IVTHE FACTORY SYSTEM
When the cotton manufacture was in its infancy, all the operations, from dressing the raw material to folding the finished fabric, were completed under the roof of the weaver’s cottage. With Arkwright’s invention it became the custom to spin the yarn in factories and weave it by hand in cottages. With the invention of the power loom, it again became the practice to perform all the processes in a single building.
The weaver’s cottage, then, with its rude apparatus of peg warping, hand cards, spinning-wheels, and wooden looms, was the steam factory in miniature; but the amount of labor performed in a single factory was as great as that which formerly gave occupationto the inhabitants of an entire district. A good hand-loom weaver could produce two pieces of shirtings each week; by 1823, a power-loom weaver produced seven such pieces in the same time.
A factory containing two hundred looms was operated by one hundred persons who wove seven hundred pieces a week, and it was estimated that under the domestic system at least eight hundred and seventy-five looms would have been required to weave this amount of cloth, because the women of the household had their home duties to perform while the men were required to devote a considerable portion of their time to farming. It was therefore further estimated that the work done in a steam factory containing two hundred looms would, if performed by hand, give employment and support to a population of more than two thousand persons. It is interesting here to note, that, whereas a hand-loom weaver could produce two pieces of shirtingsa week, an ordinary weaver is now able to turn off eight or ten pieces of equal length every ten hours; so that a modern weave room containing two hundred power looms operated by twenty-five weavers represents the labor of a community of sixty thousand craftsmen, their wives and their children. A population of thirty million would be required to perform by hand the work now produced by the Fall River factories alone.
“Watt,” said a celebrated French engineer, “improves the steam engine, and this single improvement causes the industry of England to make an immense stride. This machine, at the present time [about 1830], represents the power of three hundred thousand horses or of two million men, strong and well fitted for labor, who should work night and day without an interruption and without repose.... A hairdresser invents, or at least brings into action, a machine for spinning cotton; thisalone gives the British industry immense superiority. Fifty years only, after this great discovery, more than one million of the inhabitants of England are employed in those operations which depend, directly or indirectly, on the action of this machine. Lastly, England exports cotton, spun and woven by an admirable system of machinery, to the value of four hundred million francs yearly.... The British navigator travels in quest of the cotton of India, brings it from a distance of four thousand leagues, commits it to an operation of the machines of Arkwright, carries back their products to the East, making them again to travel four thousand leagues, and in spite of the loss of time—in spite of the enormous expense incurred by this voyage of eight thousand leagues, the cotton manufactured by the machinery of England becomes less costly than the cotton of India, spun and woven by hand near the field that produced it, and sold at the nearestmarket. So great is the power of the progress of machinery.”
Two distinct systems of production preceded the factory. First, the system of isolated handicraft labor, and second, the system of cottage industry, which we have already considered and in which the several members of a family participated,—this, too, was handicraft. The craftsman, as we have seen, worked with his family in his own cottage; he owned his loom and the other simple machinery necessary for the production of cloth, and either he owned his raw material or received it from the master manufacturer to be returned in the form of finished fabric. But in either case, the craftsman was his own master and sold cloth not labor.
With the establishment of the factory, these conditions were completely changed. The master manufacturer not only owned the factory building and the machinery, but he owned the raw material. Moreoverto him the operative sold his labor which thereby became a commodity quite as completely as the cotton he wove into cloth. This latter circumstance is important because it became the source of the vast social discontent which, in the end, aided powerfully in revolutionizing the structure of British society.
To the consideration of this event we shall soon return. For the moment we must consider briefly the most characteristic distinction in the process of manufacture under the new system—the extension of the principle of division of labor.
The principle itself was in no wise new, for the first application of it was made in a very early stage in the evolution of society. At the very dawn of civilization it must have become apparent that more comforts and conveniences could be acquired by one man restricting his occupation to a single craft—and the development of independent arts was in itself a division oflabor. The same principle was then carried into the different trades, and at last we find it fully developed in the cottage system of industry. Thus we find carding, spinning, and weaving carried on by separate members of the family. Carding and spinning, which required less bodily strength, was performed by the women, while the more laborious work of weaving was given over to the men. With the establishment of the factory and the introduction of machinery, means were supplied by which this system could attain its highest development.
The advantages resulting from the division of labor are evident. When the whole work in any art is executed by one person, that person must possess sufficient skill to perform the most difficult, and sufficient strength to perform the most laborious, of the processes; but by employing a division of labor several persons may be kept at work executing that part of the whole for which he is best fitted.
The further advantages may be most briefly stated in the familiar words of Adam Smith: “The great increase in the quantity of work, which, in consequence of the division of labor, the same number of people are capable of performing, is owing to three different circumstances: first, to the increase of dexterity in every particular workingman; secondly, to the saving of time, which is commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another, and, lastly, to the invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labor and enable one man to do the work of many.”
It should be noted that the factory was, in the beginning, not the creation of capital, but of labor. The early master manufacturers were risen workingmen. Sir Richard Arkwright, the creator of the factory, the man who dominated industrial activities in the first great period of expansion, was a penny barber; but he died a Knight Bachelor with an income greater than thatof many a prince. The process of social elevation by means of trade began back in the fifteenth century with the first extension of manufactures. By the beginning of the eighteenth century it was possible to name five hundred great estates within a hundred miles of London, which, at no remote time, had been possessions of the ancient English gentry, but had later been bought up by tradesmen and manufacturers. The ancestors of these new landed proprietors had been, less than three hundred years before, not soldiers, but serfs.
Moreover, generations before the establishment of the factory, important towns had been raised by manufactures—towns of which Manchester and Birmingham were examples, in which there were few or no families of the gentry, yet which were full of families richer by far than many a noble house. And side by side with this process of tradesmen rising to the gentry had gone the other process of declining gentryplacing their sons in trade. So, as Defoe pithily said, “Tradesmen became gentlemen by gentlemen becoming tradesmen.”
The successful artisan under the domestic system became in time master clothier, and when the factory became the means of further increase to their fortunes the capital which this class had already amassed was utilized in building mills and machinery. To this class belonged the grandfather of Sir Robert Peel, a resident of Blackburn, who supported himself from the profits of a farm in the neighborhood and devoted his spare time to mechanical experiments. From this he came to operate a print-works, and later commenced the manufacture of cloth.
His son, the first Sir Robert,—the father of the Prime Minister,—was apprenticed to the trade and came to manhood at the time when the impulse given to manufactures in England, through the introduction of machinery, led to a more rapidaccumulation of wealth than had been known in any previous period of history. It is said that in his youth Robert Peel entertained a presentiment that he would become the founder of a family. By means of the factory, he amassed a fortune, was raised to the honor of knighthood, and realized his presentiment—for in the next generation no name is more famous in the annals of government than that of Sir Robert Peel, the grandson of a domestic manufacturer.
As the number of factories increased it became possible for operatives to rise, first to positions of trust within the factory, and later to the rank of master manufacturer—so that many a bobbin boy became a cotton lord.
Within the factory the effect was to intensify that spirit of discontent which presently arose among the workers—for risen workingmen are apt to prove the hardest task masters. A graphic picture of this aspect of factory life as it existed inManchester in the first half of the last century, when discontent had become articulate and the great Chartist movement reached its height is to be found in Dickens’sHard Times. In that story Josiah Bounderby of Coketown is typical of this class of risen workingmen—the early employers of labor under the factory system; Josiah Bounderby, who learnt his letters from the outside of shops and was first able to tell time from studying the steeple clock at St. Giles’s Church, London; Josiah Bounderby, vagabond, errand boy, laborer, porter, clerk, chief manager, small partner, merchant, banker, manufacturer. There was very little in the training of Josiah Bounderby, or any of his class to make them humane employers of labor—and among the several causes which made the early relation of employer and employee under the factory system one of bitter strife, this cause, so strictly social in its origin, is one of the most important.
The establishment of the factory altered completely the relation between employer and employee. Indeed in the modern sense these relations were then first established. Labor became a commodity which the master manufacturer, who was also the capitalist, bought and which the workingman sold. When in the year 1785 Arkwright’s patents were set aside and the use of his perfected spinning machinery became free to all manufacturers, a great extension of the cotton industry followed. Factories were built throughout Lancashire and about these factories important cities sprang up in which the modern problem of the relation of employer and employee had its beginning.
The factory produced cloth more cheaply and in far greater quantity than was possible under the domestic system. Hand workers sought employment in the factories. Vast numbers of purely agricultural laborers left the rural districts for the manufacturingtowns. And, augmenting this great supply of labor, came thousands of children—for an eight-year-old child was capable of operating a spinning-frame, in which, for this very reason, the spindles were set near to the floor. With an unlimited supply of labor, the cotton masters had only the cost of production to consider, and so it came about that they thought only of their profits and forgot the human hands which operated the machinery. England had fallen under the sway of a book—Adam Smith’sWealth of Nations, which, as Southey said, “considers man as a manufacturing animal, estimating his importance not by the goodness and knowledge he possesses, not by his virtues and charities, not by the happiness of which he may be the source and centre, not by the duties to which he is called, not by the immortal destinies for which he is created, but by the gain that may be extracted from him or of which he may be made the instrument.”
The crowding of this vast laboring population into great industrial centres, however, gave rise to a class-consciousness which demanded that attention should be paid to the human element which distinguished labor from all other commodities, demanded that the cotton masters should no longer regard the workingman as a slave, or as merely a part of the machine, but as a free man, and which demanded further that this free man should be recognized as a citizen and given the right of suffrage.
It would be interesting for us to follow the history of the factory where we now leave it, firmly established as the cornerstone of Great Britain’s wealth, down to the present time, and trace its development not only in England and America but throughout the civilized world. It is a surprising story of industrial progress, an important chapter in the social progress of mankind. But enough has already been saidto prepare us for the consideration of the way in which the establishment of the factory affected England’s laboring poor. The actual development of the cotton industry surpasses any dream that even the barber of Preston could have imagined when he exclaimed that he, unaided, would pay the national debt.
Less than a century and a half ago, Richard Arkwright built his first little mill at Nottingham which gave employment to a dozen operatives. To-day there are one hundred great cotton factories in the city of Fall River alone, operating three and one half million spindles, nearly one hundred thousand looms, and giving employment to twenty-seven thousand operatives. There are more than twenty-five million spindles in daily operation in the United States, and even a greater number on the continent of Europe, while Great Britain contains over fifty million; and when to these we add the spindles of India, Japan, and China, wehave a total of one hundred and twenty million spindles giving employment to an army of workers as great as the entire population of England when Arkwright took out his patents for spinning by rollers. Nor is this all. The factory system first applied to the cotton industry has been applied to all manufactures as well as to agriculture and has become the central fact in modern industrial life.
We are now to take up the question of how the establishment of the factory affected England’s laboring poor, and to study a little more in detail the social effects of the Industrial Revolution. In preparing the way for this discussion we should remember that the factory was not the sole cause of the Industrial Revolution, although it was a very important one. Other elements besides the introduction of machinery had gradually made possible production on a large scale. Chief among these was the decline of stateregulation of industry, the development of rationalism quickening the scientific spirit, the growth of the empire and prestige of England which opened great export markets for the goods of British manufacture, the extension of banking facilities, and the construction of roads and canals. All these were elements in producing the Industrial Revolution. But what gave the movement force to revolutionize the social life of the common people was the factory, which gathered great masses of the population into industrial centres in which became possible the development of class consciousness.