Part 3

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.

The advantages resulting from the division of labor are evident. When the whole work in any art is executed by one person, that person must possess sufficient skill to perform the most difficult, and 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.