but the 
 yarn produced on neither of these machines 
 could be advantageously used for making 
 the finer qualities of goods. 
 
 This defect in the spinning-machinery 
 was remedied by still another device called 
 the mule jenny, but now termed simply 
 the mule, so named because it combined 
 the principles of both Arkwright's water- 
 frame and Hargreaves' jenny. The mule 
 was invented by Samuel Crompton, a 
 weaver living at Hall-in-the-Wood near 
 Bolton. He commenced his experiments 
 in 1774, but it was five years before he 
 completed the machine. Crompton took 
 
MECHANICAL INVENTIONS 41 
 
 out no patent and only regretted that pub- 
 lic curiosity would not allow him to keep 
 his little invention for himself. The mule 
 was first known as the Hall-in-the-Wood 
 wheel, then as the muslin wheel because 
 it made yarn sufficiently fine for weaving 
 that fabric, and finally by its present name. 
 As the inventor made no effort to secure 
 a patent, the mule became public property, 
 and was generally adopted by manufac- 
 turers, but Crompton himself received no 
 other reward than a grant of five thousand 
 pounds voted him by Parliament in 18 12. 
 Although his means were small, he was 
 always in easy circumstances, until the 
 latter part of his life, when, being no 
 longer able to work, he was reduced to 
 poverty. Certain manufacturers who had 
 profited by his invention then subscribed 
 for the purchase of a life annuity, to which 
 fund foreign as well as English spinners 
 contributed. Crompton died on January 
 26, 1827. 
 
42 THE FACTORY 
 
 Having considered the inventions in the 
 art of spinning, we now turn to the power 
 loom built in 1785 by the Reverend Ed- 
 mund Cartwright, of Hollander House, 
 Kent. A loom moved by water power had 
 been contrived as early as the seventeenth 
 century by one De Gennes, and described 
 as "a new engine to make linen cloth 
 without the help of an artificer." But the 
 machine never came into general use ; 
 and in about the middle of the eighteenth 
 century there is record of another power 
 loom, also a French invention, which suf- 
 fered a similar fate. Describing his own 
 loom Cartwright says that in the summer 
 of 1784 he fell in company with some 
 gentlemen of Manchester who were dis- 
 cussing Arkwright's spinning-machinery. 
 One of the company observed that, as 
 soon as Arkwright's patents expired, so 
 many mills would be erected and so much 
 cotton spun that hands could not be found 
 to weave it. 
 
MECHANICAL INVENTIONS 43 
 
 To this observation the ingenious clergy- 
 man replied that Arkwright should set his 
 wits to work to invent a weaving-mill. 
 But the Manchester gentlemen unani- 
 mously agreed that the thing was im- 
 practical. Cartwright argued, however, 
 that, having seen exhibited in London 
 an automaton figure which played at 
 chess, he did not believe it more diffi- 
 cult to construct a machine which would 
 weave. He kept this conversation in mind 
 and later employed a carpenter and a 
 blacksmith to carry his ideas into effect. 
 Thus he built a loom which, to his own 
 delight, produced a piece of cloth. The 
 machine, however, required two powerful 
 men to work it, but Cartwright, who was 
 entirely unfamiliar with the art of weaving, 
 believed that he had accomplished all that 
 was required, and on the 4th of April, 
 1 7 8 5 , he secured a patent. It was only then 
 that he commenced to study the method 
 by which the craftsmen wove cloth, and he 
 
44 THE FACTORY 
 
 was astonished when he compared the easy 
 working of the hand loom with his own 
 ponderous engine. Profiting by his study, 
 however, he produced a loom which in its 
 general principles is precisely the same as 
 the looms used to-day. 
 
 Thus was invented the machinery of 
 the cotton mill; but there remains to be 
 considered the one other contrivance with- 
 out which the vast extension of manu- 
 factures would have been impossible and 
 the manufacturing towns, which we are 
 about to consider, would never have at- 
 tained the size and importance which en- 
 abled them to become factors in the polit- 
 ical life of England. I refer to the steam 
 engine. 
 
 In 1763, James Watt was employed in 
 repairing a model of Newcomen's steam 
 engine, and, noting certain basic defects, 
 undertook to remedy them. He perceived 
 the vast possibilities of a properly con- 
 structed engine and, after years of patient 
 
MECHANICAL INVENTIONS 45 
 
 labor he gave to the world the mighty 
 power of steam. Previous to this time, 
 and indeed until the year 1782, the steam 
 engine had been used almost exclusively 
 to pump water out of mines, but with 
 Watt's improvements it became possible 
 for the engine to give rotary motion to 
 machinery. 
 
 The first cotton mill to install a steam 
 engine made by Boulton and Watt was the 
 one owned by the Messrs. Robinson in 
 Nottinghamshire — this was about the 
 year 1785. Two years earlier, Arkwright 
 had made use of an atmospheric engine 
 in his Manchester factory, but it was not 
 until 1789 that an improved steam engine 
 was set up in that city and it was a year 
 later when Arkwright adopted the device. 
 
 The invention of spinning-machinery* 
 created the cotton manufacture of Eng- 
 land, but the industry would never have 
 reached the proportions which it presently 
 did except for the genius of Watt. 
 
IV 
 
 THE FACTORY SYSTEM 
 
 WHEN the cotton manufacture was 
 in its infancy, all the operations, 
 from dressing the raw material to folding 
 the finished fabric, were completed under 
 the roof of the weaver's cottage. With 
 Arkwright's invention it became the cus- 
 tom to spin the yarn in factories and weave 
 it by hand in cottages. With the invention 
 of the power loom, it again became the 
 practice to perform all the processes in a 
 single building. 
 
 The weaver's cottage, then, with its rude 
 apparatus of peg warping, hand cards, spin- 
 ning-wheels, and wooden looms, was the 
 steam factory in miniature ; but the amount 
 of labor performed in a single factory was 
 as great as that which formerly gave occupa- 
 
THE FACTORY SYSTEM 47 
 
 tion to the inhabitants of an entire district. 
 A good hand-loom weaver could produce 
 two pieces of shirtin gs each week ; by 1 8 2 3 , 
 a power-loom weaver produced seven such 
 pieces in the same time. 
 
 A factory containing two hundred looms 
 was operated by one hundred persons who 
 wove seven hundred pieces a week, and it 
 was estimated that under the domestic sys- 
 tem at least eight hundred and seventy-five 
 looms would have been required to weave 
 this amount of cloth, because the women 
 of the household had their home duties to 
 perform while the men were required to 
 devote a considerable portion of their time 
 to farming. It was therefore further esti- 
 mated that the work done in a steam fac- 
 tory containing two hundred looms would, 
 if performed by hand, give employment 
 and support to a population of more than 
 two thousand persons. It is interesting 
 here to note, that, whereas a hand-loom 
 weaver could produce two pieces of shirt- 
 
48 THE FACTORY 
 
 ings a week, an ordinary weaver is now 
 able to turn off eight or ten pieces of equal 
 length every ten hours ; so that a modern 
 weave room containing two hundred power 
 looms operated by twenty-five weavers 
 represents the labor of a community of 
 sixty thousand craftsmen, their wives and 
 their children, A population of thirty mil- 
 lion would be required to perform by hand 
 the work now produced by the Fall River 
 factories alone. 
 
 " Watt," said a celebrated French en- 
 gineer, "improves the steam engine, and 
 this single improvement causes the indus- 
 try of England to make an immense stride. 
 This machine, at the present time [about 
 1830], represents the power of three hun- 
 dred thousand horses or of two million men, 
 strong and well fitted for labor, who should 
 work night and day without an interrup- 
 tion and without repose. ... A hair- 
 dresser invents, or at least brings into ac- 
 tion, a machine for spinning cotton ; this 
 
THE FACTORY SYSTEM 49 
 
 alone gives the British industry immense 
 superiority. Fifty years only, after this 
 great discovery, more than one million of 
 the inhabitants of England are employed 
 in those operations which depend, di- 
 rectly or indirectly, on the action of this 
 machine. Lastly, England exports cotton, 
 spun and woven by an admirable system 
 of machinery, to the value of four hundred 
 million francs yearly. . . . The British 
 navigator travels in quest of the cotton of 
 India, brings it from a distance of four 
 thousand leagues, commits it to an opera- 
 tion of the machines of Arkwright, carries 
 back their products to the East, making 
 them again to travel four thousand leagues, 
 and in spite of the loss of time — in spite 
 of the enormous expense incurred by this 
 voyage of eight thousand leagues, the cot- 
 ton manufactured by the machinery of 
 England becomes less costly than the cotton 
 of India, spun and woven by hand near the 
 field that produced it, and sold at the near- 
 
50 THE FACTORY 
 
 est market. So great is the power of the 
 progress of machinery." 
 
 Two distinct systems of production pre- 
 ceded the factory. First, the system of 
 isolated handicraft labor, and second, the 
 system of cottage industry, which we have 
 already considered and in which the several 
 members of a family participated, — this, 
 too, was handicraft. The craftsman, as we 
 have seen, worked with his family in his own 
 cottage; he owned his loom and the other 
 simple machinery necessary for the pro- 
 duction of cloth, and either he owned his 
 raw material or received it from the mas- 
 ter manufacturer to be returned in the 
 form of finished fabric. But in either case, 
 the craftsman was his own master and 
 sold cloth not labor. 
 
 With the establishment of the factory, 
 these conditions were completely changed. 
 The master manufacturer not only owned 
 the factory building and the machinery, 
 but he owned the raw material. Moreover 
 
THE FACTORY SYSTEM 51 
 
 to him the operative sold his labor which 
 thereby became a commodity quite as com- 
 pletely as the cotton he wove into cloth. 
 This latter circumstance is important be- 
 cause it became the source of the vast so- 
 cial discontent which, in the end, aided 
 powerfully in revolutionizing the structure 
 of British society. 
 
 To the consideration of this event we 
 shall soon return. For the moment we must 
 consider briefly the most characteristic 
 distinction in the process of manufacture 
 under the new system — the extension of 
 the principle of division of labor. 
 
 The principle itself was in no wise new, 
 for the first application of it was made in 
 a very early stage in the evolution of so- 
 ciety. At the very dawn of civilization it 
 must have become apparent that more com- 
 forts and conveniences could be acquired 
 by one man restricting his occupation to a 
 single craft — and the development of in- 
 dependent arts was in_ itself a division of 
 
52 THE FACTORY 
 
 labor. The same principle was then carried 
 into the different trades, and at last we find 
 it fully developed in the cottage system of 
 industry. Thus we find carding, spinning, 
 and weaving carried on by separate mem- 
 bers of the family. Carding and spinning, 
 which required less bodily strength, was 
 performed by the women, while the more 
 laborious work of weaving was given over 
 to the men. With the establishment of the 
 factory and the introduction of machinery, 
 means were supplied by which this system 
 could attain its highest development. 
 
 The advantages resulting from the di- 
 vision of labor are evident. When the 
 whole work, in any art is executed by one 
 person, that person must possess sufficient 
 skill to perform the most difficult, and suf- 
 ficient strength to perform the most la- 
 borious, of the processes ; but by employing 
 a division of labor several persons may be 
 kept at work executing that part of the 
 whole for which he is best fitted. 
 
THE FACTORY SYSTEM 53 
 
 The further advantages may be most 
 briefly stated in the familiar words of Adam 
 Smith : " The great increase in the quantity 
 of work, which, in consequence of the di- 
 vision of labor, the same number of people 
 are capable of performing, is owing to three 
 different circumstances : first, to the increase 
 of dexterity in every particular working- 
 man ; secondly, to the saving of time, which 
 is commonly lost in passing from one spe- 
 cies of work to another, and, lastly, to the 
 invention of a great number of machines 
 which facilitate and abridge labor and en- 
 able one man to do the work of many." 
 
 It should be noted that the factory was, 
 in the beginning, not the creation of cap- 
 ital, but of labor. The early master manu- 
 facturers were risen workingmen. Sir Rich- 
 ard Arkwright, the creator of the factory, 
 the man who dominated industrial activi- 
 ties in the first great period of expansion, 
 was a penny barber ; but he died a Knight 
 Bachelor with an income greater than that 
 
54 THE FACTORY 
 
 of many a prince. The process of social 
 elevation by means of trade began back in 
 the fifteenth century with the first exten- 
 sion of manufactures. By the beginning of 
 the eighteenth century it was possible to 
 name five hundred great estates within a 
 hundred miles of London, which, at no 
 remote time, had been possessions of the 
 ancient English gentry, but had later been 
 bought up by tradesmen and manufacturers. 
 The ancestors of these new landed proprie- 
 tors had been, less than three hundred years 
 before, not soldiers, but serfs 
 
 Moreover, generations before the estab- 
 lishment of the factory, important towns 
 had been raised by manufactures — towns 
 of which Manchester and Birmingham 
 were examples, in which there were few or 
 no families of the gentry, yet which were 
 full of families richer by far than many a 
 noble house. And side by side with this pro- 
 cess of tradesmen rising to the gentry had 
 gone the other process of declining gentry 
 
THE FACTORY SYSTEM 55 
 
 placing their sons in trade. So, as Defoe 
 pithily said, " Tradesmen became gentle- 
 men by gentlemen becoming tradesmen." 
 
 The successful artisan under the domes- 
 tic system became in time master clothier, 
 and when the factory became the means of 
 further increase to their fortunes the cap- 
 ital which this class had already amassed 
 was utilized in building mills and ma- 
 chinery. To this class belonged the grand- 
 father of Sir Robert Peel, a resident of 
 Blackburn, who supported himself from the 
 profits of a farm in the neighborhood and 
 devoted his spare time to mechanical ex- 
 periments. From this he came to operate 
 a print-works, and later commenced the 
 manufacture of cloth. 
 
 His son, the first Sir Robert, — the father 
 of the Prime Minister, — was apprenticed 
 to the trade and came to manhood at the 
 time when the impulse given to manufac- 
 tures in England, through the introduc- 
 tion of machinery, led to a more rapid 
 
56 THE FACTORY ^ 
 
 accumulation of wealth than had been 
 known in any previous period of history. 
 It is said that in his youth Robert Peel en- 
 tertained a presentiment that he would be- 
 come the founder of a family. By means of 
 the factory, he amassed a fortune, was raised 
 to the honor of knighthood, and realized 
 his presentiment — for in the next genera- 
 tion no name is more famous in the annals 
 of government than that of Sir Robert Peel, 
 the grandson of a domestic manufacturer. 
 
 As the number of factories increased it 
 became possible for operatives to rise, first 
 to positions of trust within the factory, and 
 later to the rank of master manufacturer 
 — so that many a bobbin boy became a 
 cotton lord. 
 
 Within the factory the effect was to 
 intensify that spirit of discontent which 
 presently arose among the workers — for 
 risen workingmen are apt to prove the 
 hardest task masters. A graphic picture of 
 this aspect of factory life as it existed in 
 
THE FACTORY SYSTEM ^1 
 
 Manchester in the first half of the last cen- 
 tury, when discontent had become articu- 
 late and the great Chartist movement 
 reached its height is to be found in Dick- 
 ens's Hard Times. In that story Josiah 
 Bounderby of Coketown is typical of this 
 class of risen workingmen — the early em- 
 ployers of labor under the factory system ; 
 Josiah Bounderby, who learnt his letters 
 from the outside of shops and was first 
 able to tell time from studying the steeple 
 clock at St. Giles's Church, London ; Josiah 
 Bounderby, vagabond, errand boy, laborer, 
 porter, clerk, chief manager, small partner, 
 merchant, banker, manufacturer. There 
 was very little in the training of Josiah 
 Bounderby, or any of his class to make them 
 humane employers of labor — and among 
 the several causes which made the early re- 
 lation of employer and employee under the 
 factory system one of bitter strife, this cause, 
 so strictly social in its origin, is one of the 
 most important, 
 
58 THE FACTORY 
 
 The establishment of the factory altered 
 completely the relation between employer 
 and employee. Indeed in the modern sense 
 these relations were then first established. 
 Labor became a commodity which the 
 master manufacturer, who was also the 
 capitalist, bought and which the working- 
 man sold. When in the year 1785 Ark- 
 wright's patents were set aside and the use 
 of his perfected spinning machinery be- 
 came free to all manufacturers, a great ex- 
 tension of the cotton industry followed. 
 Factories were built throughout Lancashire 
 and about these factories important cities 
 sprang up in which the modern problem 
 of the relation of employer and employee 
 had its beginning. 
 
 The factory produced cloth more cheap- 
 ly and in far greater quantity than was pos- 
 sible under the domestic system. Hand 
 workers sought employment in the fac- 
 tories. Vast numbers of purely agricultural 
 laborers left the rural districts for the man- 
 
THE FACTORY SYSTEM 59 
 
 ufacturing towns. And, augmenting this 
 great supply of labor, came thousands of 
 children — for an eight-year-old child was 
 capable of operating a spinning-frame, in 
 which, for this very reason, the spindles 
 were set near to the floor. With an unlim- 
 ited supply of labor, the cotton masters had 
 only the cost of production to consider, and 
 so it came about that they thought only of 
 their profits and forgot the human hands 
 which operated the machinery. England 
 had fallen under the sway of a book — Adam 
 Smith's Wealth of Nations, which, as Southey 
 said, "considers man as a manufacturing 
 animal, estimating his importance not by 
 the goodness and knowledge he possesses, 
 not by his virtues and charities, not by the 
 happiness of which he may be the source 
 and centre, not by the duties to which he 
 is called, not by the immortal destinies for 
 which he is created, but by the gain that 
 may be extracted from him or of which 
 he may be made the instrument." 
 
6o THE FACTORY 
 
 The crowding of this vast laboring pop- 
 ulation into great industrial centres, how- 
 ever, gave rise to a class-consciousness which 
 demanded that attention should be paid to 
 the human element which distinguished 
 labor from all other commodities, de- 
 manded that the cotton masters should 
 no longer regard the workingman as a 
 slave, or as merely a part of the machine, 
 but as a free man, and which demanded 
 further that this free man should be 
 recognized as a citizen and given the right 
 of suffrage. 
 
 It would be interesting for us to follow 
 the history of the factory where we now 
 leave it, firmly established as the corner- 
 stone of Great Britain's wealth, down to 
 the present time, and trace its development 
 not only in England and America but 
 throughout the civilized world. It is a sur- 
 prising story of industrial progress, an im- 
 portant chapter in the social progress of 
 mankind. But enough has already been said 
 
THE FACTORY SYSTEM 6i 
 
 to prepare us for the consideration of the 
 way in which the establishment of the fac- 
 tory affected England's laboring poor. The 
 actual development of the cotton industry 
 surpasses any dream that even the barber 
 of Preston could have imagined when he 
 exclaimed that he, unaided, would pay the 
 national debt. 
 
 Less than a century and a half ago, 
 Richard Arkwright built his first little mill 
 at Nottingham which gave employment to 
 a dozen operatives. To-day there are one 
 hundred great cotton factories in the city 
 of Fall River alone, operating three and one 
 half million spindles, nearly one hundred 
 thousand looms, and giving employment to 
 twenty-seven thousand operatives. There 
 are more than twenty -five million spindles 
 in daily operation in the United States, and 
 even a greater number on the continent of 
 Europe, while Great Britain contains over 
 fifty million ; and when to these we add 
 the spindles of India, Japan, and China, we 
 
62 THE FACTORY 
 
 have a total of one hundred and twenty mil- 
 lion spindles giving employment to an army 
 of workers as great as the entire popula- 
 tion of England when Arkwright took out 
 his patents for spinning by rollers. Nor is 
 this all. The factory system first applied to 
 the cotton industry has been applied to all 
 manufactures as well as to agriculture and 
 has become the central fact in modern in- 
 dustrial life. 
 
 We are now to take up the question 
 of how the establishment of the factory 
 affected England's laboring poor, and to 
 study a little more in detail the social 
 effects of the Industrial Revolution. In 
 preparing the way for this discussion we 
 should remember that the factory was not 
 the sole cause of the Industrial Revolu- 
 tion, although it was a very important 
 one. Other elements besides the intro- 
 duction of machinery had gradually made 
 possible production on a large scale. Chief 
 among these was the decline of state 
 
THE FACTORY SYSTEM 63 
 
 regulation of industry, the development 
 of rationalism quickening the scientific 
 spirit, the growth of the empire and 
 prestige of England which opened great 
 export markets for the goods of British 
 manufacture, the extension of banking fa- 
 cilities, and the construction of roads and 
 canals. All these were elements in pro- 
 ducing the Industrial Revolution. But what 
 gave the movement force to revolutionize 
 the social life of the common people was 
 the factory, which gathered great masses 
 of the population into industrial centres in 
 which became possible the development 
 of class consciousness. 
 
V 
 
 THE FACTORY TOWNS 
 
 THE dictionary contains the history 
 of the race, if you search deep into 
 its mysteries ; every word tells its own story 
 and bears its present meaning because men, 
 at different times, thought precisely as they 
 did and not otherwise. 
 
 Servius Tullius made six divisions of the 
 citizens of Rome for the purposes of taxa- 
 tion and these divisions were called classes. 
 A seventh included the mass of the popu- 
 lation, those who were not possessed of 
 any taxable property — that is to say the 
 laboring poor. It is from this circumstance 
 that our word "class" derives its peculiar 
 meaning. Now it is significant that before 
 the great extension of manufactures occa- 
 sioned by the factory, we find no reference 
 
THE FACTORY TOWNS 65 
 
 in our language to the working classes. 
 The laboring poor belonged to no class; 
 but when great cities grew up about the 
 factories, populated by toilers whose inter- 
 ests in life were identical, the masses sud- 
 denly became conscious of their common 
 life, their common needs, their common 
 hopes. Blindly at first, and then more 
 surely, they struggled for recognition as a 
 class, and at last the struggle found ex- 
 pression in the language of their time. 
 The arousing of this class consciousness 
 amongst the workers I take to be the chief 
 contribution of the factory to the social 
 progress of mankind ; and for this reason 
 the rise of the manufacturing towns be- 
 comes a subject of great importance. 
 
 In the town hall at Manchester there is 
 a fresco by Ford Maddox Brown which 
 bears the title of " The Establishment of 
 Flemish Weavers in Manchester," and 
 shows Queen Philippa visiting the colony 
 which she founded in 1363. Mr, George 
 
66 THE FACTORY 
 
 Saintsbury, in his history of Manchester, 
 questions the historical accuracy of the event 
 portrayed; "but," he adds, "Queen Philippa 
 didmany things which weshould all be sorry 
 to give up as art and literature and which, 
 yet, are somewhat dubious history." 
 
 No one knows when Manchester first 
 became a manufacturing town, and the in- 
 troduction of Flemish artificers in the reign 
 of Edward III is rather a probable than a 
 certain starting-point. Nothing is distinctly 
 known of the progress of woolen manu- 
 facture, until the reign of Henry VIII, 
 at which time it had evidently grown into 
 considerable importance. In the statute 
 of the thirty-third year of his reign it ap- 
 pears that the inhabitants of Manchester 
 carried on a considerable manufacture both 
 of linens and woolens by which they were 
 acquiring great wealth ; but no mention has 
 yet been found of cotton manufacture in 
 that city earlier than the year 1641. By 
 this time, however, it had become well 
 established. 
 
THE FACTORY TOWNS 67 
 
 The labor was entirely handicraft; and 
 it was not until the establishment of the 
 factory by Arkwright that Manchester and 
 the other manufacturing towns of England 
 came into prominence in the political life 
 of the nation ; indeed it was not until the 
 nineteenth century was well advanced that 
 the inhabitants of these cities were repre- 
 sented in Parliament. 
 
 It has been held that the factory is an 
 episode, not an element, in modern socio- 
 logical development, and in a strict sense 
 this is true. But because the factory led to 
 the growth of great manufacturing towns 
 and caused the migration thither of a vast 
 population from the agricultural districts, 
 and because it was among this popula- 
 tion that the social discontent, which for a 
 long period had existed in the lower classes, 
 first became articulate, the factory directly 
 contributed to the development of modern 
 democracy. 
 
 The factory transformed not only crafts- 
 
68 THE FACTORY 
 
 men into operatives, but agricultural la- 
 borers as well, the latter becoming for 
 the first time free to dispose of their own 
 labor ; for while serfdom had been declared 
 illegal long before the establishment of the 
 factory, yet the peasant remained depend- 
 ent, in a large measure, upon the good 
 will of his employer and he was bound by 
 custom if not by law to the soil he tilled. 
 The migration of this vast laboring popu- 
 lation from the fields to the towns led to 
 far-reaching social results. 
 
 " Meanwhile, at social Industry's command 
 How quick and fast an increase ! From the germ 
 Of some poor hamlet, rapidly produced. 
 Here a large town, continuous and compact. 
 Hiding the face of earth for leagues — and there, 
 Where not a habitation stood before. 
 Abodes of men irregularly massed 
 Like trees in forests — spread through spacious 
 
 tracts. 
 O'er which the smoke of unremitting fires 
 Hangs permanent, and plentiful as wreaths 
 Of vapor glittering in the morning sun." 
 
THE FACTORY TOWNS 69 
 
 Thus Wordsworth in The Excursion de- 
 scribes the rise of the manufacturing 
 towns. 
 
 Our first concern is with the social con- 
 ditions existing in these great manufac- 
 turing cities. The factory system was first 
 applied to the spinning of yarn ; but weav- 
 ing continued, for a time, as a handicraft. 
 This period was one of great prosperity to 
 the hand-loom weavers. Before the inven- 
 tion of spinning-machinery, several spin- 
 ners were required to furnish one loom with 
 yarn ; and one half of the weaver's time 
 was spent in waiting for work. This time 
 was employed in farming. But with the 
 establishment of the spinning-mills the 
 situation was reversed, and the weaver, 
 plentifully supplied with yarn, ceased to 
 cultivate the soil and devoted his whole 
 time to the loom, a far more profitable 
 occupation. 
 
 Villages of hand-loom weavers sprang 
 up throughout the country adjacent to the 
 
70 THE FACTORY 
 
 manufacturing towns, and hither the mas- 
 ter spinners sent their yarn and received 
 back the finished cloth ; while sometimes 
 the weaving was done in "dandy" shops 
 containing eight or ten and often as many 
 as twenty looms. These little factories 
 were usually owned by a single weaver who 
 hired others to assist him in his work; but 
 whatever the method, the profits from the 
 business were always great. 
 
 " One of the happiest sights in Lanca- 
 shire life at this time," writes a contem- 
 porary historian, " was the home of a 
 family of weavers. . . . There could be 
 heard the merry song to the tune of the 
 clacking shuttles and the bumping of the 
 lathes ; the cottage surrounded with a 
 garden filled with flowers and situated in 
 the midst of green fields where the larks 
 sang and the throstles whistled their 
 morning adoration to the rising sun. The 
 weaving thus carried on at home, where 
 several persons of the same family and 
 
THE FACTORY TOWNS 71 
 
 apprentices were employed, made them 
 prosperous small manufacturers and a proud 
 lot of people." This was about x8oo. 
 
 " The trade of muslin weaver," says a 
 Bolton manufacturer of the same period, 
 "was that of a gentleman. The weavers 
 brought home their work in top boots and 
 ruffled shirts ; they had a cane and took a 
 coach in some instances, and appeared as 
 well as military officers of the first degree. 
 They used to walk about the streets with 
 a five-pound Bank of England note spread 
 out under their hat-bands; they would 
 smoke none but long churchwarden pipes, 
 and objected to the intrusion of any other 
 craftsman into the particular rooms of the 
 public-houses which they frequented." 
 This abnormal prosperity, however, pre- 
 ceded their downfall. Two events were 
 preparing it, — the invention of the power 
 loom and the application of steam power 
 to all the processes of manufacture. 
 
 Before considering the condition of the 
 
72 THE FACTORY 
 
 laboring population after the establishment 
 of factories for weaving as well as for spin- 
 ning, we should glance backward into the 
 previous history of the laboring poor. 
 During the prevalence of the feudal system 
 the population of England was purely agri- 
 cultural. The chief landed proprietors 
 possessed a certain number of slaves who were 
 employed generally in domestic service, but 
 who also manufactured the wearing apparel 
 and household furniture. " Priests are set 
 apart for prayer," says an ancient chron- 
 icle, " but it is fit that noble chevaliers 
 should enjoy all ease, and taste all pleas- 
 ures, while the laborer toils, in order that 
 they may be nourished in abundance — 
 they, and their horse, and their dogs." 
 This class of laborers, however, was never 
 very large. 
 
 The great body of the peasantry was 
 composed, first, of persons who rented 
 small farms, and who paid their rent either 
 in kind or in agicrultural labor ; and sec- 
 
THE FACTORY TOWNS 73 
 
 ondly, of cottagers, each of whom had a 
 small parcel of land attached to his dwell- 
 ing, and the privilege of turning out a 
 cow, or pigs, or a few sheep into the woods, 
 commons and wastes of the manor. Dur- 
 ing this whole period the entire popula- 
 tion derived its subsistence immediately 
 from the land. The mechanics of each 
 village, not having time to cultivate a 
 sufficient quantity of land to yield them a 
 sustenance, received a fixed annual allow- 
 ance of produce from each tenant. The 
 peasantry worked hard and fared scantily 
 enough, but still there was never an abso- 
 lute want of food; the whole body was 
 poor, but it contained no paupers. 
 
 During the fourteenth century the de- 
 mand for wool not only to supply the 
 markets of the Netherlands, but also the 
 newly established manufacture of England, 
 rapidly increased and the owners of the 
 land found sheep-feeding more profitable 
 than husbandry; and the sudden exten- 
 
74 THE FACTORY 
 
 sion of manufacture in the fifteenth cen- 
 tury greatly increased the demand. This 
 circumstance led to an important change 
 in the distribution of the population and 
 the peasants previously employed in till- 
 age were turned adrift upon the world. 
 The allotments of arable land which had 
 formerly afforded them the means of sub- 
 sistence were converted into sheep walks 
 and this policy greatly accelerated a social 
 revolution which had already commenced. 
 It eventually led to a complete severance 
 between the English peasantry and the 
 English soil ; and with the exception of 
 those employed in domestic manufacture, 
 the little farmers and cottiers of the coun- 
 try were converted into day laborers de- 
 pending entirely upon wages for their sub- 
 sistence. 
 
 Thus when we come to consider the piti- 
 able condition of the working classes, fol- 
 lowing the establishment of the factory, we 
 must remember this underlying cause of 
 
THE FACTORY TOWNS 75 
 
 the poverty and suffering, holding in mind 
 the fact that from the beginning the in- 
 crease of English poor rates kept pace vis- 
 ibly with the progress of the enclosure of 
 the common land. Complaints against 
 vagrancy and idleness, and the difficulty of 
 providing for the poor increased propor- 
 tionately with the progress of the system of 
 consolidating farms, and abstracting from 
 the English cottager his crofts and rights 
 to the common lands. Upon the factory 
 has fallen the blame for social conditions 
 which had their source in causes long 
 antedating its establishment — but the 
 factory has sufficient misery for which to 
 answer. 
 
 Arkwright's inventions, as we have seen, 
 took manufactures out of the cottages 
 and farm houses of England and assembled 
 them in factories. Thousands of hands 
 were suddenly required especially in Lan- 
 cashire, which until then was compara- 
 tively thinly populated. A great migra- 
 
76 THE FACTORY 
 
 tion of population from the rural districts 
 to the manufacturing towns was set in 
 motion, thousands of families leaving the 
 quiet life of the country for the intenser 
 life of the city, but still the new demand 
 for labor was unsatisfied. The custom 
 sprang up of procuring apprentices from 
 the parish workhouses of London, Birm- 
 ingham, and elsewhere ; and many thou- 
 sand children between the ages of seven 
 and fourteen years were thus sent to swell 
 the numbers of the laboring population. 
 Beside the factories stood apprentice houses 
 in which the children were lodged and 
 fed; and it was also the custom for the 
 master manufacturer to furnish the ap- 
 prentice with clothes. 
 
 The work required of the children was 
 exacting. The pay of the overseers was 
 fixed in proportion to the work produced, 
 a circumstance which bore hard on the 
 apprentices. The greatest cruelties were 
 practiced to spur the children to excessive 
 
THE FACTORY TOWNS -jj 
 
 labor; they were flogged, fettered, and 
 in many cases they were starved and some 
 were driven to commit suicide. We have 
 it on the authority of Mr. John Fielding, 
 himself, a master manufacturer and mem- 
 ber of Parliament for Oldham, that the 
 happiest moments in the lives of many of 
 these children were those passed in the 
 workhouse. 
 
 The profits of manufacturing were en- 
 ormous and so was the greed of the new- 
 born manufacturing aristocracy. Night 
 work was begun, the day shift going to 
 sleep in the same beds that the night shift 
 had just quitted, so that it was a common 
 saying in Lancashire that the beds never got 
 cold. Although the master manufacturers 
 were unmoved by the dictates of humanity, 
 they were not proof against the malignant 
 fevers which broke out in the congested 
 districts and spread their ravages through- 
 out the manufacturing towns. 
 
 Public opinion was soon aroused which 
 
78 THE FACTORY 
 
 led to the institution in Manchester of a 
 board of health which in the year 1796 
 made an interesting report. It appeared 
 that the children and others working in the 
 cotton factories were peculiarly disposed to 
 the contagion of fever ; and that large fac- 
 tories were generally injurious to those 
 employed in them even when no particular 
 disease prevailed, not only on account of 
 the close confinement and the debilitating 
 effect of the hot and impure air, but on 
 account of the untimely labor of the night 
 and the protracted hours of the working 
 day. 
 
 These conditions with respect to the 
 children not only tended to diminish the 
 sum of life by destroying the health and 
 thus affecting the vital stamina of the rising 
 generation ; but it also encouraged idleness 
 and profligacy in the parents, who, in many 
 instances, lived upon the labor of their 
 children. It further appeared that the chil- 
 dren employed in factories were debarred 
 
THE FACTORY TOWNS 79 
 
 from all opportunities of education as well 
 as from moral and religious instruction. The 
 investigation produced this report and no- 
 thing more — " when the dangers of infec- 
 tion were removed the precautions of mercy 
 were forgotten." 
 
 Later, in the Parliamentary debate of 
 I 81 5, Mr. Horner, oneof the early factory 
 reformers, graphically described the prac- 
 tices of the apprentice system. He told 
 how, with a bankrupt's effects, a gang of 
 workhouse children were put up for sale 
 and publicly advertised as a part of the pro- 
 perty; how a number of boys apprenticed 
 by a parish in London to one manufac- 
 turer, had been transferred to another and 
 in the process were left in a starving con- 
 dition ; how an agreement had been made 
 between a London parish and a Lancashire 
 manufacturer by which it was stipulated 
 that with every twenty sound children one 
 idiot should be taken. -— 
 
 Among the master manufacturers who 
 
8o THE FACTORY 
 
 had been incredulous concerning these con- 
 ditions until the alarm of contagion arose, 
 was the first Sir Robert Peel. He made a 
 personal investigation and saw the abom- 
 inations of the system; he declared his 
 convictions and introduced into Parliament 
 the first legislative measure for the protec- 
 tion of children. This was in the year 
 1802, and after many reverses he ultimately 
 obtained the act known as the 42d Geo. 
 ni, " for the preservation of the Health 
 and Morals of Apprentices and others, em- 
 ployed in Cotton and other mills." 
 
 This act is chiefly interesting because it 
 established the principle of factory legisla- 
 tion, a principle which later in the century 
 was greatly to promote the welfare of the 
 masses. His first bill, however, referred only 
 to apprentices and after its enactment chil- 
 dren instead of being imported from the 
 workhouses as formerly were nevertheless 
 hired from their parents. Their services 
 were dignified by the name of free labor, 
 
THE FACTORY TOWNS 8i 
 
 but because they were not accorded the 
 protection given to apprentices their con- 
 dition was little better than that of actual 
 slavery. 
 
 The next step in the progress of fac- 
 tory legislation was to extend the protec- 
 tion to young persons engaged in manual 
 employment whether apprentices or not. 
 Time does not permit us to follow the 
 interesting history of factory legislation, 
 under the devoted leadership of Mr. Hor- 
 ner, Sir John Hobhouse (afterwards Lord 
 Broughton), Mr. Saddler, and Lord Astley 
 (afterwards the Earl of Shaftesbury). But 
 the evidences of the social condition of the 
 toilers brought out by the Parliamentary 
 debates of 1816, 1818, 18 19, and 1832, 
 are all of the same nature and reveal a 
 state of human misery without a parallel in 
 history. 
 
 We turn now from child labor to the 
 sanitary conditions of the manufacturing 
 towns. The report printed by Doctor Kay 
 
82 THE FACTORY 
 
 in 1832, is an astounding document; it 
 shows that out of six hundred and eighty- 
 seven streets inspected, more than one half 
 contained heaps of refuse or stagnant pools; 
 and of nearly seven thousand houses in- 
 spected, more than one third were out of re- 
 pair, damp, or ill-ventilated, and an equally 
 large proportion lacked all sanitary conven- 
 iences, even of the most primitive kind. 
 
 The population lived on the simplest 
 diet. Breakfast consisted of tea or coffee 
 with a little bread, while sometimes the 
 men had oatmeal porridge; dinner con- 
 sisted generally of boiled potatoes heaped 
 into one large dish over which melted lard 
 was poured and sometimes a few pieces of 
 fried fat bacon were added. Those who ob- 
 tained higher wages or families whose ag- 
 gregate income was large added a greater 
 portion of animal food to this meal at least 
 three times a week, but the quantity of 
 meat consumed by the laboring population 
 was not large. 
 
THE FACTORY TOWNS 83 
 
 The typical family sat around the table, 
 plunging their spoons into the common 
 dish and with animal eagerness satisfied the 
 cravings of their appetite. The evening 
 meal consisted of tea, often mingled with 
 spirits and accompanied by a little bread. 
 The population thus scantily nourished was 
 crowded in one dense mass in cottages, 
 separated by narrow, unpaved streets, in an 
 atmosphere loaded with smoke. Engaged 
 in an employment which unremittingly 
 exhausted their physical energies, these 
 men and women lacked every moral and 
 intellectual stimulus; living in squalid 
 wretchedness and on meagre food it was 
 small wonder that their superfluous gains 
 were spent in debauchery. With domestic 
 economy neglected, domestic comfort un- 
 known, home had no other relation to the 
 factory operative than that of a shelter. At 
 this period the number of operatives above 
 the age of forty was incredibly small. 
 
 In a pamphlet printed during a great 
 
84 THE FACTORY 
 
 turnout in 1 831, we find certain very in- 
 teresting statistics concerning 1665 persons 
 whose ages ranged between fifteen and 
 sixty. Of these 1584 were under forty-five 
 years of age, only fifty-one between forty- 
 five and fifty were counted as fit for work, 
 while only three had lived to be sixty years 
 old. Such figures make it evident that 
 large numbers of workers, prematurely un- 
 fitted for labor, came to live upon the toil 
 of their own children. Nor was this all, 
 for "puny and sickly parents gave birth 
 to puny and sickly children, and thus the 
 mischief continued its progress, one gener- 
 ation transmitting its accumulated evils to 
 the next." 
 
VI 
 
 CHARTISM 
 
 SUCH was the condition of the manu- 
 facturing population of England in the 
 early days of the factory system. It is evi- 
 dent that these conditions must inevitably 
 give rise to a deep social discontent which 
 sooner or later must become articulate, and 
 we find from the very beginning of the 
 factory system the records of innumerable 
 riots. 
 
 The history of these disturbances begins 
 with the opposition to the introduction 
 of new machinery. Rebellious craftsmen 
 bound themselves by fearful oaths into 
 secret organizations, the members of which 
 were known as Luddites, from the name of 
 their legendary leader — Ben Ludd. His 
 
86 THE FACTORY 
 
 name was the password to their secret meet- 
 ings, at which plans were made for the 
 destruction of property, plans afterwards 
 carried out with open violence. Then fol- 
 lowed innumerable riots arising from that 
 growing social discontent which led in the 
 beginning to factory legislation, and later 
 to Parliamentary reform. It must not be 
 thought that only the factory folk were 
 discontented. The unrest was general 
 throughout the lower classes; it was felt, 
 moreover, in the ranks of the rapidly grow- 
 ing middle class, and the justice of the 
 demand for better conditions was admitted 
 now and then by individuals in the govern- 
 ing class — men of the broader vision. I 
 have in my possession an interesting pamph- 
 let containing the proceedings in the trial 
 of indictment against Thomas Walker, a 
 merchant of Manchester, and others, for a 
 conspiracy to overthrow the constitution 
 and government and to assist the French, 
 the King's enemies, should they invade 
 
CHARTISM 87 
 
 the Kingdom. The case was tried at the As- 
 sizes at Lancaster, in 1794, and the ac- 
 count throws light upon the true state of 
 the public mind in Manchester at that 
 time. 
 
 Thomas Walker, so it appeared to his 
 accusers, was a pernicious, seditious, and ill- 
 disposed person, greatly disaffected to the 
 King, and who did in the hearing of divers 
 liege subjects utter the words : " What are 
 kings ! Damn the King ! " Moreover, Mr. 
 Thomas Walker was a member of the 
 Manchester Reformation Society, a body 
 composed chiefly of working people. They 
 met at a public house — the Old Boar's 
 Head, where the works of Tom Paine were 
 read aloud over innumerable pots of ale ; 
 and a correspondence was carried on with 
 the Society of the Friends of the People 
 in London and with other more question- 
 able organizations. The publican, warned 
 by the magistrates that he must no longer 
 give entertainment to this society, turned 
 
88 THE FACTORY 
 
 the reformers into the streets, whereupon 
 they sought shelter in the warehouse of Mr. 
 Walker. Here it was alleged they were 
 trained in the use of firearms; and here one 
 night they were attacked by members of 
 the Church and King Club, and a riot en- 
 sued. The Reformation Society, however, 
 maintained that the sole object of their 
 meetings was to obtain, by constitutional 
 means, an adequate representation of the 
 people in Parliament. 
 
 Discontent continues rife in Manchester, 
 increasing with each year, and at last we 
 come to an event which typifies to all time 
 this upward struggle of toiling humanity 
 — the massacre on St, Peter's Field which 
 occurred on the i6th of August, 1819. 
 Throughout the whole preceding summer, 
 on account of the distressed condition of 
 trade, discontent had been rife in the man- 
 ufacturing towns; agitation was at white 
 heat; and the voice of the demagogue was 
 heard with that of the conscientious refor- 
 
CHARTISM 89 
 
 mer. It was proposed to hold at Manchester 
 on the 9th of August an immense meeting to 
 consider the election by the unrepresented 
 inhabitants of Manchester of a Parliament- 
 ary delegate; but the purpose of this meet- 
 ing was declared illegal and it was pro- 
 hibited by the authorities. Then another 
 meeting was advertised to take place on 
 the 1 6th of August, the stated object being 
 to consider the most legal and effectual 
 means of obtaining Parliamentary reform. 
 It was said that this meeting was attended 
 by over one hundred thousand persons. 
 
 Several of the divisions that composed 
 the assembly came upon the field in regu- 
 lar military formations, accompanied by 
 bands of music and preceded by banners 
 bearing such mottoes as " Equal Represent- 
 ation or Death." Many of the marchers 
 were armed with bludgeons. Most of the 
 columns, however, marched in silence ; and 
 except for the loud shouts of defiance on 
 the appearance of the yeomen cavalry, sent 
 
90 THE FACTORY 
 
 to disperse the meeting, there was no dis- 
 turbance on the part of the populace. 
 
 The assembly was in charge of Henry 
 Hunt, the famous radical, who, mounting 
 the platform which had been erected upon 
 a cart had just commenced his opening 
 speech when the civil authorities attempted 
 to arrest him. This the mob resisted, 
 whereupon the yeoman cavalry shouting, 
 ** Have down with their banners ! " charged 
 upon the field, put the crowds to flight, and 
 in the disorder which followed, a number 
 were killed and many were wounded. 
 
 Says Carlyle : " Who shall compute the 
 waste and loss, the obstruction of every sort, 
 that was produced in the Manchester region 
 by Peterloo alone. Some thirteen unarmed 
 men and women cut down — the number 
 of the slain and maimed is very countable ; 
 but the treasury of rage, burning hidden 
 or visible in all hearts ever since, is of un- 
 known extent. ' How ye came among us, in 
 your cruel armed blindness, ye unspeakable 
 
CHARTISM 91 
 
 County Yeomanry, sabres flourishing, hoofs 
 prancing, and slashed us down at your brute 
 pleasure ; deaf, blind to all our claims, and 
 woes and wrongs; of quick sight and sense 
 to your own claims only. There lie poor 
 sallow, workworn weavers, and complain 
 no more now ; women themselves are 
 slashed and sabred, howling terror fills the 
 air; and ye ride prosperous, very victori- 
 ous, — ye unspeakable : Give us sabres too 
 and then come on a little ! ' " 
 
 The treasury of rage burning hidden 
 became visible to all. Chartism — the de- 
 mand of the people for equal political 
 rights — sprang into being ; the outward 
 and visible sign of inward suppressed dis- 
 content filled the manufacturing towns 
 with unrestrained murmurings, and govern- 
 ment felt the castle of privilege trembling 
 at its foundation. Some days later Sid- 
 mouth, writing from Whitehall, congrat- 
 ulated the yeomanry in the name of the 
 Prince Regent for their effective services in 
 
92 THE FACTORY 
 
 preserving public tranquillity. Public tran- 
 quillity indeed! The cries of those stricken 
 weavers shall yet shake the empire of 
 Britain. 
 
 Peterloo was typical of the discontent 
 which had spread throughout the labor- 
 ing population of England. Parliament 
 was assembled in special session to consider 
 the state of the country and to enact meas- 
 ures for the suppression of disorder. Lord 
 Grenfell in a brilliant speech discussed se- 
 dition, declaring that the whole nation 
 was inundated with inflammatory publica- 
 tions intended to stimulate the multitude 
 to acts of savage violence against all who 
 were eminent for birth or rank, for talent 
 or virtue. Mr. Canning placed the blame 
 entirely upon discontented radicals, under- 
 rating the wide-spread demand for parlia- 
 mentary reform, and ]_advocated the acts 
 which were passed prohibiting meetings 
 like the one held in Manchester, and in 
 other ways restricting the liberties of the 
 
CHARTISM 93 
 
 masses in discussing social conditions. All 
 of these acts tended to increase the dis- 
 content and hasten forward that reform 
 which alone could save England from 
 revolution. 
 
 All famous Englishmen, however, did 
 not view Peterloo with the eyes of Lord 
 Grenfell or Mr. Canning. Writing to 
 Thomas Love Peacock, Shelley said: 
 " Many thanks for your attention in send- 
 ing the papers which contained the ter- 
 rible and important news of Manchester. 
 These are, as it were, the distant thunders 
 of the terrible storm which is approaching. 
 The tyrants here, as in the French Revo- 
 lution, have first shed blood. May their 
 execrable lessons not be learnt with equal 
 docility." Inspired by the Manchester 
 massacre, Shelley wrote "The Masque of 
 Anarchy," the spirit of which is summed 
 up in these stanzas : — 
 
 " Men of England, heirs of Glory, 
 Heroes of unwritten story. 
 
94 THE FACTORY 
 
 Nurselings of one mighty Mother, 
 Hopes of her, and one another ; 
 
 " Rise like Lions after slumber 
 In unvanquishable number, 
 Shake your chains to earth like dew 
 Which in sleep has fallen on you — 
 Ye are many — they are few." 
 
 And in the same year he wrote : — 
 
 " Men of England, wherefore plough 
 For the Lords who lay ye low ? 
 Wherefore weave with toil and care 
 The rich robes your tyrants wear ? 
 
 " Wherefore feed, and clothe, and save, 
 From the cradle to the grave. 
 Those ungrateful drones who would 
 Drain your sweat — nay, drink your blood ? 
 
 " The seed ye sow, another reaps ; 
 The wealth ye find, another keeps ; 
 The robes ye weave, another wears ; 
 The arms ye forge, another bears. 
 
 " Sow seed, — but let no tyrant reap ; 
 Find wealth, — let no impostor heap ; 
 Weave robes, — let not the idle wear; 
 Forge arms, — in your defense to bear." 
 
CHARTISM 95 
 
 Fortunately the appeal to arms was un- 
 necessary. The working classes of England 
 were destined to exemplify Shelley's lesson, 
 — but by peaceful means, — were destined 
 to teach the world the great truth that the 
 many, if accordant and resolute, can always 
 control the few. And this peaceful con- 
 quest is recorded in the history of Chart- 
 ism. 
 
 I have known many labor agitators liv- 
 ing in the City of the Dinner Pail, and 
 almost without exception these men were 
 the sons of English Chartists. From them 
 I had learned to honor the early British 
 labor agitator, and to give to the name of 
 pothouse politician something more than a 
 contemptuous meaning. At the Old Boar's 
 Head, in Manchester, and at many another 
 less famous public house in the manufac- 
 turing cities, groups of workingmen gath- 
 ered, evening after evening to discuss their 
 wrongs ; and over many a pot of ale, and 
 through many a cloud of tobacco smoke, 
 
96 THE FACTORY 
 
 there emerged at last certain definite de- 
 mands for reform. 
 
 Workingmen and radicals joined hands; 
 liberal leaders combined with working-class 
 leaders, and presently there was issued the 
 famous Charter with its six points, — man- 
 hood suffrage, annual parliaments, the bal- 
 lot, abolition of property qualifications, pay- 
 ment of members, and equality of electoral 
 districts. A very sober programme this, but 
 popular leaders like Fergus O'Connor and 
 Ernest Jones with incendiary oratory gave 
 it a revolutionary aspect. 
 
 So the discontent grew year by year, and 
 year by year it gathered force. Events in 
 France and elsewhere on the continent 
 excited the imagination of the governing 
 classes, and every meeting place of work- 
 ingmen appeared to be bristling with fire- 
 arms, but still the movement grew, and at 
 last the workingmen were ready with their 
 petition to Parliament. When, on the morn- 
 ing of the loth of April, 1848, bands of 
 
CHARTISM 97 
 
 Chartists began to gather on Kennington 
 Common, carrying red banners and tricol- 
 ors, all London was astir with excitement. 
 Government had taken precaution for its 
 defense; the guns oftheTower were manned 
 and loaded ; the employees of the post-office 
 were supplied with two thousand rifles; the 
 bank was surrounded with artillery; and be- 
 hind sand-bags piled upon its roof stood a 
 regiment of infantry. The bridges and ap- 
 proaches to Westminster were defended by 
 an army of ten thousand horse, foot, and 
 artillery, while the six thousand police of 
 London lined the streets, supported by an 
 army of special constables. And in com- 
 mand of this elaborate defense of the city 
 against four thousand unarmed working- 
 men assembled on Kennington Common 
 to bear a petition to Parliament, was none 
 other than the Iron Duke himself — Wel- 
 lington. Surely the voice of the pothouse 
 politicians had been heard throughout Eng- 
 land; it had penetrated the halls of govern- 
 
98 THE FACTORY 
 
 ment — what need had the reformers for 
 powder and shot? And must we not be- 
 lieve that when five years later the great 
 reform was enacted, credit for that event 
 was in some measure due to the resolute 
 and accordant factory folk ? Yes, the wheels 
 and spindles of which Arkwright dreamed 
 brought something more than material 
 wealth to England ; his vision made the na- 
 tion rich and powerful and his vision like- 
 wise gave to the masses equal political 
 rights. , 
 
VII 
 
 THE FACTORY AND SOCIAL 
 PROGRESS 
 
 WE have now traced the history of the 
 factory, from its beginning with 
 the inventions of Arkwright down to its 
 permanent establishment in the first half 
 of the last century, and we have noted its 
 influence upon the social life of England. 
 We have seen how, as early as the fifteenth 
 century, the introduction of manufactures 
 assisted in breaking down the feudal sys- 
 tem, and how, by making possible the ac- 
 cumulation of wealth by men of humble 
 birth, it contributed to the rise of the 
 middle class. We have further seen that at 
 the close of the eighteenth century the in- 
 troduction of machinery intensified these 
 
loo THE FACTORY 
 
 tendencies and exerted a powerful influ- 
 ence on the development ot our modern 
 democracy. 
 
 We have, however, confined our atten- 
 tion to a single industry as it developed in 
 a particular nation, — we have taken the 
 cotton factory as typical of all factories 
 and its growth in England as typical of 
 its growth throughout the Western world. 
 But the factory has developed differently 
 in each industry and its social influence 
 has never been quite alike in any two na- 
 tions. When, for instance, Samuel Slater 
 introduced cotton manufacturing into 
 America, he set up in Rhode Island an 
 exact counterpart of the English factory. 
 When, later, other factories were built in 
 New England there took place the same 
 transition of a vast laboring population 
 from the rural districts to the manufactur- 
 ing towns ; — but this population was very 
 unlike the manufacturing population of 
 England. The American factories were 
 
SOCIAL PROGRESS loi 
 
 operated by the sons and daughters of 
 Yankee farmers, reared in the atmosphere 
 of democracy and springing from a race 
 unaffected by the traditions of feudalism ; 
 for them political equality had been already 
 won, yet even in America the factory be- 
 came an instrument for social progress. In 
 the rapidly growing manufacturing towns 
 these countryfolk found a new life of op- 
 portunity for social advancement ; they did 
 not remain operatives long, but advanced 
 to higher callings; and to take the places 
 which they left, thousands of workers came 
 from Lancashire here to enjoy that civic 
 freedom for which their brothers in the 
 Old World were still contending. To-day 
 in our Southern States we see a similar pro- 
 cess at work, — another race of men ad- 
 vancing in the social scale by means of the 
 factory ; from the mountains of the Caro- 
 linas thousands of young men and women, 
 reared in a civilization almost unbeliev- 
 ably primitive, are flocking to the manu- 
 
I02 THE FACTORY 
 
 facturing towns, there to enjoy the advan- 
 tages of modern life. But however varied 
 have been the phases of the development 
 of the factory in different parts of the world 
 there has always been this common phe- 
 nomenon — the concentration of the labor- 
 ing population in manufacturing cities and 
 the development of social discontent lead- 
 ing to social progress. 
 
 The nineteenth century was the age of 
 Power Discovered ; mechanical inventions, 
 the concentration of industry, the exten- 
 sion of the factory system, new means of 
 transportation destroyed the last vestige of 
 the feudal world and left the democratic 
 ideal triumphant but unfulfilled: a new 
 century dawns, — the age of Power Hu- 
 manized. The industrial world in which 
 we live, with all its peculiar characteristics, 
 has been built upon the ruins of the feudal 
 order, and in due time will give place to 
 a newer and better civilization. Radicals 
 of to-day see visions of to-morrow; re- 
 
SOCIAL PROGRESS 103 
 
 formers fired by the visions seek to make 
 them real; while conservatives, clinging 
 to the traditions of a dead past, strive to 
 stay the inevitable progress of mankind. 
 Truth never changes, but the knowledge 
 of truth grows deeper with each age ; no 
 political institution, no social institution 
 is sacred unless it is founded upon some 
 eternal truth, and all human institutions 
 must change with the increasing know- 
 ledge of mankind. Everywhere in the 
 Western world the condition of the labor- 
 ing population is vastly better to-day than 
 when, a century and a half ago, the factory 
 was established; vastly better than when, 
 sixty years ago, the governments of Europe 
 trembled before a working-class revolt, — 
 when British Chartism triumphed in re- 
 form ; when Karl Marx, exiled from Prus- 
 sia, called upon the workingmen of the 
 world to unite ; when Mazzini, another 
 exile in London, preached to the toilers of 
 Italy the gospel of God and humanity. 
 
I04 THE FACTORY 
 
 of progress through education. But the 
 evolution is incomplete, and the discon- 
 tent of the laboring population still remains 
 a vital force in the upward progress of 
 mankind. 
 
 To-day we in America are confronted 
 by the amazing spread of Socialism ; So- 
 cialism which the radicals preach, the re- 
 formers seek to establish, and the conserv- 
 atives fear. We cannot evade its issues, 
 for Socialism is something more than a 
 political creed, — it is the modern ex- 
 pression of that same spirit of human pro- 
 gress which destroyed slavery in the ancient 
 world, serfdom in the middle ages and, 
 creating modern democracy, cannot rest 
 until it has guaranteed to all men not only 
 equal political rights but equal social rights. 
 Two men, smoke-room companions of 
 mine during a Pacific voyage, stand for 
 the contending ideals of the feudal and the 
 modern world. One was a noble earl, the 
 other a British tea merchant ; both were 
 
SOCIAL PROGRESS 105 
 
 men of wealth, — the one of large but un- 
 productive estates, the other of a great 
 business giving employment to thousands 
 of men. Of the two, the tea merchant, 
 though lacking in fine manners, was the 
 more important person ; yet he would not 
 have exchanged those hours of familiar 
 gossip with the noble earl for more chests 
 of tea than would fill the hold of the ship. 
 And there was a reason for this feeling, 
 because the Groom of the Bedchamber 
 stood for that aristocracy of culture and 
 good manners which has an important 
 value in any society. Under the militant 
 structure of society this value belonged to 
 the few; in our present democracy it has 
 become increasingly the privilege of the 
 many. Public education, public libraries, 
 public art galleries, the perfected art of 
 printing have opened the highest culture 
 to children of the humblest birth. May we 
 not, then, look forward to the time when 
 " the best that has anywhere been in the 
 
io6 THE FACTORY 
 
 world shall be the lot of every man born 
 into it" — that is to say, the lot of every 
 man w^ho desires the best ? 
 
 Every thinking man must admit that 
 there is something wrong in our present 
 industrial regime. The progress of avowed 
 Socialism and the more rapid progress of 
 particular socialistic ideas indicate quite 
 clearly that we Americans are alive to the 
 unequal social conditions which now exist 
 and are anxious to find a remedy. But 
 whatever may be the Utopian dreams of 
 the reformers, all immediate progress must 
 be made in the industrial world as we find 
 it to-day ; the industrial state of the So- 
 cialist is too remote in time, — our task 
 is with social conditions as they now exist. 
 The splendid machinery of production 
 created during the last century must not 
 be destroyed, but utilized for the benefit 
 of mankind. The question which we have 
 now to ask ourselves is this : What is 
 the ultimate purpose for which the busi- 
 
SOCIAL PROGRESS 107 
 
 ness of the world is conducted, what the 
 real purpose of all this planting and reap- 
 ing, this mining and manufacturing, this 
 exchanging of commodities ? Is it not, 
 primarily, to furnish each human creature 
 with food, shelter, and clothing, — the 
 means of supporting life ? Men require 
 something more than the mere means of 
 subsistence ; but before the individual 
 can cultivate his mind and soul his body 
 must be made comfortable, and this, after 
 all, is the whole end of our complex com- 
 mercial regime. The test of right and 
 wrong conduct in business refers to this 
 fundamental purpose, — that conduct only 
 is praiseworthy which advances the time 
 when every man capable of industry shall 
 be rewarded for his labor, not only with 
 a loaf of bread, but with hours of fruitful 
 leisure. 
 
 Captains of Industry ! that was a noble 
 title Carlyle gave to the prosaic business 
 man, when gazing beyond the squalid 
 
io8 THE FACTORY 
 
 turmoil of his day with its dominant 
 industrialism, triumphant mercantilism, 
 doctrines of laissez-faire y overproduction, 
 surplus population, he with clear vision 
 foresaw the future freedom of the masses 
 won through their own strength and the 
 ability of their leaders. Until Richard 
 Arkwright was born, the leaders of men in 
 their progress towards human freedom had 
 been soldiers ; henceforward they were to 
 be men of affairs. Great soldiers won their 
 victory by the loyalty they inspired in 
 their followers ; no adventurer seeking 
 personal glory ever won a lasting victory, 
 but only those heroes, forgetful of them- 
 selves who consecrated their service to the 
 cause of freedom. In such wise must 
 Captains of Industry win their victories ; 
 the adventurer can but for a time prevail ; 
 fame is secure only to those leaders who 
 see in wealth accumulated a treasure held 
 in trust from which they are to feed and 
 clothe the armies that they lead to peace- 
 
SOCIAL PROGRESS 109 
 
 ful conquests. Social reformers of senti- 
 mental temper have deemed the compar- 
 ison between the modern employer of la- 
 bor and the feudal lord as ill-chosen, but 
 history seems to justify it. Yet we have, 
 indeed, gone far since the Middle Ages. 
 When the feudal lord demanded loyalty 
 from his retainers the demand was alone 
 sufficient, but the Captain of Industry, in 
 order to obtain the loyalty of the toilers, 
 must not only demand but deserve it ; he 
 too must be loyal to the great cause he 
 serves — the eternal cause of human free- 
 dom. 
 
 THE END 
 
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
 U . S . A