the whole work in any art is executed by one person, that person
must possess sufficient skill to perform the most difficult, and
sufficient strength to perform the most laborious, 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 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 division 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 workingman; secondly, to the saving of time, which is
commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another,
and, lastly, to the invention of a great number of machines which
facilitate and abridge labor and enable one man to do the work of
many.”
It should be noted that the factory was, in the beginning, not the
creation of capital, but of labor. The early master manufacturers
were risen workingmen. Sir Richard Arkwright, the creator of the
factory, the man who dominated industrial activities in the first
great period of expansion, was a penny barber; but he died a Knight
Bachelor with an income greater than that of many a prince. The
process of social elevation by means of trade began back in the
fifteenth century with the first extension 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 proprietors had been, less than three
hundred years before, not soldiers, but serfs.
Moreover, generations before the establishment 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 process
of tradesmen rising to the gentry had gone the other process of
declining gentry placing their sons in trade. So, as Defoe pithily
said, “Tradesmen became gentlemen by gentlemen becoming tradesmen.”
The successful artisan under the domestic system became in time
master clothier, and when the factory became the means of further
increase to their fortunes the capital which this class had already
amassed was utilized in building mills and machinery. To this class
belonged the grandfather 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 experiments. 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 manufactures in England, through the introduction
of machinery, led to a more rapid accumulation of wealth than
had been known in any previous period of history. It is said that
in his youth Robert Peel entertained a presentiment that he would
become 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 generation 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 Manchester
in the first half of the last century, when discontent had become
articulate and the great Chartist movement reached its height is to
be found in Dickens’s _Hard Times_. In that story Josiah Bounderby
of Coketown is typical of this class of risen workingmen—the early
employers 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 relation 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.
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 workingman sold. When in the year 1785 Arkwright’s patents
were set aside and the use of his perfected spinning machinery became
free to all manufacturers, a great extension 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 cheaply and in far greater quantity
than was possible under the domestic system. Hand workers sought
employment in the factories. Vast numbers of purely agricultural
laborers left the rural districts for the manufacturing 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 unlimited 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.”
The crowding of this vast laboring population into great industrial
centres, however, gave rise to a class-consciousness which
demanded that attention should be paid to the human element which
distinguished labor from all other commodities, demanded 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 cornerstone 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 surprising story of industrial progress, an important chapter
in the social progress of mankind. But enough has already been
said to prepare us for the consideration of the way in which the
establishment of the factory 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 have a total of one hundred and twenty
million spindles giving employment to an army of workers as great as
the entire population 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
industrial 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 Revolution, although
it was a very important one. Other elements besides the introduction
of machinery had gradually made possible production on a large scale.
Chief among these was the decline of state 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 facilities, and the construction of roads and canals.
All these were elements in producing 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 taxation and these divisions were called classes. A
seventh included the mass of the population, 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 occasioned by the factory, we find no
reference 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 interests in life were
identical, the masses suddenly 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 expression 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
becomes 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 Saintsbury, in his history of
Manchester, questions the historical accuracy of the event portrayed;
“but,” he adds, “Queen Philippa did many things which we should
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 introduction 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 manufacture, 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 appears 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 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
represented in Parliament.
It has been held that the factory is an episode, not an element, in
modern sociological 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 population
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 craftsmen into operatives, but
agricultural laborers 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 dependent, 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 population 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.”
Thus Wordsworth in _The Excursion_ describes the rise of the
manufacturing towns.
Our first concern is with the social conditions existing in these
great manufacturing cities. The factory system was first applied
to the spinning of yarn; but weaving continued, for a time, as a
handicraft. This period was one of great prosperity to the hand-loom
weavers. Before the invention of spinning-machinery, several spinners
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 manufacturing towns, and hither the master 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 Lancashire life at this time,” writes
a contemporary 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 apprentices were
employed, made them prosperous small manufacturers and a proud lot of
people.” This was about 1800.
“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, preceded
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 laboring population after
the establishment of factories for weaving as well as for spinning,
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 agricultural. 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 chronicle, “but it is fit that noble chevaliers should enjoy
all ease, and taste all pleasures, 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
agricultural labor; and secondly, of cottagers, each of whom had
a small parcel of land attached to his dwelling, and the privilege
of turning out a cow, or pigs, or a few sheep into the woods,
commons and wastes of the manor. During this whole period the entire
population 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
allowance of produce from each tenant. The peasantry worked hard and
fared scantily enough, but still there was never an absolute want of
food; the whole body was poor, but it contained no paupers.
During the fourteenth century the demand 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
extension of manufacture in the fifteenth century greatly increased
the demand. This circumstance led to an important change in the
distribution of the population and the peasants previously employed
in tillage were turned adrift upon the world. The allotments of
arable land which had formerly afforded them the means of subsistence
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 country were
converted into day laborers depending entirely upon wages for their
subsistence.
Thus when we come to consider the pitiable condition of the working
classes, following the establishment of the factory, we must remember
this underlying cause of the poverty and suffering, holding in mind
the fact that from the beginning the increase of English poor rates
kept pace visibly with the progress of the enclosure of the common
land. Complaints against vagrancy and idleness, and the difficulty of
providing for the poor increased proportionately 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
Lancashire, which until then was comparatively thinly populated.
A great migration 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,
Birmingham, and elsewhere; and many thousand 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 apprentice 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 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 member 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 enormous and so was the greed of
the newborn 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 throughout the manufacturing towns.
Public opinion was soon aroused which 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 factories 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
children employed in factories were debarred from all opportunities
of education as well as from moral and religious instruction. The
investigation produced this report and nothing more—“when the dangers
of infection were removed the precautions of mercy were forgotten.”