Sec. 13. Regarding the Business as a combination of Labour and Capital, we perceive that one strongly distinctive characteristic of the pre-machinery age is the small proportion which capital bears to labour in the industrial unit. It is this fact that enabled the "domestic" worker to hold his own so long in so many industries as the owner of a separate business. So long as the mechanical arts are slightly developed and tools are simple, the proportion of "fixed capital" to the business is small and falls within the means of the artisan who plies his craft in his home. So long as tools are simple, the processes of manufacture are slow, therefore the quantity of raw material and other "circulating capital" is small and can also be owned by the worker. The growing divorcement in the ownership of capital and labour in the industrial unit will be found to be a direct and most important result of those improvements in mechanical arts which, by continually increasing the proportion of capital to labour in a business, placed capital more and more beyond the possession of those who supplied the labour power required to co-operate in production.

In the middle of last century there were very few instances of a manufacturing business in which a large capital was engaged, or in which the capital stood to the labour in anything like modern proportion. It was indeed the merchant and not the manufacturer who represented the most advanced form of Capitalism in the eighteenth century. Long before Dr. Johnson's discovery that "an English merchant is a new species of gentleman," Defoe had noted the rise of merchant-princes in the Western clothing trades, observing that "many of the great families who now pass for gentry in these counties have been originally raised from and built out of this truly noble manufacture."[52] These wealthy entrepreneurs were sometimes spoken of as "manufacturers," though they had no claim either upon the old or the new signification of that name. They neither wrought with their hands nor did they own machinery and supervise the labour which worked with it. They were, as has been shown above, merchant-middlemen. The clothing trade being the most highly developed, evolved several species of middlemen, including under that term all collectors and distributors of the raw material or finished goods.

(a) One important class of "factors" engaged themselves in buying wool from farmers and selling it to clothiers, and appear to have sometimes exercised an undue and tyrannous control over the latter by an unscrupulous manipulation of the credit system which was growing up in trade.[53]

(b) The "clothiers" themselves must be regarded in large measure as middleman-collectors, analogous in function to the distributors, who still rank as one of the grades of middlemen in the cheap clothing trade of London to-day.[54]

(c) After the cloth was made three classes of middlemen were engaged in forwarding it to the retailer—(1) travelling merchants or wholesale dealers who attended the big fairs or the markets at Leeds, Halifax, Exeter, etc., and made large purchases, conveying the goods on pack-horses over the country to the retail trader; (2) middlemen who sold on commission through London factors and warehousemen, who in their turn disposed of the goods to shopkeepers or to exporters; (3) merchants directly engaged in the export trade.

With the exception of shipping and canal transport (which became important after the middle of the century) there were no considerable industries related to manufacture where large capitals were laid down in fixed plant. Even the capital sunk in permanent improvements of land, which played so important a part in the development of agriculture, belonged chiefly to the latter years of the eighteenth century. Almost the only persons who wielded large capitals within the country were those merchants, dealers, or middlemen, whose capital at any given time consisted of a large stock of raw material or finished goods. Even the latter were considerably restricted in the magnitude of their transactions by the imperfect development of the machinery of finance and the credit system. In 1750 there were not more than twelve bankers' shops out of London.[55] Until 1759 the Bank of England issued no notes of less value than L20.

Joint-ownership of capital and effective combination of the labour units in a business were only beginning to make progress. The Funded Debt, the Bank of England, the East India Company were the only examples of really large and safe investments at the opening of the eighteenth century. Joint-ownership of large capitals for business purposes made no great progress before the middle of the eighteenth century, except in the case of chartered companies for foreign trade, such as the East India Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, the Turkish, Russian, Eastland, and African companies. Insurance business became a favourite form of joint-stock speculation in the reign of George I. The extraordinary burst of joint-stock enterprise culminating in the downfall of the South Sea Company shows clearly the narrow limitations for sound capitalist co-operation. Even foreign trade on joint-stock lines could only be maintained successfully on condition that the competition of private adventurers was precluded.

Joint-capital had yet made no inroad into manufacture, one of the earliest instances being a company formed in 1764 with a capital of L100,000 for manufacturing fine cambrics.[56]

The limits of co-operative capitalism at the opening of the period of Industrial Revolution are indicated by Adam Smith in a passage of striking significance:—"The only trades which it seems possible for a joint-stock company to carry on successfully, without an exclusive privilege, are those of which all the operations are capable of being reduced to what is called a routine, or to such a uniformity of method as admits of little or no variation. Of this kind is, first, the banking trade; secondly, the trade of insurance from fire and from sea risk and capture in time of war; thirdly, the trade of making and maintaining a navigable cut or canal; and fourthly, the similar trade of bringing water for the supply of a great city."[57]

In other words, the businesses amenable to joint-stock enterprise are those where skilled management can be reduced to a minimum, and where the scale of the business or the possession of a natural monopoly limits or prohibits competition from outside.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] A. Smith, Wealth of Nations, Bk. iv., chap. i.

[4] Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, vol. ii. p. 728.

[5] Smith, Memoirs, vol. ii., chap. iii. As the approximate calculation of a very competent business man these figures are more reliable than the official figures of imports and exports, the value of which throughout the eighteenth century is seriously impaired by the fact that they continued to be estimated by the standard of values of 1694.

[6] Whitworth's State quoted, Macpherson, vol. iii. p. 283.

[7] Annals, vol. iii. p. 340.

[8] Cunningham, History of English Industry, vol. ii. p. 287, etc.

[9] Smith, Memoirs of Wool, vol. ii. p. 113.

[10] Chalmers, Estimates, p. 148.

[11] Cf. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry, vol. ii. p. 292.

[12] Smith, Wealth of Nations, Bk. iv., chap. viii.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Growth of English Industry, vol. ii. p. 303.

[15] Macpherson, Annals, vol. iii. pp. 155, 156.

[16] Chalmers, Estimate, p. 208. See, however, Baines, who gives a slightly smaller estimate, History of the Cotton Manufacture, p. 112.

[17] Macpherson, Annals, vol. iii. p. 114.

[18] Ibid., vol. iii. p. 73.

[19] Ibid., vol. iii. p. 73.

[20] Smith, Memoirs of Wool, vol. ii. pp. 19, 45.

[21] Smith, ibid., vol. ii. p. 270; cf. also Cunningham, Growth of English Industry, vol. ii. p. 300.

[22] Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 50.

[23] Schulze-Gaevernitz, Der Grossbetrieb, p. 77.

[24] Defoe, Tour, vol. ii. p. 371.

[25] Ibid., vol. ii. p. 370.

[26] Chalmers, pp. 124, 125.

[27] Defoe, Tour, vol. iii. p. 9, etc.

[28] Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. i., chap. x., part 2.

[29] Defoe, Tour, vol. iii. p. 84.

[30] Scrivener, History of the Iron Trade.

[31] Defoe, Tour, vol. ii. p. 323.

[32] Schulze-Gaevernitz, Der Grossbetrieb, p. 52.

[33] Cf. Marshall, Principles, p. 328. In the case of Staffordshire, however, there existed an early trade in wooden platters dependent on quality of timber and traditional skill. When the arts of pottery came in, the new trade taken up in the same locality ousted the old, though there was no particular local advantage in materials.

[34] Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book III., chap. iii.

[35] Westmoreland coal did not compete in the Newcastle market,—Wealth of Nations, Book I., chap. xi. p. 2.

[36] Adam Smith, writing later in the century, observes with some exaggeration, "A merchant, it has been said very properly, is not necessarily the citizen of a particular country. It is in a great measure indifferent to him from what place he carries on his trade, and a very trifling disgust will make him remove his capital, and together with it all the industry which it supports, from one country to another."—Book III., chap. iv.

[37] Defoe, vol. ii. p. 37.

[38] Ibid., vol. ii. p. 17.

[39] Annals of Agriculture, chap. iv. p. 157.

[40] Defoe, vol. iii. pp. 78, 79.

[41] Cf. Burnley, Wool and Wool-combing, p. 417.

[42] Smith, Memoirs of Wool, vol. ii. p. 297.

[43] Ure, History of the Cotton Manufacture, vol. i. p. 224.

[44] James, History of the Worsted Manufacture, p. 323 (quoted Taylor, The Modern Factory System, p. 61).

[45] Baines, History of the County Palatine of Lancashire, vol. ii. p. 413.

[46] Ure, History of Cotton Manufacture, vol. i. p. 224, etc.

[47] Dr. Aikin, History of Manchester (quoted Baines, p. 406).

[48] Taylor, The Modern Factory System, p. 69.

[49] Economic History, vol. ii. p. 237.

[50] Defoe, Tour, vol. iii. p. 89.

[51] Report from the Committee on the Woollen Manufacture of England, (1806).

[52] Tour, vol. ii. p. 35.

[53] For an interesting account of the cunning devices of "factors" see Smith's Memoirs of Wool, vol. ii. p. 311, etc.

[54] Cf. Booth, Labour and Life of the People, vol. i. p. 486, etc.

[55] Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 55.

[56] Cunningham, vol. ii. p. 350.

[57] Wealth of Nations, Bk. V., chap. i., part 3.



CHAPTER III.

THE ORDER OF DEVELOPMENT OF MACHINE INDUSTRY.

Sec. 1. A Machine differentiated from a Tool. Sec. 2. Machinery in Relation to the Character of Human Labour. Sec. 3. Contributions of Machinery to Productive Power. Sec. 4. Main Factors in Development of Machine Industry. Sec. 5. Importance of Cotton-trade in Machine Development. Sec. 6. History refutes the "Heroic" Theory of Invention. Sec. 7. Application of Machinery to other Textile Work. Sec. 8. Reverse order of Development in Iron Trades. Sec. 9. Leading Determinants in the General Application of Machinery and Steam-Motor. Sec. 10. Order of Development of modern Industrial Methods in the several Countries—Natural, Racial, Political, Economic.

Sec. 1. It appears that in the earlier eighteenth century, while there existed examples of various types of industrial structure, the domestic system in its several phases may be regarded as the representative industrial form. The object of this chapter is to examine the nature of those changes in the mechanical arts which brought about the substitution of machine-industry conducted in factories or large workshops for the handicrafts conducted within the home or in small workshops, with the view of discovering the economic bearing of these changes.

A full inductive treatment would perhaps require this inquiry to be prefaced by a full history of the inventions which in the several industries mark the rise of the factory system and the adoption of capitalist methods. This, however, is beyond the scope of the present work, nor does it strictly belong to our scientific purpose, which is not to write the narrative of the industrial revolution, but to bring such analysis to bear upon the records of industrial changes as shall enable us to clearly discern the laws of those changes.

The central position occupied by machinery as the chief material factor in the modern evolution of industry requires that a distinct answer should be given to the question, What is machinery?

In distinguishing a machine from a mere tool or handicraft implement it is desirable to pay special attention to two points, complexity of structure and the activity of man in relation to the machine. Modern machinery in its most developed shape consists, as Karl Marx points out, of three parts, which, though mechanically connected, are essentially distinct, the motor mechanism, the transmitting mechanism, and the tool or working machine.

"The motor mechanism is that which puts the whole in motion. It either generates its own motive power, like the steam-engine, the caloric engine, the electro-magnetic machine, etc., or it receives its impulse from some already existing natural force, like the water-wheel from a head of water, the windmill from wind, etc. The transmitting mechanism, composed of fly-wheels, shafting, toothed wheels, pullies, straps, ropes, bands, pinions, and gearing of the most varied kind, regulates the motion, changes its form where necessary, as, for instance, from linear to circular, and divides and distributes it among the working machines. These two first parts of the whole mechanism are there solely for putting the working machines in motion, by means of which motion the subject of labour is seized upon and modified as desired."[58]

Although the development of modern machinery is largely concerned with motor and transmitting mechanisms, it is to the working machine we must look in order to get a clear idea of the differences between machines and tools. A tool may be quite simple in form and action as a knife, a needle, a saw, a roller, a hammer, or it may embody more complex thought in its construction, more variety in its movement, and call for the play of higher human skill. Such tools or implements are the hand-loom, the lathe, the potter's-wheel. To these tools man stands in a double relation. He is handicraftsman in that he guides and directs them by his skill within the scope of activity to which they are designed. He also furnishes by his muscular activity the motive force with which the tool is worked. It is the former of these two relations which differentiates the tool from the machine. When the tool is removed from the direct and individual guidance of the handicraftsman and placed in a mechanism which governs its action by the prearranged motion of some other tool or mechanical implement, it ceases to be a tool and becomes part of a machine. The economic advantage of the early machines consisted chiefly in the economy of working in combined action a number of similar tools by the agency of a single motor. In the early machine the former tool takes its place as a central part, but its movements are no longer regulated by the human touch.[59] The more highly evolved modern machinery generally represents an orderly sequence of processes by which mechanical unity is given to the labour once performed by a number of separate individuals, or groups of individuals with different sorts of tools. But the economy of the earlier machines was generally of a different character. For the most part it consisted not in the harmonious relation of a number of different processes, but rather in a multiplication of the same process raised sometimes to a higher size and speed by mechanical contrivances. So the chief economic value of the earlier machinery applied to spinning consisted in the fact that it enabled each spinner to work an increased number of spindles, performing with each the same simple process as that which he formerly performed with one. In other cases, however, the element of multiplication was not present, and the prime economy of the machine consisted in the superior skill, regularity, pace, or economy of power obtained by substituting mechanical direction of the tool for close and constant human direction. In modern machinery the sewing-machine illustrates the latter, as the knife-cleaning machine illustrates the former.

The machine is inherently a more complex structure than the tool, because it must contain within itself the mechanical means for working a tool, or even for the combined working of many tools, which formerly received their direction from man. In using a tool man is the direct agent, in using a working machine the transmitting mechanism is the direct agent, so far as the character of the several acts of production is not stamped upon the form of the working machine itself. The man placed in charge of a machine determines whether it shall act, but only within very narrow limits how it shall act. The two characteristics here brought out in the machine, complexity of action and self-direction or automatic character, are in reality the objective and subjective expression of the same factor—namely, the changed relation of man towards the work in which he co-operates.

Some of the directing or mental effort, skill, art, thought, must be taken over, that is to say, some of the processes must be guided not directly by man but by other processes, in order to constitute a machine. A machine thus becomes a complex tool in which some of the processes are relatively fixed, and are not the direct expression of human activity. A machinist who feeds a machine with material may be considered to have some control over the pace and character of the first process, but only indirectly over the later processes, which are regulated by fixed laws of their construction which make them absolutely dependent on the earlier processes. A machine is in the nature of its work largely independent of the individual control of the "tender," because it is in its construction the expression of the individual control and skill of the inventor. A machine, then, may be described as a complex tool with a fixed relation of processes performed by its parts. Even here we cannot profess to have reached a definition which enables us in all cases to nicely discriminate machine from tool. It is easy to admit that a spade is a tool and not a machine, but if a pair of scissors, a lever, or a crane are tools, and are considered as performing single simple processes, and not a number of organically relative processes, we may by a skilfully arranged gradation be led on to include the whole of machinery under tools. This difficulty is of course one which besets all work of definition.

But while it is not easy by attention to complexity of structure always to distinguish a tool from a machine, nothing is gained by making the differentia of a machine to consist in the use of a steam or other non-human motor.

A vast amount of modern machinery is of course directed not to combining tools or series of productive processes upon which the productive skill of man is closely engaged, but to substituting other motors for the muscular power of man. But though certain tools as well as certain forms of human effort are here replaced by machines, these tools are not commonly embodied in the machinery for generating and transmitting the new force, so that the mere consideration of the different part played by the worker in generating productive force does not assist us to distinguish a machine from a tool. A type-writer, a piano, which receive their impulse from the human muscles, must evidently be included among machines. It is indeed true that these, like others of the same order, are exceptional machines, not merely in that the motive power is derived more essentially from human muscles, but in that the raison d'etre of the mechanism has been to provide scope for human skill and not to destroy it. But though it is true that a high degree of skill may be imparted to the first process of the working of a piano or type-writer, it is none the less true that the "tool," the implement which strikes the sound or makes the written mark, is not under immediate control of human touch. The skill is confined to an early process, and the mechanism as a whole must be classed under machinery. Nothing would indeed be gained in logical distinctness if we were to abandon our earlier differentia of the machine and confine that term to such mechanical appliances as derived their power from non-human sources—the fact which commonly marks off modern from earlier forms of machine production. For we should find that this substitution of non-human for human power was also a matter of degree, and that the most complex steam-driven machinery of to-day cannot entirely dispense with some directing impulse of human muscular activity, such as the shovelling of coal into a furnace, though the tendency is ever to reduce the human effort to a minimum in the attainment of a given output.

This consideration of the difficulties attending exact definitions of machinery is not idle, for it leads to a clearer recognition of the nicely graded evolution which has changed the character of modern industry, not by a catastrophic substitution of radically different methods, but by the continuous steady development of certain elements, common to all sorts of industrial activity, and a corresponding continuous degeneration of certain other elements.

Sec. 2. The growth of machine-industry then may be measured by the increased number and complexity of the processes related to one another in the mechanical unit or machine, and by a corresponding shrinkage of the dependence of the product upon the skill and volition of the human being who tends or co-operates with the machine. Every product made by tool or machine is qua industrial product or commodity the expression of the thought and will of man; but as machine-production becomes more highly developed, more and more of the thought and will of the inventor, less and less of that of the immediate human agent or machine-tender is expressed in the product. But it is evidently not enough to say that the labour-saving machine has merely substituted the stored and concentrated effort of the inventor for that labour of the handicraftsman which is saved. This would be to ignore the saving of muscular power due to the substitution of forces of nature—water, steam, electricity, etc., for the painful effort of man. It is the thought of the inventor, plus the action of various mechanical and other physical forces, which has saved the labour of man in the production of a commodity. The further question—how far this saving of labour in respect of a given commodity is compensated by the increased number of commodities to which human labour is applied—is a consideration which belongs to a later chapter.

In tracing the effect of the application of modern machinery to English industry there appear two prominent factors, which for certain purposes require separate treatment—the growth of improved mechanical apparatus, and the evolution of extra-human motor power.

We speak of the industry which has prevailed since the middle of the eighteenth century as machine-production, not because there were no machines before that time, but firstly, because a vast acceleration in the invention of complex machinery applied to almost all industrial arts dates from that period, and secondly, because the application upon an extensive scale of non-human motor powers manifested itself then for the first time.

One important external effect and indication of the momentous character of these changes is to be found in the quickening of that operation, the beginning of which was observable before the great inventions, the substitution of the Factory System for the Domestic System.

The peculiar relation of Machinery to the Factory System consists in the fact that the size, expensiveness, and complexity of machinery on the one hand, and the use of non-human power on the other hand, were forces which united to drive labour from the home workshop to the large specialised workshop—the Factory.

"The water frame, the carding engine, and the other machines which Arkwright brought out in a finished state, required both more space than could be found in a cottage, and more power than could be applied by the human arm. Their weight also rendered it necessary to place them in strongly-built walls, and they also could not be advantageously turned by any power then known but that of water. Further, the use of machinery was accompanied by a greater division of labour, and therefore a greater co-operation was requisite to bring all the processes of production into harmony and under a central superintendence."[60] Hence the growth of machine-production is to a large extent synonymous with the growth of the modern Factory System.

Sec. 3. Man does his work by moving matter. Hence machinery can only aid him by increasing the motive power at his disposal.

(1) Machinery enables forces of man or nature to be more effectively applied by various mechanical contrivances composed of levers, pulleys, wedges, screws, etc.

(2) Machinery enables man to obtain the use of various motor forces outside his body—wind, water, steam, electricity, chemical action, etc.[61]

Thus by the provision of new productive forces, and by the more economical application of all productive forces, machinery improves the industrial arts.

Machinery can increase the scope of man's productive ability in two ways. The difficulty of concentrating a large mass of human force upon a given point at the same time provides certain quantitative limits to the productive efficiency of the human body. The steam-hammer can perform certain work which is quantitatively outside the limit of the physical power of any number of men working with simple tools and drawing their motor power from their own bodies. The other limit to the productive power of man arises from the imperfect continuity of human effort and the imperfect command of its direction. The difficulty of maintaining a small, even, accurate pressure, or a precise repetition of the same movement, is rather a qualitative than a purely quantitative limit. The superior certainty and regularity of machinery enables certain work to be done which man alone could not do or could do less perfectly. The work of the printing machine could not be achieved by man. Machinery has improved the texture and quality of certain woollen goods;[62] recent improvements in milling result in improved quality of flour and so on. Machinery can also do work which is too fine or delicate for human fingers, or which would require abnormal skill if executed by hand. Economy of time, which Babbage[63] accounts a separate economy, is rightly included in the economies just named. The greater rapidity with which certain manufacturing processes—e.g., dyeing—can be achieved arises from the superior concentration and continuity of force possible under machinery. All advantages arising from rapid transport are assignable to the same causes.

The continuity and regularity of machine work are also reflected in certain economies of measurement. The faculty of self-registering, which belongs potentially to all machinery, and which is more utilised every day, performs several services which may be summed up by saying that they enable us to know exactly what is going on. When to self-registration is applied the faculty of self-regulation, within certain limits a new economy of force and knowledge is added. But machinery can also register and regulate the expenditure of human power. Babbage well says:—"One of the most singular advantages we derive from machinery is in the check which it affords against the inattention, the idleness, or the knavery of human agents."[64] This control of the machine over man has certain results which belong to another aspect of machine economy.[65]

These are the sources of all the improvements of economies imputed to machine-production. All improvements in machinery, as applied to industrial arts, take therefore one of the following forms:—

(1) Re-arrangement or improvement of machinery so as to utilise more fully the productive power of nature or man. Improvements enabling one man to tend more spindles, or enabling the same engine at the same boiler-pressure to turn more wheels, belong to this order of improvement.

(2) Economies in the source of power. These will fall under four heads—

1. Substitution of cheaper for dearer kinds of human power. Displacement of men's labour by women's or children's.

2. Substitution of mechanical power for human power. Most great improvements in the "labour-saving" character of machinery properly come under this head.

3. Economies in fuel or in steam. The most momentous illustration is the adoption of the hot blast and the substitution of raw coal for coke in the iron trade.[66]

4. The substitution of a new mechanical motor for an old one derived from the same or from different stores of energy—e.g., steam for water power, natural gas for steam.

(3) Extended application of machinery. New industrial arts owing their origin to scientific inventions and their practice to machinery arise for utilising waste products. Under "waste products" we may include (a) natural materials, the services of which were not recognised or could not be utilised without machinery—e.g., nitrates and other "waste" products of the soil; (b) the refuse of manufacturing processes which figured as "waste" until some unsuspected use was found for it. Conspicuous examples of this economy are found in many trades. During the interval between great new inventions in machinery or in the application of power many of the principal improvements are of this order. Gas tar, formerly thrown into rivers so as to pollute them, or mixed with coal and burnt as fuel, is now "raw material for producing beautiful dyes, some of our most valued medicines, a saccharine substance three hundred times sweeter than sugar, and the best disinfectants for the destruction of germs of disease." "The whole of the great industries of dyeing and calico-printing have been revolutionised by the new colouring matters obtained from the old waste material gas tar."[67] These economies both in fuel and in the utilisation of waste material are largely due to the increased scale of production which comes with the development of machine industry. Many waste products can only be utilised where they exist in large quantities.

Sec. 4. If we trace historically the growth of modern capitalist economies in the several industries we shall find that they fall generally into three periods—

1. The period of earlier mechanical inventions, marking the displacement of domestic by factory industry.

2. The evolution of the new motor in manufacture. The application of steam to the manufacturing processes.

3. The evolution of steam locomotion, with its bearing on industry.

As these periods are not materially exclusive, so also there are close economic relations subsisting between the development of machinery and motor, and between the improvements in manufacture and in the transport industry. But in order to understand the nature of the irregularity which is discernible in the history of the development of machinery, it is essential to consider these factors both separately and in the historical and economic relation they stand to each other. For this purpose we will examine two large staple industries, the textile and the iron industries of England, in order that we may trace in the chief steps of their progress the laws of the evolution of modern machinery.

The textile industry offers special facilities to such a study. The strongest and most widespread of English manufactures, it furnishes in the early eighteenth century the clearest examples of the several forms of industry. To the several branches of this industry the earliest among the great inventions were applied. This start in industrial development has been maintained, so that the most advanced forms of the modern factory are found in textile industry. Moreover, the close attention which has been given to, and the careful records which have been kept of certain branches of this work, in particular the Lancashire cotton industry, enable us to trace the operation of the new industrial forces here with greater precision than is the case with any other industry. As Schulze-Gaevernitz, in his masterly study, says of the cotton industry—"The English cotton industry is not only the oldest, but is in many respects that modern industry which manifests most clearly the characteristics of modern industrial methods, both in their economic and their social relations."[68]

The iron industry has been selected on the ground of its close connection with the application of steam-driven machinery to the several industries. It is in a sense the most fundamental industry of modern times, inasmuch as it furnishes the material environment of the great modern economic forces. Moreover, we have the advantage of tracing the growth of the iron manufacture ab ovo, for, as we have seen, before the industrial revolution it played a most insignificant part in English commerce.

Lastly, a study of the relations between the growth of the iron and the textile industries will be of special service in assisting us to realise the character of the interaction of the several manufactures under the growing integration of modern industry.[69]

Sec. 5. In observing the order of inventions applied to textile industries, the first point of significance is that cotton, a small industry confined to a part of Lancashire, and up to 1768 dependent upon linen in order to furnish a complete cloth, should take the lead.

The woollen trades, in the first half of the eighteenth century, as we saw, engaged the attention of a vastly larger number of persons, and played a much more important part in our commerce. The silk trade had received new life from the flow of intelligent French workers, and the first modern factory with elaborate machinery was that set up for silk throwing by Lombe. Yet by far the larger number of the important textile inventions of the eighteenth century were either applied in the first instance to the cotton manufacture and transferred, sometimes after a lapse of many years, to the woollen, worsted, and other textile trades, or being invented for woollen trades, proved unsuccessful until applied to cotton.[70]

Although the origin and application of inventive genius is largely independent of known laws, and may provisionally be relegated to the domain of "accident," there are certain reasons which favoured the cotton industry in the industrial race. Its concentration in South Lancashire and Staffordshire, as compared with the wide diffusion of the woollen industries, facilitated the rapid acceptance of new methods and discoveries. Moreover, the cotton industry being of later origin, and settling itself in unimportant villages and towns, had escaped the influence of official regulations and customs which prevailed in the woollen centres and proved serious obstacles to the introduction of new industrial methods.[71] Even in Lancashire itself official inspectors regulated the woollen trade at Manchester, Rochdale, Blackburn, and Bury.[72]

The cotton industry had from the beginning been free from all these fetters. The shrewd, practical business character which marks Lancashire to-day is probably a cause as well as a result of the great industrial development of the last hundred years.

Moreover, it was recognised, even before the birth of the great inventions, that cotton goods, when brought into free competition with woollen goods, could easily undersell them and supplant them in popular consumption. This knowledge held out a prospect of untold fortune to inventors who should, by the application of machinery, break through the limitations imposed upon production by the restricted number of efficient workers in some of the processes through which the cotton yarn must pass.

But the stimulus which one invention afforded to another gave an accumulative power to the application of new methods. This is especially seen in the alternation of inventions in the two chief processes of spinning and weaving.

Even before the invention of John Kay's Fly Shuttle, which doubled the quantity of work a weaver could do in a day, we found that spinners had great difficulties in supplying sufficient yarn to the weavers. This seems to have applied both to the Lancashire cotton and to the Yorkshire woollen manufactures. After the fly-shuttle had come into common use this pressure of demand upon the spinners was obviously increased, and the most skilful organisation of middleman-clothiers was unable to supply sufficient quantities of yarn. This economic consideration directed more and more attention to experiments in spinning machinery, and so we find that, long before the invention of the jenny and the water-frame, ingenious men like John Kay of Bury, Wyatt, Paul, and others had tried many patents for improved spinning. The great inventions of Hargreaves and Arkwright and Crompton enabled spinning to overtake and outstrip weaving and when, about 1790, steam began to be applied to considerable numbers of spinning mills, it was no longer spinning but weaving that was the limiting process in the manufacture of woollen and cotton cloths.

This strain upon weaving, which had been tightening through the period of the great spinning improvements, acted as a special incentive to Cartwright, Horrocks, and others to perfect the power-loom in its application, first to woollen, then to cotton industries. Not until well into the nineteenth century, when steam power had been fully applied by many minor improvements, were the arts of spinning and weaving brought fully into line. The complete factory, where the several processes of carding, spinning, weaving (and even dyeing and finishing), are conducted under the same roof and worked in correspondence with one another, marks the full transition from the earlier form of domestic industry, where the family performed with simple tools their several processes under the domestic roof.[73]

Sec. 6. The history of these textile inventions does a good deal to dispel the "heroic" theory of invention—that of an idea flashing suddenly from the brain of a single genius and effecting a rapid revolution in a trade. No one of the inventions which were greatest in their effect, the jenny, the water-frame, the mule, the power-loom, was in the main attributable to the effort or ability of a single man; each represented in its successful shape the addition of many successive increments of discovery; in most cases the successful invention was the slightly superior survivor of many similar attempts. "The present spinning machinery which we now use is supposed to be a compound of about eight hundred inventions. The present carding machinery is a compound of about sixty patents."[74] This is the history of most inventions. The pressure of industrial circumstances direct the intelligence of many minds towards the comprehension of some single central point of difficulty, the common knowledge of the age induces many to reach similar solutions: that solution which is slightly better adapted to the facts or "grasps the skirts of happy chance" comes out victorious, and the inventor, purveyor, or, in some cases, the robber is crowned as a great inventive genius. It is the neglect of these considerations which gives a false interpretation to the annals of industrial invention by giving an irregular and catastrophic appearance to the working of a force which is in its inner pressure much more regular than in its outward expression. The earlier increments of a great industrial invention make no figure in the annals of history because they do not pay, and the final increment which reaches the paying-point gets all the credit, though the inherent importance and the inventive genius of the earlier attempts may have been as great or greater.

There is nothing fortuitous or mysterious in inventive energy. Necessity is its mother, which simply means that it moves along the line of least resistance. Men like Kay, Hargreaves, Arkwright, Cartwright, set their intelligence and industry to meet the several difficulties as they arose. Nearly all the great textile inventors were practical men, most of them operatives immersed in the details of their craft, brought face to face continually with some definite difficulty to be overcome, some particular economy desirable to make. Brooding upon these concrete facts, trying first one thing then another, learning from the attempts and failures made by other practical men, and improving upon these attempts, they have at length hit upon some contrivance that will get over the definite difficulty and secure the particular economy. If we take any definite invention and closely investigate it, we shall find in nearly every case it has thus grown by small increments towards feasibility. Scientific men, strictly so-called, have had very little to do with these great discoveries. Among the great textile inventors, Cartwright alone was a man leading a life of thought.[75] When the spinning machinery was crippled in its efficiency by the crude methods of carding, Lees and Arkwright set themselves to apply improvements suggested by common-sense and experience; when Cartwright's power-loom had been successfully applied to wool, Horrocks and his friends thought out precisely those improvements which would render it remunerative in the cotton trade.

Thus in a given trade where there are several important processes, an improvement in one process which places it in front of the others stimulates invention in the latter, and each in its turn draws such inventive intelligence as is required to bring it into line with the most highly-developed process. Since the later inventions, with new knowledge and new power behind them, often overshoot the earlier ones, we have a certain law of oscillation in the several processes which maintains progress by means of the stimulus constantly applied by the most advanced process which "makes the pace." There is nothing mysterious in this. If one process remains behind in development each increment of inventive effort successfully applied there brings a higher remuneration than if applied to any of the more forward processes. So the movement is amenable to the ordinary law of "Supply and Demand" enforced by the usual economic motives. As the invention of the fly-shuttle gave weaving the advantage, more and more attention was concentrated upon the spinning processes and the jenny was evolved; the deficiency of the jenny in spinning warp evolved the water-frame, which for the first time liberated the cotton industry from dependence upon linen warp: the demand for finer and more uniform yarns stimulated the invention of the mule. These notable improvements in spinning machinery, with their minor appendages, placed spinning ahead of weaving, and stimulated the series of inventions embodied in the power-loom. The power-loom was found to be of comparatively little service until the earlier processes of dressing and sizing had been placed on a level of machine development by the efforts of Horrocks and others. Not until after 1841 was an equilibrium reached in the development of the leading processes. So likewise each notable advance in the machinery for the main processes has had the effect of bringing an increase of inventive energy to bear upon the minor and the subsidiary processes—bleaching, dyeing, printing, etc. Even now the early process of "ginning" has not been brought fully into line in spite of the prodigious efforts, made especially in the United States, to overcome the difficulties involved in this preparatory stage of the cotton industry.

The following schedule will serve to show the relation of the growth of the cotton industry as measured by consumption of raw cotton to the leading improvements of machinery.

Cotton Imported. Inventions &c. lbs. 1730 1,545,472 1730 Wyatt's roller-spinning (patented 1738). 1738 Kay's fly-shuttle. 1741 1,645,031 1748 Paul's carding-machine (useless until improved by Lees, Arkwright, Wood, 1772-74). 1764 3,870,392 1764 Hargreave's spinning-jenny (patented 1770), for weft only. 1764 Calico-printing introduced into Lancashire. 1768 Arkwright perfects Wyatt's spinning-frame (patented 1769), liberating cotton from dependence on linen warp. 1771 } to } 4,764,589 1771 Arkwright's mill built at Cromford. 1775 } 1775 Arkwright takes patents for carding, drawing, roving, spinning. 1779 Crompton's mule completed (combining jenny and water-frame, producing finer and more even yarn). 1781 5,198,775

1785 18,400,384 1785 Cartwright's power-loom. Watt and Boulton's first engine for cotton-mills. 1792 34,907,497 1792 Whitney's saw-gin. 1813 51,000,000 1813 Horrocks' dressing-machine. 1830 261,200,000 1830 The "Throstle" (almost exclusively used in England for spinning warp). 1832 287,800,000 1832 Roberts' self-acting mule perfected. 1841 489,900,000 1841 Bullough's improved power-loom. Ring spinning (largely used in U.S.A., recently introduced into Lancashire).

From this schedule it is evident that the history of this trade may be divided with tolerable accuracy into four periods.

(1) The preparatory period of experimental inventions of Wyatt, Paul, etc., to the year 1770.

(2) 1770 to 1792 (circa), the age of the great mechanical inventions.

(3) 1792 to 1830, the application of steam power to manufacture and improvements of the great inventions.

(4) 1830 onward, the effect of steam locomotion upon the industry (1830, the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway).

If we measure the operation of these several industrial forces within these several periods, as they are reflected on the growing size of the cotton industry, we shall realise the accumulative character of the great industrial movement, and form some approximately accurate conception of the relative importance of the development of mechanical inventions and of the new motor-power.

Sec. 7. The history of the cotton industry is in its main outlines also the history of other textile industries. We do not possess the same means of measuring statistically the growth of the woollen industries in the period of revolution; but since, on the one hand, many of the spinning and weaving inventions were speedily adapted into the woollen from the cotton industry, while the application of steam to manufacture and the effects of steam locomotion were shared by the older manufacture, the growth of the trade in the main conforms to the same divisions of time. The figures of imported wool are not so valuable a register as in the case of cotton, because no account is taken of home-produce, but the following statistics of foreign and colonial wool imported into England serve to throw light upon the growth of our woollen manufactures.

STATISTICS OF WOOL IMPORTED INTO ENGLAND.

lbs. lbs. 1766 1,926,000 1830 32,305,000 1771 1,829,000 1840 49,436,000 1780 323,000 1850 74,326,000 1790 2,582,000 1860 151,218,000 1800 8,609,000 1870 263,250,000 1810 10,914,000 1880 463,309,000 1820 9,775,000 1892 743,046,104

In the silk industry the influence of machinery is complicated by several considerations especially affecting this manufacture. Although the ingenuity and enterprise of the Lombes had introduced complex machinery into silk throwing many years before it was successfully applied to any other branch of textile industry, the trade did not grow as might have been expected, and the successive increments of great mechanical invention were slowly and slightly applied to the silk industry. There are special reasons for this, some of them connected with the intrinsic value of the commodity, others with the social regulation of the trade.

The inherent delicacy of many of the processes, the capricious character of the market for the commodities, the expensive production of which renders them a luxury and especially amenable to the shifts of taste and fashion, have preserved for artistic handicraft the production of many of the finer silk fabrics, or have permitted the application of machinery in a far less degree than in the cotton and woollen industries.

Moreover, the heavy duties imposed upon raw and thrown silk, which accompanied the strict prohibition of the importation of manufactured silk goods in 1765, by aggravating the expenses of production and limiting the market at the very epoch of the great mechanical inventions, prevented any notable expansion of consumption of silk goods, and rendered them quite unable to resist the competition of the younger and more enterprising cotton industry, which, after the introduction of colour-printing early in the nineteenth century, was enabled to out-compete silk in many markets.

Even in the coarser silk fabrics where weaving machinery was successfully applied at an early date, the slow progress in "throwing" greatly retarded the expansion of the trade, and after the repeal of the duty on imported silk in 1826 the number of throwing mills was still quite inadequate to keep pace with the demands of the weavers.[76] Subsequent improvements in throwing mills, and the application of the ingenious weaving machinery of Jacquard and later improvers, have given a great expansion to many branches of the trade in the last fifty years.

But the following statistics of the consumption of raw and thrown silk from 1765 to 1844 indicate how slight and irregular was the expansion of the trade in England during the era of the great inventions and the application of the steam-motor, and how disastrously the duties upon raw and thrown silks weighed upon this branch of manufacture.

AVERAGE IMPORTATION.[77]

lbs. lbs. 1765 } 1823 2,468,121 1766 } 715,000 1824 4,011,048[78] 1767 } 1825 3,604,058 1785 } 1826 2,253,513 1786 } 881,000 1827 4,213,153 1787 } 1828 4,547,812 1801 } 1829 2,892,201 to } 1,110,000 1830 4,693,517 1812 } 1831 4,312,330 1814 2,119,974 1832 4,373,247 1815 1,475,389 1833 4,761,543 1816 1,088,334 1834 4,522,451 1817 1,686,659 1835 5,788,458 1818 1,922,987 1836 6,058,423 1819 1,848,553 1837 4,598,859 1820 2,027,635 1838 4,790,256 1821 2,329,808 1839 4,665,944 1822 2,441,563 1840 4,819,262

In the linen industry the artificial encouragement given to the Irish trade, which, bounty-fed and endowed with a monopoly of the British markets, was naturally slow to adopt new methods of production, and the uncertain condition of the English trade, owing to the strong rivalry of cotton, prevented the early adoption of the new machine methods. Although Adam Smith regarded linen as a promising industry, it was still in a primitive condition. Not until the very end of the eighteenth century were flax spinning mills established in England and Scotland, and not until after 1830 was power-loom weaving introduced, while the introduction of spinning machinery into Ireland upon a scale adequate to supply the looms of that country took place a good deal later.

We see that the early experimental period in the cotton industry produced no very palpable effect upon the volume of the trade. Between 1700 and 1750 the manufacture was stagnant.[79] The woollen manufacture, owing largely to the stimulus of the fly-shuttle, showed considerable expansion. The great increase of cotton production in 1770-90 measures the force of the mechanical inventions without the aid of the new motor. The full effects of the introduction of steam power were retarded by the strain of the French war. Though 1800 marks the beginning of a large continuous expansion in both cotton and woollen manufactures, it was not until about 1817, when the new motor had established itself generally in the large centres of industry and the energy of the nation was called back to the arts of peace, that the new forces began to fully manifest their power. The period 1840 onwards marks the effect of the revolution in commerce due to the application of the new motor to transport purposes, the consequent cheapening of raw material, especially of cotton, the opening up of new markets for the purchase of raw material and for the sale of manufactured goods. The effect of this diminished cost of production and increased demand for manufactured goods upon the textile trades is measured by the rapid pace of the expansion which followed the opening of the early English railways and the first establishment of steam-ship traffic.

Sec. 8. The development of the textile trades, and that of cotton in particular, arose from the invention of new machinery. This machinery was quickened and rendered effective by the new motor. The iron trade in its development presents the reverse order. The discovery of a new motor was the force which first gave it importance. The mechanical inventions applied to producing iron were stimulated by the requirements of the new motor.

In 1740 the difficulty of obtaining adequate supplies of timber, and the failure of attempts to utilise pit-coal, had brought the iron trade to a very low condition. According to Scrivener, at this time "the iron trade seemed dwindling into insignificance and contempt."[80]

The earlier steps in its rise from this degradation are measured by the increased application of pit-coal and the diminished use of charcoal.

The progress may be marked as follows:—

(1) The application of Watt's earlier improvements upon Newcomen's engines, patented 1769, was followed by a rise in the average output for furnaces worked with charcoal. The average output of 294 tons in 1750 was increased to 545 tons in 1788.

(2) The substitution of coke for charcoal proceeding pari passu with improved methods of smelting yielded an average output for coke-fed furnaces of 903 tons in 1788. To this epoch belong also Cort's inventions for puddling and rolling (patented 1783-84), which revolutionised the production of bar-iron.

(3) The introduction of Watt's double-power engine in 1788-90. In 1796 the production of pig-iron was double that of 1788, and the average output per furnace raised to 1048 tons.

(4) The substitution of hot for cold blast in 1829, effecting an economy of coal to the extent of 2 tons 18 cwt. per ton of cast-iron.

(5) The adoption of raw coal instead of coke in 1833, effecting a further reduction of expenditure of coal from 5 tons 3-1/2 cwt. to 2 tons 5-1/4 cwt. in producing a ton of cast-iron.

These were the leading events in the establishment of the iron industry of this country. The following table indicates the growth of the production of English iron from 1740 to 1840:—

Year. No. of Furnaces. Average Output. Total Produce. Tons. Tons. 1740 59 294 17,350 1788 77 909 coke } 61,300 545 charcoal} 1796 121 1048 125,079 1806 133 1546 258,206 1825 364 2228 703,184 (261 in blast) 1828 365 2530 (277 in blast) 1839 378 3592 1,347,790

Here we see that economy of power rather than improved machinery is the efficient cause of the development of industry, or more properly, that economy of power precedes and stimulates the several steps in improvement of machinery.

The substitution of coke for charcoal and the application of steam power not merely increased enormously the volume of the trade, but materially affected its localisation. Sussex and Gloucester, two of the chief iron-producing counties when timber was the source of power, had shrunk into insignificance by 1796, when facilities of obtaining coal were a chief determinant. By 1796, it is noteworthy that the four districts of Stafford, Yorkshire, South Wales, and Salop were to the front.

The discovery of the hot blast and substitution of raw coal for coke occurring contemporaneously with the opening of railway enterprise mark the new interdependence of industries in the age of machinery.

Iron has become a foundation upon which every machine-industry alike is built. The metal manufactures, so small in the eighteenth century, attained an unprecedented growth and a paramount importance in the nineteenth.

The application of machinery to the metal industries has led to an output of inventive genius not less remarkable in this century than the textile inventions of the eighteenth century.

"In textile manufacture it was improved machinery that first called for a new motor; in metal manufacture it was the new motor which rendered necessary improved machinery.... For all modern purposes the old handicraft implements were clearly obsolete. The immediate result of this requirement was the bringing to the front a number of remarkable men, Brindley, Smeaton, Maudsley, Clements, Bramah, Nasmyth, etc., to supply mechanism of a proportionate capacity and nicety for the new motive-power to act upon and with, and the ultimate result was the adoption of the modern factory system in the larger tool-making and engineering workshops, as well as in metal manufactories proper. Thus there gradually grew up," says Jevons, "a system of machine-tool labour, the substitution of iron hands for human hands, without which the execution of engines and machines in their present perfection would be impossible."[81]

In the later era of machine development an accumulative importance is attached to the improvements in the machine-making industries. The great inventions associated with the names of Maudsley and Nasmyth, the cheapening of steel by the Bessemer process, and the various steps by which machines are substituted for hands in the making of machinery, have indirect but rapid and important effects upon each and every machine-industry engaged in producing commodities directly adapted to human use. The economy of effort for industrial purposes requires that a larger and larger proportion of inventive genius and enterprise shall be directed to an interminable displacement of handicraft by machinery in the construction of machinery, and a smaller proportion to the relatively unimportant work of perfecting manufacturing machinery in the detailed processes of each manufacture engaged in the direct satisfaction of some human want.

A general survey of the growth of new industrial methods in the textile and iron industries marks out three periods of abnormal activity in the evolution of modern industry. The first is 1780 to 1795, when the fruits of early inventions are ripened by the effective application of steam to the machine-industries. The second is 1830 to 1845, when industry, reviving after the European strife, utilised more widely the new inventions, and expanded under the new stimulus of steam locomotion. The third is 1856 to 1866 (circa), when the construction of machinery by machinery became the settled rule of industry.

Sec. 9. Bearing in mind how the invention of new specific forms of machinery in the several processes of manufacture proceeds simultaneously with the application of the new motor-power, we find ourselves quite unable to measure the amount of industrial progress due to each respectively. But seeing that the whole of modern industry has thus been set upon a new foundation of coal and iron, it is obvious that the bonds connecting such industries as the textile and the iron must be continually growing closer and stronger. In earlier times the interdependency of trades was slight and indirect, and the progress in any given trade was almost wholly derived from improvements in specific skill or in the application of specific mechanical invention. The earlier eighteenth century did indeed display an abnormal activity in these specific forms of invention. For examples of these it is only necessary to allude to Lombe's silk mill at Derby, the pin factory made famous by Adam Smith, Boulton's hardware factory at Soho, and the renowned discoveries of Wedgwood. But all increased productivity due to these specific improvements was but slight compared with that which followed the discovery of steam as a motor and the mechanical inventions rendering it generally applicable, which marked the period 1790 to 1840. By this means the several specific industries were drawn into closer unity, and found a common basis or foundation in the arts of mining, iron-working, and engineering which they lacked before.

From these considerations it will follow that the order in which the several industries has fallen under the sway of modern industrial methods will largely depend upon the facility they afford to the application of steam-driven machinery. The following are some of the principal characteristics of an industry which determine the order, extent, and pace of its progress as a machine industry:—

(a) Size and complexity of Structure.—The importance of the several leading textile manufactures, the fact that some of them were highly centralised and already falling under a factory system, the control of wealthy and intelligent employers, were among the chief causes which enabled the new machinery and the new motor to be more quickly and successfully applied than in smaller, more scattered, and less developed industries.

(b) Fixity in quantity and character of demand.—Perfection of routine-work is the special faculty of machine-production. Where there is a steady demand for the same class of goods, machinery can be profitably applied. Where fashion fluctuates, or the individual taste of the consumer is a potent factor, machinery cannot so readily undertake the work. In the textile industries there are many departments which machinery has not successfully invaded. Much lace-making, embroidery, certain finer weaving is still done by human power, with or without the aid of complex machinery. In the more skilled branches of tailoring, shoe-making, and other clothing trades, the individual character of the demand—i.e., the element of irregularity—has limited the use of machinery. A similar cause retains human motor-power in certain cases to co-operate with and control complex machinery, as in the use of the sewing-machine.

(c) Uniformity of material and of the processes of production.—Inherent irregularity in the material of labour is adverse to machinery. For this reason the agricultural processes have been slow to pass under steam-power, especially those directly concerned with work on the soil, and even where steam-driven machines are applied their economy, as compared with hand labour, is less marked than in manufacturing processes. To the getting of coal and other minerals steam and other extra-human power has been more slowly and less effectively applied than in dealing with the matter when it is detached from the earth.

(d) Durability of valuable properties.—The production of quickly perishable articles being of necessity local and immediate demands a large amount of human service which cannot economically be replaced or largely aided by machinery. The work of the butcher and the baker have been slow to pass under machinery. Where butchering has become a machine-industry to some extent, the direct cause has been the discovery of preservative processes which have diminished the perishability of meat. So with other food industries, the facility of modern means of transport has alone enabled them gradually to pass under the control of machinery. Until quite recently cakes and the finer forms of bakery were a purely local and handicraft product.

(e) Ease or simplicity of labour involved.—Where abundance of cheap labour adequate to the work can be obtained, and particularly in trades where women and children are largely engaged, the development of machinery has been generally slower. This condition often unites with (b) or (c) to retain an industry in the "domestic" class. A large mass of essentially "irregular" work requiring a certain delicacy of manipulation, which by reason of its narrowness of scope is yet easily attained, and which makes but slight demands upon muscular force or intelligence, has remained outside machine-production. Important industries containing several processes of this nature have been slower to fall into the complete form of the factory system. The slow progress of the power-loom in cotton and wool until after 1830 is explained by these considerations. The stocking-frame held out against machinery still longer, and hand work still plays an important part in several processes of silk manufacture. Even now, in the very centre of the factory system, Bolton, the old hand-weaving is represented by a few belated survivors.[82]

(f) Skilled Workmanship.—High skill in manipulation or treatment of material, the element of art infused into handicraft, gives the latter an advantage over the most skilful machinery, or over such machinery as can economically be brought into competition with it. In some of the metal trades, in pottery and glass-making there are many processes which have not been able to dispense with human skill. In these manufactures, moreover, more progress is attributable to specific inventions than to the adoption of the common machinery and motor-power which are not largely available in the most important processes.

From these considerations it will appear that where an industry is large and regular in character, it falls more readily and completely under the control of machinery, where it is small and irregular it conforms more slowly and partially to the new methods. Most of the extractive industries of agriculture, stock-raising, fishing, mining, hunting, are irregular by reason of the nature of their material and its subjection to influences, geological, chemical, climatic, and others which are but slightly under calculation or human control. The final processes by which commodities are adapted to the use of individual consumers necessarily partake of the irregularity or variety of human tastes and desires. We shall therefore find most regularity in the intermediate processes where the raw materials, having been extracted from nature, are being endowed with those qualities of shape, position, etc., which are required to enable them to satisfy human wants. The manufacturing stages where machinery finds fullest application are in nearly all cases intermediate stages of production. Even where machine-production seems directly to satisfy some human want, there are commonly some final processes required which involve individual skill. Almost all products which satisfy the desires of man pass through a large number of productive processes which may be classed as extractive, transport, manufacturing, and distributive. These are, of course, not in all cases clearly distinguishable. Mixed with the extractive processes of mining and wheat-raising are several processes of transport and manufacture: the various stages of manufacture may be broken by stages of transport: a final process of manipulation or manufacture may precede the final act of distribution, as in the sale of drugs to the consumer. But, generally speaking, these four kinds of productive processes mark four historic stages in the passage from raw material to finished commodity.

The two middle stages of transport and manufacture have fallen far more fully under the control of steam-driven machinery than the others, and it is in the elaboration of older manufacturing and transport processes and the addition of new processes that we trace the largest effects of the evolution of modern industrial methods.

The following list of the divisions under which workers engaged in the production of material wealth are classified for purposes of the census may serve to bring out more clearly this proportionate development of machinery. The figures appended give the numbers engaged in the several occupations in 1891, and serve to approximately indicate the relative importance of the several principal branches of industry:—

Agriculture 1,311,720 Fishing 25,225 Mining 561,637 Stone, clay, road-making 209,972 Transport— (a) Railways 186,774 (b) Roads 366,605 (c) Canals, rivers, seas 208,443 (d) Messages and porterage 194,044 Houses, furniture, and decorations 820,582 Food and lodgings 797,989 Iron and steel 380,193 Other metals 146,550 Ships and boats 170,517 Carriages and harness 108,780 Machines and implements 342,231 Textiles 1,128,589 Dress 1,099,833 Earthenware and glass 90,007 Chemicals and compounds 56,047 Books 135,616 Animal substances (manufacture) 76,566 Vegetable substances (paper, etc.) 196,889 General mechanics and labourers 805,105 Commercial— (a) Merchants and agents 363,037 (b) Dealers in money 21,891 (c) Insurance 31,437 Engineers and surveyors 15,441

In glancing down this list of the chief industries engaged in the production of commercial wealth, it will be recognised at once that the manufacturing and transport industries are those to which steam-power and the economies of large production have been especially applied. Though, historically, the first industrial use of steam-power was in coal-mining, it remains true that the extensive application of modern machinery to agriculture and the other extractive industries is of comparatively recent growth, while the work of retail distribution has hitherto made but trifling use of machinery and steam-power. Only within the last few years have a few gigantic retail distributive businesses shown a tendency to apply steam and electricity to mechanical contrivances for purposes of distribution.

Sec. 10. The new industrial forces first applied to the cotton spinning of South Lancashire, and rapidly forcing their way into other branches of the textile manufactures, then more gradually transforming the industrial methods of the machinery, hardware, and other staple English manufactures, passed into the Western Continent of Europe and America, destroying the old domestic industry and establishing in every civilised country the reign of steam-driven machinery. The factors determining the order and pace of the new movement in the several countries are numerous and complex. In considering the order of machine-development, it must be remembered that the different nations did not start from an equal footing at the opening of the age of great inventions. By the beginning of the eighteenth century England had established a certain supremacy in commerce. The growth of her colonial possessions since the Revolution and the drastic and successful character of her maritime policy had enabled her to outstrip Holland. In 1729 by far the greater part of the Swedish iron exported from Gothenburg went to England for shipbuilding purposes.[83] At the close of the seventeenth century Gregory King placed England, Holland, and France at the head of the industrial nations with regard to the productivity of their labour.[84] Italy and Germany were little behind in the exercise of manufacturing arts, though the naval superiority and foreign possessions of the above-named nations gave them the commercial superiority. By 1760 England had strengthened her position as regards foreign commerce, and her woollen industry was the largest and most highly-developed industry in the world. But so far as the arts of manufacture themselves were concerned there was no such superiority in England as to justify the expectation of the position she held at the opening of the nineteenth century. In many branches of the textile arts, especially in silk spinning and in dyeing, in pottery, printing, and other manufactures, more inventive genius and more skill were shown on the Continent, and there seemed a priori no reason why England should outstrip so signally her competitors.

The chief factors in determining the order of the development of modern industrial methods in the several countries may be classified as natural, political, economic.

NATURAL. (1) The structure and position of the several countries.—The insular character of Great Britain, her natural facilities for procuring raw materials of manufacture and supplies of foreign food to enable her population to specialise in manufacture, the number and variety of easily accessible markets for her manufactures, gave her an immense advantage. Add to this a temperate climate, excellent internal communication by river (or canal), and an absence of mountain barriers between the several districts. These advantages were of greater relative importance before steam transport, but they played a large part in facilitating the establishment of effective steam transport in England. Extent of sea-board and good harbourage have in no small measure directed the course of modern industry, giving to England, Holland, France, Italy an advantage which the levelling tendency of modern machinery has not yet been able to counteract. The slow progress of Germany until recent years, and the still slow progress of Russia, is attributable more to these physical barriers of free communication, internal and external, than to any other single cause that can be adduced. Inherent resources of the soil, quality of land for agriculture, the proximity of large supplies of coal and iron and other requisites of the production of machinery and power rank as important determinants of progress. The machine development of France in particular has been retarded by the slow discovery of her natural areas of manufacture, the districts where coal and iron lie near to one another in easily accessible supply. The same remark applies to Germany and to the United States. At the close of last century, when the iron trade of England was rapidly advancing, the iron trade of France were quite insignificant, and during the earlier years of the nineteenth century the progress was extremely slight.[85]

(2) Race and National Character.—Closely related to climate and soil, these qualities of race are a powerful directing influence in industry. Muscular strength and endurance, yielding in a temperate climate an even continuity of vigorous effort; keen zest of material comfort stimulating invention and enterprise; acquisitiveness, and the love of external display; the moral capacities of industry, truth, orderly co-operation; all these are leading factors determining the ability and inclination of the several nations to adopt new industrial methods. Moral qualities in English workmanship have indisputably played a large part in securing her supremacy. "A British trade-mark was accepted as a guarantee of excellence, while the products of other countries were viewed with a suspicion justified by experience of their comparative inferiority."[86] The more highly civilised nations have thus gained by this civilisation, and have widened the distance which separates them from the less civilised. England, France, Germany, Holland, and the United States are in wealth and in industrial methods far more widely removed from Spain and Russia than was the case a hundred years ago.

(b) POLITICAL.—Statecraft has played an important part in determining the order and pace of industrial progress. The possession of numerous colonies and other political attachments in different parts of the world, comprising a large variety of material resources, gave to England, and in a less measure to France, Holland, Spain, a great advantage. The tyrannical use these nations made of their colonies for the purpose of building up home manufactures enabled them to specialise more widely and safely in those industries to which the new methods of production were first applied. Even after the North American colonies broke loose, the policy of repression England had applied to their budding manufactures enabled her to retain to a large extent the markets thus created for her manufactured goods.

The large annexations England made during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries gave her a monopoly of many of the finest markets for the purchase of raw materials and for the sale of manufactured goods. The large demand thus established for her textile and metal wares served not only to stimulate fresh inventions, but enabled her to utilise many improvements which could only be profitably applied in the case of large industries with secure and expanding markets.

But the most important factor determining the priority of England was the political condition of continental Europe at the very period when the new machinery and motor-power were beginning to establish confidence in the new industrial order. When Crompton's mule, Cartwright's power-loom, Watt's engines were transforming the industry of England, her continental rivals had all their energies absorbed in wars and political revolutions. The United States and Sweden were the only commercial nations of any significance who, being neutral, obtained a large direct gain from the European strife. Yet England, in spite of the immense drain of blood and money she sustained, under the momentum of the new motor-power far outstripped the rivalry of such states. Though she had to pay a heavy price for her immunity from invasion, she thereby secured an immense start in the race of modern machine-production. Until 1820 she had the game in her own hands. In European trade she had a practical monopoly of the rapidly advancing cotton industry. It was this monopoly which, ruthlessly applied to maintain prices at a highly remunerative rate, and to keep down wages to starvation point, built up, in an age of supreme and almost universal misery for the masses, the rapid and colossal fortunes of the cotton kings. Not until peace was established did the textile and other factories begin to take shape upon the Continent, and many years elapsed before they were able to compete effectively with England. Switzerland was the first continental country to actively adopt the new methods. The large supply of water-power stood her in good stead, and the people took more willingly to the factory system than in other countries.[87] France was slower in her development, in spite of the strong protective system by which she strove, though not very successfully, to exclude English cotton goods. The fall of English prices and profits in the cotton trade between 1820 and 1830 marks clearly the breakdown of the English monopoly before the cheap labour of Alsace and the cheap raw material of the United States, now organised in the factory system with the new machinery.[88] In this, the most advanced trade, the world-competition which now is operative in a thousand different industries, measuring and levelling economic advantages, first clearly shows itself, and in 1836 Ure finds the continental nations and America competing successfully with England in markets which had hitherto been entirely her own.

(c) ECONOMIC CONDITIONS.—The transformation of English agriculture, the growth of large farms, drove great numbers of English peasants into the towns, and furnished a large supply of cheap labour for the new machinery.

This movement was accelerated by the vices of our land tenure. In France and Germany, where the agricultural workers had a stronger interest and property in their land, they were less easily detached for factory purposes. But in England, where the labourer had no property in the land, reformed methods of agriculture and the operation of the Poor Law combined to incite the large proprietors and farmers to rid themselves of all superfluous population in the rural parts and accelerated the migration into the towns. Here the population bred with a rapidity hitherto unknown. The increase of population in England and Wales during the thirty years from 1770 to 1800 is placed at 1,959,590, or 27-1/10 per cent., while during the next thirty years, 1800 to 1830, it amounted to 5,024,207, or 56-3/5 per cent.[89] This large supply of cheap labour in the towns enabled the Lancashire and Yorkshire factories to grow with startling rapidity. The exhaustion left by the Napoleonic wars, the political disorder and insecurity which prevailed on the Continent, retarded until much later the effective competition of other European nations who were behind England in skill, knowledge, and the possession of markets. The American manufactures which had sprung up after the revolution had made considerable strides, but the conquest and settlement of vast new areas of land, and the immense facilities afforded for the production of raw material, retarded their rate of growth until long after the opening of this century. It was, indeed, not until about 1845 that the cotton manufacture made rapid strides in the United States. During the twenty years previous the progress had been very slight, but between 1845 and 1859 a very substantial and, making allowance for fluctuations in the cotton crops, a very steady growth took place.[90]

Another great economic advantage which assisted England was the fact that she, more than any other European nation, had broken down the old industrial order, with its guilds, its elaborate restrictions, and conservative methods. Personal freedom, security of property, liberty to work and live where and how one liked, existed in England to an extent unknown on the Continent before the French Revolution. The following account of the condition of the cotton manufacture in Germany in the eighteenth century will serve to indicate the obstacles to the reformed methods of industry:—"Everything was done by rule. Spinning came under public inspection, and the yarn was collected by officials. The privilege of weaving was confined to the confraternity of the guild. Methods of production were strictly prescribed; public inspectors exercised control. Defects in weaving were visited with punishment. Moreover, the right of dealing in cotton goods was confined to the confraternity of the merchant guild: to be a master-weaver had almost the significance of a public office. Besides other qualifications, there was the condition of a formal examination. The sale also was under strict supervision; for a long time a fixed price prevailed, and a maximum sale was officially prescribed for each dealer. The dealer had to dispose of his wares to the weaver, because the latter had guaranteed to him a monopoly of the export trade."[91]

Under such conditions the new machine-industry could make little advance. Excepting in the case of the woollen industries, England had for the most part already shaken off the old regulations before 1770. In particular, the cotton trade, which was in the vanguard of the movement, being of recent growth and settling outside the guild towns, had never known such restrictions, and therefore lent itself to the new order with a far greater facility than the older trades. Moreover, England was free from the innumerable and vexatious local taxes and restrictions prevalent in France and in the petty governments of Germany. Although the major part of these foolish and pernicious regulations has been long swept away from Germany and other continental nations, the retarding influence they exercised, in common with the wider national system of protection which still survives, kept back the cotton industry, so that in Germany it still stands half a century behind its place in England.[92]

The following figures show how substantial was the lead held by England in the cotton manufacture a little before the middle of the century.

NUMBER OF SPINDLES WORKING IN COTTON MILLS IN 1846.[93]

Spindles. England and Wales 15,554,619 Scotland 1,727,871 Ireland 215,503 Austria and Italy 1,500,000 France 3,500,000 Belgium 420,000 Switzerland 650,000 Russia 7,585,000 United States 3,500,000 States of the Zollverein 815,000 ————— 35,467,993

The development of the cotton industry in 1888 in the chief industrial countries, as indicated by the consumption of raw cotton, is expressed in the accompanying diagram.

Lastly, the national trade policy of England was of signal advantage in her machine development. Her early protective system had, by the enlargement of her carrying trade and the increase of her colonial possessions, laid the foundation of a large complex trade with the more distant parts of the world, though for a time it crippled our European commerce. While we doubtless sacrificed other interests by this course of policy, it must be generally admitted that "English industries would not have advanced so rapidly without Protection."[94] But as we built up our manufacturing industries by Protection, so we undoubtedly conserved and strengthened them by Free Trade—first, by the remission of tariffs upon the raw materials of manufacture and machine-making, and later on by the free admission of food stuffs, which were a prime essential to a nation destined to specialise in manufacture. France, our chief national competitor, weakened her position by a double protective policy, not merely refusing admittance to foreign manufactures in her markets, but retaining heavy duties upon the importation of foreign coal and iron, the foundational constituents of machine-production. This protective policy, adopted by nations whose skill, industry, and natural resources would have rendered them formidable competitors to English manufacturers, has hindered considerably the operation of those economic forces which impel old and thickly-peopled countries to specialise in manufacture and trade, and so has retarded the general development of modern machine-production. But while protective tariffs indisputably operate in this way, it is not possible to determine the extent of their influence. In a large country of rich resources a high degree of specialisation in manufacture is possible in spite of a protective policy. The pressure of high wages is an economic force more powerfully operative than any other in stimulating the adoption of elaborate machinery.[95] Both in the textile and the iron industries the United States present examples of factory development more advanced even than those of England. Certain processes of warping and winding are done by machinery in America which are still done by hand labour in England.[96] The chain and nail-making trades, which employ large numbers of women in South Staffordshire and Worcestershire, are made more cheaply by machinery in America.[97] Moreover, the high standard of living and the greater skill of the American operatives enables them to tend more machines. In German factories a weaver tends two, or rarely three looms; in Lancashire women weavers undertake four, and in Massachusetts often six looms, and sometimes eight.[98]



Thus we see how the new industrial forces were determined in the order of their operation by the character and conditions of the several countries, their geographical position and physical resources, the elements of racial character, political and industrial institutions, deliberate economic policies, and, above all, by the absorbing nature of the military and political events contemporary with the outburst of inventive ingenuity. The composition of these forces determined the several lines of less resistance along which the new industry moved.

The exact measurement of so multiform a force is impossible. The appended tables and diagrams may, however, serve to indicate the progress of the several industrial nations as measured by (i.) development of railway and merchant shipping; (ii.) consumption of coal and iron; (iii.) application of steam-power; (iv.) estimated annual value of manufactures:—

I. COMPARATIVE MILEAGE OF RAILWAYS, 1840 TO 1890.

1840. 1850. 1860. 1870. 1880. 1890. United Kingdom 800 6,600 10,400 15,500 17,900 19,800 Continent of Europe 800 7,800 21,400 47,800 83,800 110,200 United States 2,800 9,000 30,600 53,400 93,600 156,000 India — — 800 4,800 9,300 16,000 Australia — — 200 1,200 5,400 10,100 Rest of the World — — 2,800 5,500 18,400 42,300

RAILWAY MILEAGE IN RELATION TO AREA AND POPULATION.

Density of Railway Population per Mileage Square Square Mile (1888). Area. Miles. (1890). United Kingdom 120,849 320 19,810 France 204,092 184 20,900 Germany 208,738 233 24,270 Russia 1,902,227 42 17,700 Austria 240,942 166 15,610 Italy 110,623 260 7,830 Spain 197,670 86 5,930 Portugal 34,038 136 1,190 Sweden 170,979 28 4,670 Norway 124,495 16 970 Denmark 15,289 133 1,220 Holland 12,648 350 1,700 Belgium 11,373 530 2,760 Switzerland 15,976 190 1,870 Greece 25,041 88 370 Turkey 65,909 73 900 U.S.A. (excluding Alaska and Indian territory) 1,175,550 21 156,080 Japan 145,655 274 910 India 964,992 229 15,250 Australia 3,030,771 1.20 10,140 Canada 3,315,647 1.45 12,700 Egypt (cultiv. area) 12,976 638 1,260











FOOTNOTES:

[58] Karl Marx, Capital, p. 367.

[59] Marx points out how in many of the most highly evolved machines the original tool survives, illustrating this from the original power-loom. (Capital, p. 368.)

[60] Cooke Taylor, History of the Factory System, p. 422.

[61] Cf. Babbage, p. 15.

[62] Burnley, Wool and Wool-combing, p. 417.

[63] Economy of Machinery, p. 6.

[64] Economy of Machinery, p. 39.

[65] Vide infra, p. 249.

[66] Scrivener, History of the Iron Trade, pp. 296, 297.

[67] Sir Lyon Playfair, North American Review, Nov. 1892.

[68] Der Grossbetrieb, p. 85.

[69] The important part which the cotton and iron industries play in the export trade of England entitles them to special consideration as representatives of world-industry. Out of L263,530,585 value of English exports in 1890, cotton comprised L74,430,749; iron and steel, L31,565,337.

[70] Cunningham, chap. ii. p. 450.

[71] Schulze-Gaevernitz, Der Grossbetrieb, p. 34.

[72] Ure, The Cotton Manufacture, p. 187.

[73] Modern economy now favours the specialisation of a factory and often of a business in a single group of processes—e.g., spinning or weaving or dyeing, both in the cotton and woollen industries. This, however, is applicable chiefly to the main branches of textile work. In minor branches, such as cotton thread, the tendency is still towards an aggregation of all the different processes under a single roof, both in England and in the United States.

[74] P.R. Hodge, civil engineer—evidence before House of Lords Committee in 1857.

In Germany a spinning-wheel had been long in use for flax-spinning, which in effect was an anticipation of the throstle (cf. Karmarch, Technologie, vol. ii. p. 844, quoted Schulze-Gaevernitz, p. 30), and machine-weaving is said to have been discovered in Danzig as early as 1579.

[75] Cf. Brentano, Uber die Ursachen der heutigen socialen Noth; Der Grossbetrieb, p. 30.

[76] Porter, Progress of the Nation, p. 219.

[77] Selected from Porter, p. 218.

[78] In 1824 Mr. Huskisson introduced the principle of free trade, securing a reduction of the duties on raw and thrown silks, and in 1825, 1826, considerable further reductions were made. (Cf. Ure, Philosophy of Manufactures, p. 454, etc.) But protection of English silk manufactured goods was maintained until the French Treaty of 1860.

[79] Cf. Ure, History of the Cotton Manufacture, vol. i. p. 223.

[80] Scrivener, History of the Iron Trade, p. 56.

[81] Cooke Taylor, Modern Factory System, p. 164; cf. also Karl Marx, Capital, p. 381.

[82] Schulze-Gaevernitz, p. 140.

[83] Yeats, The Growth and Vicissitudes of Commerce, p. 284.

[84] The average income for England in 1688 he puts at L7 18s; for Holland, L8 1s. 4d.; France, L6—p. 47. Such an estimate, however, has little value.

[85]

In 1810 the total produce was 140,000 tons. " 1818 " " " 114,000 " " 1824 " " " 164,000 "

(Scrivener, History of the Iron Trade, p. 153.)

[86] Yeats, Growth and Vicissitudes of Commerce, p. 285.

[87] Schulze-Gaevernitz, Der Grossbetrieb, p. 48.

[88] Ellison, History of the Cotton Trade, presents the following interesting table (yarn, 40 hanks to the lb.):—

1779. 1784. 1799. 1812. 1830. 1882. s. d. s. d. s. d. s. d. s. d. s. d.

Selling price 16 0 10 11 7 6 2 6 1 2-1/2 0 10-1/2 Cost of Cotton (18 oz.) 2 0 2 0 3 4 1 6 0 7-3/4 0 7-1/8 ——- ——- —— —— ———— ————- Labour & Capital 14 0 8 11 4 2 1 0 0 6-3/4 0 3-3/8

[89] Porter, Progress of the Nation, p. 13. Eighteenth century figures are, however, not trustworthy. The first census was in 1801.

[90] Ure, Philosophy of Manufactures, p. 531.

[91] Schulze-Gaevernitz, Der Grossbetrieb, p. 34.

[92] In 1882 42 per cent. of the German textile industry was still conducted in the home or domestic workshop, while only 38 per cent. was carried on in factories employing more than 50 persons. More weavers were still engaged with hand-looms than with power-looms, and the latter was so little developed that the hand-loom could still hold its own in many articles. Knitting, lace-making, and other minor textile industries are still in the main home industries.—(Social Peace, p. 113.) "While in England in 1885 each spinning or weaving mill had an average of 191 operatives, each spinning mill in Germany in 1882 employed an average of 10 persons only."—(Brentano, Hours, Wages, and Production, p. 64.)

[93] Ure, Philosophy of Manufactures, p. 515.

[94] Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 79.

[95] The highly elaborate American machine industry of watch-making is a striking example of this influence of high wages. Cf. Schulze-Gaevernitz, Social Peace, p. 125.

[96] Schoenhof, Economy of High Wages, p. 279.

[97] Ibid., pp. 225, 226.

[98] Schulze-Gaevernitz, p. 66 (note). This six and eight-loom weaving is, however, at a lower speed.



CHAPTER IV.

THE STRUCTURE OF MODERN INDUSTRY.

Sec. 1. Growing Size of the Business-Unit. Sec. 2. Relative Increase of Capital and Labour in the Business. Sec. 3. Increased Complexity and Integration of Business Structure. Sec. 4. Structure and Size of the Market for different Commodities. Sec. 5. Machinery a direct Agent in expanding Market Areas. Sec. 6. Expanded Time-area of the Market. Sec. 7. Interdependency of Markets. Sec. 8. Sympathetic and Antagonistic Relations between Trades. Sec. 9. National and Local Specialisation in Industry. Sec. 10. Influences determining Localisation of Industry under World-Competition. Sec. 11. Impossibility of Final Settlement of Industry. Sec. 12. Specialisation in Districts and Towns. Sec. 13. Specialisation within the Town.

Sec. 1. Turning once more to the unit of industry, the Business, and thence to the Trade and the Market, or area of competition, it is necessary to examine the structural and functional changes brought about by the action of the new industrial forces.

In considering the effect of modern machine-production upon the Business, the most obvious external change is a great increase in size. The typical unit of production is no longer a single family or a small group of persons working with a few cheap simple tools upon small quantities of material, but a compact and closely organised mass of labour composed of hundreds or thousands of individuals, co-operating with large quantities of expensive and intricate machinery, through which passes a continuous and mighty volume of raw material on its journey to the hands of the consuming public.

The expansion in mass of labour and capital composing the industrial unit does not, however, proceed at the same pace in the different industries.

The largest growths are found in two classes of industry. First, those which close dependence on monopoly of land, or other privilege conferred by state or municipal government, has placed outside competition. The size here is determined by that amount of capital required to achieve the most profitable equation of supply and demand prices under terms of monopoly.[99] In this class are placed such large businesses as railways, gas, or water companies. Second, those industries where the net advantages of large-scale production over small scale in competitive industry are greatest. Generally speaking, those industries where the most expensive machinery is employed come under this head, or where, as in banking and financial business, a large capital is managed more economically, and enjoys a monopoly of certain profitable kinds of work.

In retail trade, where neither of these forces is so powerfully operative, the increase in mass of capital and labour is not so great, though here too the economies of large-scale production are giving more and more prominence to the Universal Provider, and a large number of local shops are falling into the hands of companies. Large syndicates of capital at Smithfield are owning butchers' shops in most large towns, the drapery, jewellery, shoe trade are more and more passing into the hands of large companies, while an increased proportion of tobacconists, publicans, grocers, and other retailers are practically but agents of large capitalist firms. In such branches of agriculture as have lent themselves most effectively to new machinery the same movement is visible in the prevalence of large farming. This is seen everywhere where land is placed on the same property footing as other forms of capital. Though small farms are for some purposes still capable of yielding a large net as well as gross product, it is for the most part the legal, customary, and sentimental restrictions on free transfer of land that impede the tendency towards large farming.

It is, however, in the manufacturing and transport industries that we trace the most general and rapid growth of the unit of production. And here machinery is the chief external cause. Gigantic railways and steamship companies are the successors of stage coach businesses and small shippers. The size and value of the modern cotton factory, iron works, sugar refinery, or brewery are incomparably greater than the units of which these industries were composed a century and a half ago. In certain highly-machined industries the size of the unit is so enlarged that the number of businesses engaged in turning out the ever-growing output is actually diminishing. Among textile industries the spinning mills of England and Wales show a marked diminution in numbers between 1870 and 1890, while a similar movement in weaving mills is only retarded by the capacity of small sweating masters to compete with the more developed factories in certain minor branches, such as tape manufacture, and by the survival of the home worker owning his loom and hiring his power in such trades as the ribbon weaving of Coventry.[100]