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By Jonathan Thayer Lincoln
THE FACTORY.
THE CITY OF THE DINNER-PAIL.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
THE FACTORY
THE FACTORY
BY
JONATHAN THAYER LINCOLN
[Illustration: decoration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1912
COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY JONATHAN THAYER LINCOLN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published January 1912_
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 subsequently printed in _The
Mediator_, a magazine published in Cleveland, Ohio, and devoted to
establishing a better social understanding between 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 Manufacture. Manchester, 1823.
The Theory and Practice of Cotton Spinning. Glasgow, 1833.
URE, Andrew, M.D.
The Philosophy of Manufactures. London, 1835.
BABBAGE, Charles
On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. London, 1822.
CARLYLE, Thomas
Essay on Chartism.
TAYLOR, Richard Whately Cooke-
The Modern Factory System. London, 1891.
ABRAM, Annie
Social England in the Fifteenth Century. London, 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 85
VII. The Factory and Social Progress 99
INTRODUCTION
As you approach the City of the Dinner Pail from the west, the blue
waters of the harbor lie between you and the towering factories which
line the opposite 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 confinement of
twenty-seven thousand men and women amidst the monotonous roar of
grinding wheels. But should you thus approach the city late on a
winter afternoon the scene is marvelously changed; the myriad 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 become
ramparts of light and speak of some romantic story.
Realism and romance lie very near together, and we shall find the
factory, when we come to study the history of it, something more than
granite walls and grinding machinery; the factory, indeed, has been
an important instrument in the upward progress of mankind. There is
an ugly side to the story, especially in the beginning, for when the
craftsmen of the world were transformed 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 rightful 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
impossible 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 by manufactures became an
important element 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 employment, and, for
a time, caused great suffering 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 laboring population in
great centres of industry, thus creating a class consciousness which
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 marvelous way to the social progress of mankind.
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-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 serfdom had been
abolished, the traditions of it still remained; and it was not until
the establishment of the factory that labor became free in fact as
for generations it had been in name.
The historical event, that great movement which led in our generation
to a complete reconstruction of the social order, 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, originating 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
revolutionized, 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 simple 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 family, his wife and children
all working at the spinning wheel, could supply sufficient 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 device
which saved time and exertion to the weaver and nearly doubled the
daily product 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 Cartwright.
The moment it became possible to accomplish by machinery what
formerly had been done entirely by hand, the first effect was to
increase the productive power of 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 century the textile manufacturing
of England was carried on by craftsmen dwelling in the rural
districts, the master clothiers living in the greater towns, sending
out wool to be spun into yarn which, returned to them prepared for
the loom, was re-distributed 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
establishments and the modes of doing business were very different
from what they were soon to become. It is quite true that a limited
number of individuals had, in previous 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 admiration as the ideal method of production. The dreamers
look back regretfully to the days when manufactures were combined
with farming, and they quote from Goldsmith’s _Deserted Village_.
Let us, however, turn to a more prosaic but more trustworthy
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
counties 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 manufacturing counties, you see the wheel
going almost at every door, the wool and yarn hanging up at every
window; the looms, the winders, 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 establishment of
the factory, we shall do well to keep in mind these words written by
an eighteenth century student in praise of the domestic system; when
we hear the socialists 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 beginning
was evolved the factory as we know it to-day. But important as were
the inventions in cotton manufacture, the factory 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 consumption 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 modern
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
invention of printing and of the mariner’s compass—so that side by
side with the scholars restoring to the world its lost heritage of
learning, craftsmen and sailors played their parts in printing the
books by which the learning was disseminated, and in manning the
ships that discovered new continents. 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
industry, 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 commodities.
The Industrial Revolution, thus springing from the sudden growth in
the use of machinery, occasioned not only economic but political
and social results. On the economic side, the effect was to extend
old industries 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 on the political side it led to the
enfranchisement of the working classes. The Industrial Revolution
accomplished for England 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, journals, cash-books, and pay-rolls,—it
is a human story,—_laissez-faire_, over-production, enlightened
selfishness, were no abstract terms, but vital human problems.
Because the Industrial Revolution profoundly 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,
becomes of vast importance. The first chapter relates to brilliant
achievements in the field of mechanical invention. Then follows the
dismal story of how a multitude of craftsmen were transformed into
factory operatives—the untold suffering of oppressed workingmen.
Later we see the English yeoman replaced by the master manufacturer
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 began with great suffering, but ended in
opening new avenues for their social and political advancement.
Antagonistic in the beginning to the welfare of the masses, it aided
powerfully, in the end, the fulfillment of those ideals of liberty,
equality, and fraternity which at that moment had taken such a mighty
hold upon the thoughts of men.
II
SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT
The _Shaving of Shagpat_, that remarkable allegory with the writing
of which George Meredith commenced his literary career, has been
given several interpretations; without seriously venturing another,
it has seemed to me that this fanciful 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. ’Tis sure the race of Bagarags 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.”
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, we discover the smug and comfortable British
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 thirteen children born
to humble parents, and he grew to manhood without education, being
barely able to read and write. At an early age he was apprenticed
to a Preston barber and when he became a journeyman he established
himself in the same business.
Fate was in a jesting mood when she decreed that the chief actor in
that remarkable social drama, the Industrial Revolution, should be a
penny barber; and we may wonder if the governing classes appreciated
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 twenty-eight, was not content day
after day to shave the stolid faces of lower class Englishmen, but,
having gained a knowledge of a chemical process for dyeing human
hair, he commenced to make wigs for upper 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 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 constructing a machine for spinning yarn. He gained
this secret from a clock-maker named Kay, with whom he afterwards
formed a partnership, 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 became 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 tremendous family
row.
Arkwright is commonly credited with the invention of spinning by
rollers, but while to him is undoubtedly due the success 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 1741 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 spindles and
giving employment to twenty-five operatives was built. Wyatt wrote a
pamphlet 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 machinery
also passed into the hands of Arkwright.
It was in the year 1767 that Hargreaves invented the spinning-jenny,
and two years later Arkwright took out his patent claiming that he
had “by great study and long application invented a new piece of
machinery, 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 manufacturers, as well as to His Majesty’s
subjects in general, by employing a great number of poor people in
working the said machinery and in making the said weft or yarn much
superior in quality to any heretofore 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 spinning by machinery.
Having obtained this patent, Arkwright found himself without the
capital necessary for carrying out his plans; and he returned 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 gentleman refused to entertain
Arkwright’s plan because of the rags in which the inventor was
dressed.
It was in Preston, then, that Arkwright first fitted up his perfected
spinning machine, 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 support. In
consequence of the riots which had taken place in the neighborhood
of Blackburn on the invention of Hargreaves’s spinning-jenny, by
which many of the machines were destroyed and the inventor driven
from his native county to Nottingham, Arkwright and Smalley, fearing
similar 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 condition 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 partnership with the Preston
barber; and a mill was erected at Nottingham.
It was an unpretentious establishment, that first little cotton mill;
it gave employment to not more than a dozen operatives, 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 circumstance 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 became
public property, a great extension of cotton manufacture followed,
accompanied by a marvelous national prosperity. Arkwright, although
deprived of his monopoly, was by this time so firmly established in
the industry that he remained the dominant figure in the yarn market,
fixing the price of the commodity for all other spinners; and thus he
accumulated a great fortune.
While Arkwright was without doubt perfectly familiar with the
experiments of both Wyatt and High, nevertheless it was the Preston
barber and not the original inventors who first produced yarn fit
for weaving. It is proverbial that inventors seldom reap the harvest
of wealth which they sow; they are the dreamers and their reward is
in beholding a perfected mechanism—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 a nation made rich
and powerful by these same inventions, and he, too, lived to see his
dream come true.
Sir Richard Arkwright possessed all the qualities essential
to success—tireless energy, 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 education denied him in his youth. He had unbounded
confidence in the success of his adventures and was accustomed to say
that he would pay the national debt—an interesting 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 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 August, 1792, at the age of
sixty. The _Annual Register_ recording that event says not so much
as a single word concerning Arkwright’s masterful genius which even
then had set in motion a mighty social revolution. It mentions only
the great fortune which he had acquired as a manufacturer of cotton
yarn,—so difficult it is for the critic to place a true value on the
life work of a contemporary.
As you approach the City of the Dinner Pail from the west and
gaze across the blue waters 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 weavers of the world,
earn their daily bread. Those towering factories are, every one,
monuments to the genius of Richard Arkwright, 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 Arkwright, it would seem, was not a beautiful
man; no romance hero with 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 community 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 attendant thereon the
man had notions in that 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, rebelled; 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
Phenomenon is that bag-cheeked, pot-bellied, much-enduring,
much-inventing barber! French revolutions were a-brewing, to resist
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.”
III
MECHANICAL INVENTIONS
A distinction should be made between 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 Jack of Newbury, who died about the
year 1520, made use of the factory system on a very extensive scale.
In Fuller’s _Worthies_ you may read how he “was the most considerable
clothier without fancy or fiction England ever beheld,” and how “his
looms were his lands, whereof he kept one hundred in 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 description of his famous industrial establishment.
“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:
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 dyehouse 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 system—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
distaff and 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 between the left
arm and the body while with 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, spinning, 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 implement 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 prepare 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—experiments which, in the end, led to the invention of the
spinning-frame. The spinning-frame, in turn, increased the demand for
carded cotton and skillful mechanics again set about to meet this new
requirement, and the result was the building of the carding-engine.
This invention was not made at once, nor by any particular
individual; 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
Hargreaves 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 perfected it. Thus it came about
that the modern 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 yarn, and this demand was further augmented
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
spinners, 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 Arkwright to make the wheels and other
apparatus 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 the spinning-jenny.
It is commonly stated—even in so authoritative a history as Baines’s
we 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
statement of one Thomas Leather, a neighbor of High, that the latter
completed a similar 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 unprotected invention of such importance, however, could
not remain long the private property of a single weaver, and soon
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 Nottingham, where, with a Mr. Thomas
James, he raised sufficient capital to erect a small mill; here he
took out a patent in 1770,—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 the rioters spared the
jennies 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 attention 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 protection of owners of
machinery. There were two of these bills, one “for the more exemplary
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
machines”; the other “for the more effectual preservation of the
peace within the county of Nottingham.”
These two bills were the result of rioting 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 disturbances,
and indicate the attitude of the government, at that time, toward the
laboring poor.
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
was 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 out no patent and only
regretted that public 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 manufacturers, but
Crompton himself received no other reward than a grant of five
thousand pounds voted him by Parliament in 1812. 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.
Having considered the inventions in the art of spinning, we now turn
to the power loom built in 1785 by the Reverend Edmund 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 suffered 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 discussing
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.
To this observation the ingenious clergyman replied that Arkwright
should set his wits to work to invent a weaving-mill. But the
Manchester gentlemen unanimously agreed that the thing was
impractical. Cartwright argued, however, that, having seen exhibited
in London an automaton figure which played at chess, he did not
believe it more difficult 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, 1785,
he secured a patent. It was only then that he commenced to study the
method by which the craftsmen wove cloth, and he 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 without which the
vast extension of manufactures would have been impossible and the
manufacturing towns, which we are about to consider, would never have
attained the size and importance which enabled them to become factors
in the political 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 constructed
engine and, after years of patient 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
England, 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 custom 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, spinning-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 occupation to the
inhabitants of an entire district. A good hand-loom weaver could
produce two pieces of shirtings each week; by 1823, 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 system 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 estimated that
the work done in a steam factory 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 shirtings
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 million would
be required to perform by hand the work now produced by the Fall
River factories alone.
“Watt,” said a celebrated French engineer, “improves the steam
engine, and this single improvement causes the industry of England
to make an immense stride. This machine, at the present time [about
1830], represents the power of three hundred thousand horses or
of two million men, strong and well fitted for labor, who should
work night and day without an interruption and without repose....
A hairdresser invents, or at least brings into action, a machine
for spinning cotton; this 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, directly 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 operation 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 cotton
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 nearest market. So great is the power of the
progress of machinery.”
Two distinct systems of production preceded 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 production of cloth, and either he owned his raw material or
received it from the master 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 to him the operative sold his labor which thereby became
a commodity quite as completely as the cotton he wove into cloth.
This latter circumstance is important because it became the source
of the vast social 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 society. At
the very dawn of civilization it must have become apparent that more
comforts and conveniences could be acquired by one man restricting
his occupation to a single craft—and the development of independent
arts was in itself a division of 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 members 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.