operations were going on one hundred and fifty years ago, what should
we have found? No tall chimney, vomiting its clouds of smoke, would
have been visible; no huge building with its hundred windows blazing
with light would have loomed up before the traveller as he entered the
town at dusk; no din of machinery would have been heard; no noise of
steam hammers; no huge blast furnaces would have met his eye, nor would
miles of odors wafted from chemical works have saluted his nostrils. If
Lancashire had been the scene of his visit he would have found a number
of narrow red-brick houses with high steps in front, and outside wooden
shutters such as one may still see in the old parts of some Lancashire
towns to-day. Inside each of these houses was a little family workshop,
containing neither master nor servant, in which the family jointly
contributed to produce by the labor of their hands a piece of cotton
cloth. The father provided his own warp of linen yarn, and his cotton
wool for weft. He had purchased the yarn in a prepared state, while
the wool for the weft was carded and spun by his wife and daughters,
and the cloth was woven by himself and his sons. There was a simple
division of labor in the tiny cottage factory; but all the implements
necessary to produce the cotton cloth were owned by the producers.
There was neither capitalist nor wage-receiver: the weaver controlled
his own labor, effected his own exchange, and received himself the
equivalent of his own product. Such was the germ of the great English
cotton manufacture. Ferdinand Lasselle said: “Society consists of
ninety-six proletaires and four capitalists. That is your State.” But
in old Lancashire there was neither capitalist nor proletaire.
Or even much later had one visited--Stafford, let us say, one would
not have found the large modern shoe-factory, with its bewildering
variety of machines, each one with a human machine by its side. For
shoemaking then was a pure handicraft, requiring skill, judgment and
some measure of artistic sense. Each shoemaker worked in his own little
house, bought his own material from the leather merchant, and fashioned
every part of the shoe with his own hand, aided by a few simple and
inexpensive tools. He believed there was “nothing like leather,” and
had not yet learned the art of putting on cheap soles, _not_ made of
leather, to cheap boots, which, in a month’s time, will be almost worn
out. Very likely the shoemaker had no vote; but he was never liable
to be locked out by his employer, or to be obliged to go on strike
against a reduction of wages, with his boy in prison for satisfying
hunger at the expense of the neighboring baker, or his girl on the
streets to pay for her new dress. Such was the simple industrialism of
our great-great-grandfathers. But their mode of life was destined to
change. All progress, says Mr. Herbert Spencer, is differentiation; and
this formidable factor began to appear in the quiet, sleepy, English
country. About 1760 a large share of calico-printing was transferred
from London to Lancashire, where labor was then cheaper. There was a
consequent fall in prices, and an increased demand for calicoes of
linen warp and cotton weft. Then the Manchester dealers, instead of
buying fustians and calicoes from the weaver, began to furnish him
with the materials for his cloth, and to pay him a fixed price per
piece for the work when executed. So the Manchester dealer became
what the French call an _entrepreneur_; and the transformation of
the independent weaver into a wage receiver began. The iron law of
wages and the unemployed question also began to loom dimly up. For
as the weaver came to hire himself to the dealer, so the weaver let
out part of his work; and it frequently happened that the sum which
the master weaver received from his employer was less than what he
found himself compelled to pay to those whom he employed in spinning.
“He durst not, however, complain,” says Mr. Watts in his article on
cotton (Encyclopædia Britannica), “much less abate the spinner’s price,
lest his looms should be unemployed.” The quantity of yarn producible
under this simple system by the aid of the one-thread wheel was very
small. The whole did not exceed in quantity what 50,000 spindles of
our present machinery can yield. As one man can now superintend 2,000
spindles, it will be seen that twenty-five men with machinery can
produce as much as the whole population of old Lancashire. In 1750 the
first important invention in the cotton industry was made in the shape
of the fly-shuttle, invented by Kaye of Bury. In 1760 improvements were
made in the carding process. In 1767 the spinning-jenny was invented by
Hargreaves, and this was at length brought to work as many as eighty
spindles. The ingenious Hargreaves had ample opportunity for practical
study of the “unemployed” question; for the spinners, some of whom were
forced into idleness by the new invention, broke into his house and
destroyed his machine. Shortly after, there was a general rising over
industrial Lancashire: the poor hand-workers, whose prophetic souls
were evidently dreaming on things to come, scouring the country and
breaking in pieces every carding and spinning machine they could find.
Progress by differentiation, however, heeded not the second sight of
Lancashire workers. In 1769, Arkwright contrived the spinning frame,
and obtained his patent for spinning with rollers. In 1775, Crompton,
of Bolton, invented the mule-jenny, enabling warps of the finest
quality to be spun. In 1792, further improvements in this machine
were made by Pollard, of Manchester, and Kelly, of Glasgow. In 1785,
steam was first applied to the spinning of cotton in Nottinghamshire.
In 1784 the Rev. E. Cartwright, of Kent, invented power-loom weaving,
and completed and patented his invention in August, 1787. Here, then,
within a period of about forty years, was a series of mechanical
inventions which had the effect of absolutely changing the method of
production, and enormously increasing the output; of dividing the
labor of producing, which had formerly been effected by a single
family within the walls of a single room, between scores and hundreds
of people, each of whom only undertook a single process in a complex
operation; of massing together hundreds of thousands of people under
new conditions; of bringing a heretofore isolated district into
intimate relations with distant foreign lands: and of separating the
work of spinning or weaving from the ownership of the instruments by
whose aid the work was done. The independent weaver was gone; or rather
he was subjected, like an amœba, to a process of fission, but with
this difference: that whereas the amœba produces by fission other
similar amœbæ, the weaver was differentiated into a person called an
employer and another called an employé or “hand.” Multiply this “hand”
by thousands, and we get the mill or factory, divided into departments,
each with its special detail of work, each detail fitting into all the
rest, each machine taking up the work where the last machine left it,
and each contributing its share to the joint product. Multiply the
employer; add enormously to the aggregate of his capital; remove the
barrier of national frontiers from his operations; relieve him of the
duty of personal supervision; and we get the joint-stock capitalist.
Pause a moment to consider the famous world-events which made so much
noise while these industrial processes were going on. The conquest
of Canada, the victories of Clive in India, the Seven Years’ War,
the successful revolt of the American colonies, the Declaration of
Independence and formation of the American Constitution, the deeds of
Frederic the Great, Pitt’s accession to power, Washington’s election
to the Presidency, the Fall of the Bastille, the death of Mirabeau,
the fall of the old French monarchy, the National Convention--all
these great events which shook the world were contemporary with the
industrial revolution in England; and that revolution was in promise
and potency more important than them all.
I will glance at the development of another great industry, that of
iron. In former times iron was largely worked in the south of England,
notably in Sussex, in a district now purely agricultural. By the middle
of the 18th century, important iron industries had begun to cluster
round Coalbrookdale; and here many of the industrial changes in the
working of iron were first introduced. From 1766 to 1784 improvements
were made in the mode of working malleable iron and of transferring
cast into wrought iron. The puddling forge was invented in 1784; and
it gave an immense impetus to the manufacture. In 1828 the use of the
hot blast was substituted for cold air; in 1842 Nasmyth invented the
steam-hammer; and in 1856 the Bessemer process of making steel was
patented. Subsequently we have the Siemens regenerative furnace and
gas producer, the use of machinery in lieu of hand labor for puddling,
the casting of steel under great pressure, and the improvements in
the Bessemer process. As a result of these inventions the increase
in the production of steel during the last few years, especially in
the United States and Great Britain, has been enormous. In all this
we see the same series of phenomena, all tending to huge monopolies.
Machinery supplants hand labor; production is greatly stimulated; the
immense capital needed enables only the large producers to survive in
the competitive conflict; and we get as the net result well defined
aggregations of capital on the one hand, and dependent machine minders
on the other.
I have alluded to the shoe industry as having been formerly a pure
handicraft. Simple machine processes for fastening soles and heels to
inner soles began to be adopted in 1809; and from that time onward
successive inventions have converted the pure handicraft into one of
the most mechanical industries in the world. In the United States in
1881 no less than 50,000,000 pairs of boots and shoes were sewn by
the Blake-Mackay machines. A visitor to a shoe factory to-day will
see the following machines: for cutting leather, for pressing rollers
for sole leather, for stamping out sole and heel pieces, for blocking
and crimping, for moulding uppers or vamps, for vamp-folding, for
eyeletting, lasting, trimming and paring, scouring, sand-papering
and burnishing, for stamping, peg-cutting, and nail-rasping. It is
well to witness all these processes going on in one large factory in
order to grasp fully the idea that the old individual industry of the
last century is almost as extinct as the mastodon--that the worker in
a shoe factory to-day is, so to speak, a machine in a vast complex
system. The great industry has supplanted the small one; such great
industry involves the aggregation of capital: consequently competition
on the part of the small producer is hopeless and impossible. Thus
in the proletarian class the intensity of the struggle for existence
is increased, keeping down wages and ever widening the margin of the
unemployed class. The small producer must become a wage earner either
as manager, foreman, or workman. As well attempt to meet Gatling guns
with bow and arrows, or steel cruisers armed with dynamite bombs
with the little cockle-shells in which Henry V’s army crossed over
to win the field of Agincourt, as to set up single shoe-makers or
cotton-weavers against the vast industrial armies of the world of
machinery. The revolution is confined to no one industry, to no one
land. While most fully developed in England, it is extending to most
industries and to all lands. Prince Kropotkin, it is true, reminds us
in an interesting article in the _Nineteenth Century_ for October,
1888, that a number of small industries can still be found in town
and country. That is so, no doubt; and it is not unlikely that for
a long time to come many small trades may exist, and some may even
flourish. But the countries in which small industries flourish most
are precisely those in which there is least machine industry, and
where consequently capitalism is least developed. In no country, says
Kropotkin, are there so many small producers as in Russia. Exactly:
and in no country is there so little machinery or such an inefficient
railway system in proportion to population and resources. On the other
hand, in no country is machinery so extensively used as in the United
States; and it is precisely that country which contains the fewest
small industries in proportion to population and resources. Many of the
small industries, too, as Kropotkin admits, are carried on by persons
who have been displaced by machines, and who have thus been thrown
unemployed on the labor market; or who have drifted into large towns,
especially into London, because in the country there was no work for
them. At best the great majority of these people earn but a scanty and
precarious living; and, judging from the number of hawkers and vendors
who wander about suburban streets and roads without selling anything,
one would imagine that great numbers can scarcely make any living at
all.
Furthermore, when Kropotkin refers to the sweaters’ victims, and to the
people in country places who make on a small scale clothes or furniture
which they dispose of to the dealers in large towns, and so forth, let
it be remembered that so long as human labor is cheaper than machinery
it will be utilized by capitalists in this way. The capitalist uses
or does not use machinery according as it pays or does not pay; and
if he can draw to an unlimited extent on the margin of unemployed
labor, paying a bare subsistence wage, he will do so, as the evidence
given before the House of Lords Committee on Sweating shews. While
admitting then that a good many small industries exist, and that some
will continue to exist for an indefinite time, I do not think that
such facts make against the general proposition that the tendency is
to large production by machinery, involving the grouping of men and
the massing of capital, with all the economic and social consequences
thereby involved.
Even agriculture, that one occupation in which old-fashioned
individualism might be supposed safe, is being subjected to capitalism.
The huge farms of Dakota and California, containing single fields
of wheat miles long, are largely owned by joint stock corporations
and cultivated exclusively by machinery. It was the displacement of
human labor by machinery on these farms as well as the crises in
mining operations which helped to bring about the phenomenon of an
unemployed class in the richest region of the world, and led Mr.
Henry George to write his “Progress and Poverty.” These huge farms,
combined with the wheat “corners” in New York and Chicago and the great
railway corporations of America, have played havoc with many of the
small farmers of the Mississippi Valley, as the statistics respecting
mortgaged farms will show. And when it is remembered that the American
farmer will be more and more obliged to meet the growing competition of
the wheat of India, produced by the cheapest labor in the world, his
prospect does not appear to be very bright.
In order to perceive clearly the immense development of machine
industry and the consequent displacement of labor, one must resort
to figures, mere rhetoric being of no avail. The following figures
are cited from the United States, because American public statistics
are so much better than British, being both more complete and more
accessible. The facts are taken from the first Annual Report of the
United States Commissioner of Labor Statistics in Washington for 1886.
The Commissioner, inquiring into the industrial crisis, finds that it
is mainly due to the immense development of machine industry under the
joint-stock system; and he takes up various trades one after another
to show how labor has been displaced by machinery. In the timber
business, he says, twelve laborers with a Bucker machine will dress
12,000 staves. The same number of men by hand labor would have dressed
in the same time only 2,500. In the manufacture of paper a machine
now used for drying and cutting, run by four men and six girls, will
do the work formerly done by 100 persons, and do it much better. In
the manufacture of wall-paper the best evidence puts the displacement
in the proportion of a hundred to one. In a phosphate mine in South
Carolina ten men accomplish with machinery what 100 men handle without
it in the same time. There has been a displacement of 50 per cent in
the manufacture of rubber boots and shoes. In South Carolina pottery
the product is ten times greater by machine processes than by muscular
labor. In the manufacture of saws, experienced men consider that there
has been a displacement of three men out of five. In the weaving of
silk the displacement has been 95 per cent, and in the winding of silk
90 per cent. A large soap manufacturing concern carefully estimates the
displacement of labor in its works at 50 per cent. In making wine in
California a crushing machine has been introduced with which one man
can crush and stem 80 tons of grapes in a day, representing an amount
of work formerly requiring eight men. In woollen goods modern machinery
has reduced muscular labor 33 per cent in the carding department, 50
per cent in the spinning, and 25 per cent in the weaving. In some
kinds of spinning one hundred to one represents the displacement. In
the whole United States in 1886 the machinery was equal to 3,500,000
horse power. If men only had been employed, it would have required
21,000,000 to turn out the actual total product: the real number was
four millions. To do the work accomplished in 1886 in the United
States by power machinery and on the railways would have required men
representing a population of 172,500,000. The actual population of the
United States in 1886 was something under 60,000,000, or a little more
than one-third.
Commenting on these very remarkable statistics, the Labor Commissioner
says: “The apparent evils resulting from the introduction of machinery
and the consequent subdivision of labor have to a large extent, of
course, been offset by advantages gained; but it must stand as a
positive statement, which cannot be successfully controverted, that
this wonderful introduction and extension of power machinery is one
of the prime causes, if not the prime cause, of the novel industrial
condition in which the manufacturing nations find themselves.” One of
the results of the “novel industrial condition” in America in 1885, was
an unemployed class variously estimated at from one to two millions
of men, the condition of many of whom as tramps, furnished subjects
for some very sorry jests to the American press. Such facts as are
here suggested, will show how a new country may soon be reduced to a
condition which aggregated capital on the one hand and unemployed labor
on the other, render little better than that of an old European State
with its centuries of misery and oppression. And incidentally they also
show that such a nostrum as emigration, if intended not as a palliative
but as a solution, is simply quackery. The inference would seem to
be irresistible. Just as fast as capitalists find it profitable to
introduce improved machinery, as fast also will the helplessness of a
growing number of the proletariat increase. The “unemployed” question
is the sphinx which will devour us if we cannot answer her riddle.
The wonderful expansion of Lancashire perhaps affords the best
illustration of the change from individual to collective industry.
A cotton-mill in one of the dismal “hell-holes,” called towns in
Lancashire, is a wonderful place, full of bewildering machines. Here
is a machine called an “opener,” by which 15,000 lbs. of cotton can be
opened in 56 hours. There is a throstle, the spindles of which make
from 6,000 to 7,000 revolutions per minute. Here is a man who, with
the aid of two piecers to take up and join the broken ends, can work
2,000 spindles. Among the distinct separate machines used are opener,
scutcher and lap machine, drawing frame, slubbing frame, intermediate
frame, roving frame, throstle, self-acting mule and hand mule, doubling
frame, and mule doublers or twiners. By means of these appliances
the following results have been attained. Within eight years, from
1792 to 1800, the quantity of cotton exported from the United States
to Lancashire had increased from 138,000 lbs. to 18,000,000 lbs. In
1801 Lancashire took 84,000 bales of cotton from the United States;
in 1876 she took 2,075,000 bales; and whereas in the former year only
14,000 bales came from India, in 1876 from that country came 775,000
bales, besides a great increase in Brazilian cotton, and a new import
of 332,000 bales from Egypt. In 1805, one million pieces of calico
were sold in the Blackburn market during the whole year; and that was
considered a very large sale. In 1884, according to Ellison’s Annual
Review of the Cotton Trade, there were exported 4,417,000,000 yards of
piece goods besides the vast quantity produced for home consumption.
In 1875, in place of the little cottages with their hand-looms of
a century before, Lancashire contained 2,655 cotton factories with
37,515,772 spinning spindles and 463,118 power looms; and she produced
yarn and piece goods to the weight of 1,088,890,000 lbs. and of the
value of £95,447,000. See, too, how through the use of machinery the
cost of production had been lowered. In 1790 the price of spinning the
yarn known technically as No. 100 was 4s. per lb.: in 1826 it had been
reduced to 6¹⁄₂d. The sale price of yarn No. 100 in 1786 was 38s.: in
1793 it was reduced to 15s. 1d., in 1803 to 8s. 4d., in 1876 to 2s.
6d. The decreased cost in each case followed on economy in production,
itself dependent on increased differentiation in machinery; that in
turn involving larger and larger capital, and that again necessitating
aggregation and the crushing out of small concerns which could not
command machinery or sell at a profit in competition with it.
Speculating on the possibility of foreign competition destroying
the industrial supremacy of Lancashire, Mr. Watts writes in the
Encyclopædia Britannica: “It may perhaps be sufficient to recall to
our readers the small part of the cost of the commodity which now
belongs to the labor of the hand, and the daily diminution which is
taking place even of that part, by the introduction of new mechanical
substitutes.”[51] Mr. Watts wrote as a expert; and the inference
one is compelled to draw from his dictum is that concentration of
capital and growth of monopoly must continue to develop; and that the
“unemployed” problem must force itself on Lancashire. One who is not
an expert will only venture to criticise with great diffidence Mr.
Watts’s optimistic tone; but it is well to point out that in India
capitalists can command the cheapest labor in the world--labor too, at
present entirely unregulated by law. The cotton of India, and also of
Asiatic Russia, is spun and woven near to where it is grown, and where
it can easily command the great Asiatic market. One is not surprised to
find therefore that the Bombay cotton mills are already giving cause
for some anxiety in Lancashire; and there seems no rational ground for
supposing that that anxiety will decrease; in which case the increasing
competition would seem to involve in Lancashire either immense
development of machinery or reduction in wages in order to cheapen
the cost of production. Either alternative forces the social problem
forward.
I now pass on to consider the social problem as it has actually been
forced on the attention of the British Government through the new
industrial conditions.