The Factory

Part 1

Transcriber’s Note Italic text displayed as: italic

By Jonathan Thayer Lincoln

THE FACTORY. THE CITY OF THE DINNER-PAIL.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY BOSTON AND NEW YORK

THE FACTORY

THE FACTORY

BY JONATHAN THAYER LINCOLN

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1912

COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY JONATHAN THAYER LINCOLN

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published January 1912

TO MY FATHER

NOTE

This essay is based upon a course of lectures delivered before the Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance associated with Dartmouth College. These lectures were subsequently printed in The Mediator, a magazine published in Cleveland, Ohio, and devoted to establishing a better social understanding between the man who buys and the man who sells labor.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

In preparing the historical part of this essay I have consulted many authorities, and in particular I have made free use of the following works.

DEFOE, Daniel

A plan for the English Commerce, London, 1728.

BAINES, Edward

History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain. London, 1835.

GUEST, Richard

A Compendious History of the Cotton Manufacture. Manchester, 1823.

The Theory and Practice of Cotton Spinning. Glasgow, 1833.

URE, Andrew, M.D.

The Philosophy of Manufactures. London, 1835.

BABBAGE, Charles

On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. London, 1822.

CARLYLE, Thomas

Part 2

Essay on Chartism.

TAYLOR, Richard Whately Cooke-

The Modern Factory System. London, 1891.

ABRAM, Annie

Social England in the Fifteenth Century. London, 1909.

Among the many articles printed in the periodical press the following from the Quarterly Review are especially helpful.

Vol. XLI, 1829. Condition of the English Peasantry.

Vol. LVII, 1836. The Factory System.

Vol. LXVII, 1841. Infant Labour.

CONTENTS

I. The Industrial Revolution 3

II. Sir Richard Arkwright 16

III. Mechanical Inventions 30

IV. The Factory System 46

V. The Factory Towns 64

VI. Chartism 85

VII. The Factory and Social Progress 99

INTRODUCTION

As you approach the City of the Dinner Pail from the west, the blue waters of the harbor lie between you and the towering factories which line the opposite shore. By day the factories are not attractive to the eye, their massive granite walls, prison-like and unlovely, suggest only the sordid side of toil,—the long day’s confinement of twenty-seven thousand men and women amidst the monotonous roar of grinding wheels. But should you thus approach the city late on a winter afternoon the scene is marvelously changed; the myriad lights of the factories shine through the early darkness, transforming prison-walls into fairy palaces, castles of enchantment reflected with mysterious beauty in the deep waters of the bay. There is no suggestion now of sordid toil, the factory walls have become ramparts of light and speak of some romantic story.

Realism and romance lie very near together, and we shall find the factory, when we come to study the history of it, something more than granite walls and grinding machinery; the factory, indeed, has been an important instrument in the upward progress of mankind. There is an ugly side to the story, especially in the beginning, for when the craftsmen of the world were transformed into factory operatives, thousands suffered a degree of poverty never known before, and many perished in the transition to the new system of manufacturing; but in the end that system revolutionized the whole social order, gave to toil its rightful dignity, and, creating a new loyalty to the cause of labor, became an element in the development of modern democracy. It is this brighter side of the story that we have now to consider.

THE FACTORY

THE FACTORY

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

In the fifteenth century the wealth of England, which until then had been made up chiefly of raw products, was greatly increased by the introduction of manufactures, the most important being the making of cloth. Previous to this first extension of industry, it had been impossible for the toiler to rise out of his class except by becoming a priest or a soldier; but with the increase of manufactures wealth became a means of social advancement, and thus industry not only tended to break down the feudal order by tempting serfs away from their masters, but the wealth created by manufactures became an important element in the creation of the middle class.

The sudden and extensive introduction of machinery at the close of the eighteenth century drove hand labor out of employment, and, for a time, caused great suffering among the masses; but in the end it created an ever increasing demand for labor—a new labor more skillful than the old. Moreover, it concentrated the laboring population in great centres of industry, thus creating a class consciousness which demanded that attention should be given to the rights of labor, created a new ideal of the dignity of toil and gave to the world that vision of the inclusive cause of labor which was destined to advance in a marvelous way to the social progress of mankind.

Slavery had been abolished in England long before the Industrial Revolution, and yet, in the first quarter of the last century men in chains worked in the British coal-mines and were bought and sold when the property changed hands. For generations before the Industrial Revolution, the lord of the manor had ceased to demand the labor of the villein as his due, but while serfdom had been abolished, the traditions of it still remained; and it was not until the establishment of the factory that labor became free in fact as for generations it had been in name.

The historical event, that great movement which led in our generation to a complete reconstruction of the social order, we call the “Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century.” It was an extremely complex event, originating in economic, political, and social conditions; but while it was the consequence of many causes, it derived its chief influence in the beginning from a series of remarkable inventions in the art of making textile fabrics.

This art is as old as civilization, originating when men, advancing from barbarism, put aside the skins of beasts for raiment of their own making; but from the days of the first rude distaff and the simple bamboo loom until the time so recently past when, by a series of the most brilliant inventions known to any craft, the art was revolutionized, the implements remained unchanged. Up to the year 1769 the machines in use in the manufacture of cotton cloth in England were practically the same as those which for centuries had been employed in India. There were no factories as there are to-day: the cotton was spun and woven into cloth by hand, and both the spinning and the weaving were done in the cottages of the craftsmen.

Part 3

The first of these inventions was a simple one, but it made necessary all that followed. From the beginning of the art, one man could weave into cloth all the yarn that several spinners could produce. Indeed, it was seldom that a weaver’s family, his wife and children all working at the spinning wheel, could supply sufficient weft for his loom; and this difficulty was increased by the invention of the fly-shuttle in the year 1738. This invention, made by John Kay, consisted in giving motion to the shuttle by a mechanical device which saved time and exertion to the weaver and nearly doubled the daily product of his loom. The increased demand for yarn led to many experiments, and at last a machine was produced upon which many threads could be spun by a single pair of hands: the water frame commonly attributed to Richard Arkwright. With this important invention came many others in the same field, making famous the names of Hargreaves, Crompton, and Cartwright.

The moment it became possible to accomplish by machinery what formerly had been done entirely by hand, the first effect was to increase the productive power of the workman and thus to add vastly to the wealth of the nation, and secondly, to gather into the factories the craftsmen who had formerly worked in their homes.

In the beginning of the eighteenth century the textile manufacturing of England was carried on by craftsmen dwelling in the rural districts, the master clothiers living in the greater towns, sending out wool to be spun into yarn which, returned to them prepared for the loom, was re-distributed among other hand workers in other cottages. The Lancashire weaver worked in his cottage surrounded by a bit of land, and generally combined small farming with domestic manufacturing. Sometimes a single family performed all the labor, the wife and daughters working at carding and spinning, the father operating the loom; sometimes other craftsmen joined the household and worked as members of one family. The extent of mercantile establishments and the modes of doing business were very different from what they were soon to become. It is quite true that a limited number of individuals had, in previous ages, made fortunes by trade, but until the very end of the seventeenth century the capital in the hands of British merchants was small. Because of the bad condition of the roads and the lack of inland navigation, goods were conveyed by pack horses with which the Manchester chapmen traveled through the principal towns, selling their goods to the shopkeepers, or at the public fairs, and bringing back sheep’s wool to be sold to the clothiers of the manufacturing districts.

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