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.

In the writings of modern socialists we find the domestic system held up for admiration as the ideal method of production. The dreamers look back regretfully to the days when manufactures were combined with farming, and they quote from Goldsmith’s Deserted Village. Let us, however, turn to a more prosaic but more trustworthy account, which is to be found in Daniel Defoe’s Plan of the English Commerce. The author is writing enthusiastically in praise of English manufactures, and, having pointed out how in the unemployed counties women and children are seen idle and out of business, the women sitting at their doors, the children playing in the street, he continues: “Whereas, in the manufacturing counties, you see the wheel going almost at every door, the wool and yarn hanging up at every window; the looms, the winders, the combers, the carders, the dyers, the dressers all busy; and the very children as well as the women constantly employed ... indeed there is not a poor child in the town above the age of four but can earn his own bread.”

When we come to study the brutalizing social conditions which obtained in the manufacturing towns following the establishment of the factory, we shall do well to keep in mind these words written by an eighteenth century student in praise of the domestic system; when we hear the socialists declare that the factory created wage slavery, let us remember this earlier and more monstrous slavery.

Richard Arkwright, the inventor of the spinning-frame, was a man of great genius. Endowed with the inventive faculty, and even more with the ability to perfect the inventions of others, he possessed as well extraordinary executive ability, and having brought his spinning machinery to the point of practical efficiency, he organized the modern factory system as the means of obtaining the highest results from the new mechanisms. The spinning frame was too cumbersome to be operated in the cottage, and, moreover, it required a greater power to operate it than that of the human hand, so Arkwright built his first factory which was run by horse power, and from this beginning was evolved the factory as we know it to-day. But important as were the inventions in cotton manufacture, the factory would never have become the mighty power that it is, except for the steam engine; and it is interesting to note that in the same year in which Arkwright took out his patent for spinning by rollers, Watt invented his device for lessening the consumption of fuel in fire engines, that epoch-making invention by means of which the factory system as perfected by Arkwright was to become the material basis of modern life.

Like the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution was a movement destined to change the very course of human thought. Mechanical invention contributed to the force of the earlier movement—the invention of printing and of the mariner’s compass—so that side by side with the scholars restoring to the world its lost heritage of learning, craftsmen and sailors played their parts in printing the books by which the learning was disseminated, and in manning the ships that discovered new continents. The Renaissance, however, was essentially an intellectual movement to which mechanical invention was merely an aid, while the Industrial Revolution was due in an important measure to machinery. The movement began in the cotton industry, but soon a similar expansion occurred in all other manufactures. Machinery made possible a vast production; and the steam engine, first applied to manufacture, later became the means of distributing the commodities.

The Industrial Revolution, thus springing from the sudden growth in the use of machinery, occasioned not only economic but political and social results. On the economic side, the effect was to extend old industries and to create new ones, as well as to revolutionize the methods of the production and distribution of wealth. On the social side it created new classes of men, breaking down the barriers of ancient feudalism, and on the political side it led to the enfranchisement of the working classes. The Industrial Revolution accomplished for England what the political revolution did for France, but by more peaceful means. Yet not alone in France was the event achieved in blood—for the Factory as well as the Terror had its victims. The history of the factory is no dry summary of patent rights and inventions, inventories of cotton and cotton goods, abstracts of ledgers, journals, cash-books, and pay-rolls,—it is a human story,—laissez-faire, over-production, enlightened selfishness, were no abstract terms, but vital human problems.

Because the Industrial Revolution profoundly influenced the social and political life of England, and later of the whole world, the history of the factory, which contributed so much to its influence, becomes of vast importance. The first chapter relates to brilliant achievements in the field of mechanical invention. Then follows the dismal story of how a multitude of craftsmen were transformed into factory operatives—the untold suffering of oppressed workingmen. Later we see the English yeoman replaced by the master manufacturer who soon became a force in the political life of the nation, finding his way into Parliament and even into the Peerage. For the common people the revolution began with great suffering, but ended in opening new avenues for their social and political advancement. Antagonistic in the beginning to the welfare of the masses, it aided powerfully, in the end, the fulfillment of those ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity which at that moment had taken such a mighty hold upon the thoughts of men.

SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT

The Shaving of Shagpat, that remarkable allegory with the writing of which George Meredith commenced his literary career, has been given several interpretations; without seriously venturing another, it has seemed to me that this fanciful story deals with the chief events in the Industrial Revolution.

“So there was feasting in the hall and in the city, and over earth”: we read towards the end of the tale, “great pledging the sovereign of Barbers, who had mastered an event and become the benefactor of his craft and of his kind. ’Tis sure the race of Bagarags endured for many centuries, and his seed were the rulers of men, and the seal of their empire stamped on mighty wax the Tackle of Barbers.”

Shibli Bagarag,—could he not well have been Richard Arkwright, the barber, inventor of the spinning-frame, master of an event? In Shagpat the Clothier, we discover the smug and comfortable British aristocracy; in the Identical, that magic hair in Shagpat’s beard which gave him a position of power greater even than the King, we observe Feudal Privilege; the sword of Aklis, with the steel of which the Identical was cut, may well stand for the factory, a weapon gained after many trials by Arkwright, so that of him it might be written as it was of Shibli Bagarag: “Thou, even thou will be master of the event, so named in anecdotes, and histories, and records, to all succeeding generations.”

Richard Arkwright, who first saw the light of day at Preston on the 23d of December, 1732, was the youngest of thirteen children born to humble parents, and he grew to manhood without education, being barely able to read and write. At an early age he was apprenticed to a Preston barber and when he became a journeyman he established himself in the same business.

Fate was in a jesting mood when she decreed that the chief actor in that remarkable social drama, the Industrial Revolution, should be a penny barber; and we may wonder if the governing classes appreciated the irony, when twenty years later, in recognition of his genius, the barber was raised to the honor of knighthood and his lady privileged to walk before the wives of the untitled gentry.

Richard Arkwright, at the age of twenty-eight, was not content day after day to shave the stolid faces of lower class Englishmen, but, having gained a knowledge of a chemical process for dyeing human hair, he commenced to make wigs for upper class Englishmen—wigs dyed to suit any complexion. This occupation took him away from the barber’s chair and sent him traveling about the country. On such a tour in 1761, he met a lady in the city of Leigh,—Margaret Biggins was her name,—and he married her; and in the same city at a somewhat later date he heard of certain experiments which had been made by a man named High in constructing a machine for spinning yarn. He gained this secret from a clock-maker named Kay, with whom he afterwards formed a partnership, by getting Kay—so the gossips said—loquaciously drunk at a public-house. Concerning his wife, history has little to say except that she quarreled with him because of the interest he took in High’s machine; and commencing to make experiments on his own account he became so absorbed in his workshop that his lady, fearing that they might be thrown upon the parish for support, begged him to return to his razor, and because he refused smashed the first model of the spinning-machine and thus precipitated a tremendous family row.

Arkwright is commonly credited with the invention of spinning by rollers, but while to him is undoubtedly due the success of that invention he did not originate it. The inventor of that ingenious process was neither Arkwright nor High, but John Wyatt of Birmingham, who in 1738 took out a patent in the name of Lewis Paul. In 1741 or 1742 these two men set up in Birmingham a mill “turned by two asses walking around an axis,” and in which ten girls were employed; while later a larger mill containing two hundred and fifty spindles and giving employment to twenty-five operatives was built. Wyatt wrote a pamphlet entitled, A Systematic Essay on the Business of Spinning, in which he showed the great profits which would attend the establishment of a plant of three hundred spindles. Wyatt’s factory, however, did not prosper and it seems probable that his machinery also passed into the hands of Arkwright.

It was in the year 1767 that Hargreaves invented the spinning-jenny, and two years later Arkwright took out his patent claiming that he had “by great study and long application invented a new piece of machinery, never before found out, practiced or used, for the making of weft or yarn from cotton, flax, and wool; which would be of great utility to a great many manufacturers, as well as to His Majesty’s subjects in general, by employing a great number of poor people in working the said machinery and in making the said weft or yarn much superior in quality to any heretofore manufactured or made.” However lacking in originality this famous invention may have been, however great may have been the debt which Arkwright owed to Wyatt and Paul, to John Kay and to High, nevertheless, to him belongs all the credit of the first successful introduction of spinning by machinery.

Having obtained this patent, Arkwright found himself without the capital necessary for carrying out his plans; and he returned to his native city of Preston and there applied to a friend, Mr. John Smalley, a liquor merchant, for assistance. So reduced were his circumstances at this time that going to vote at a contested election, which occurred during his visit to Preston, his wardrobe was in so tattered a condition that a number of his friends advanced the money to purchase decent clothes in which he might appear in the poll-room; and once during this period he having applied for pecuniary aid to a Mr. Atherton, that gentleman refused to entertain Arkwright’s plan because of the rags in which the inventor was dressed.

It was in Preston, then, that Arkwright first fitted up his perfected spinning machine, in the parlor of a house belonging to the free grammar school. Here Arkwright successfully demonstrated the utility of his invention and first received financial support. In consequence of the riots which had taken place in the neighborhood of Blackburn on the invention of Hargreaves’s spinning-jenny, by which many of the machines were destroyed and the inventor driven from his native county to Nottingham, Arkwright and Smalley, fearing similar outrages, also went to Nottingham accompanied by John Kay, the loquacious clock-maker; so that Nottingham became the cradle of the two great inventions in cotton spinning. Here, Arkwright also applied for aid to the Messrs. Wright, Bankers, who made advances on the condition that they should share in the profits of the invention; but as the machine was not perfected as soon as they had hoped they withdrew their support and he turned to Mr. Samuel Need, a partner of Jedidiah Strutt, the inventor of the stocking frame. Strutt examined Arkwright’s mechanism, declared it to be an admirable invention, and the two men of wealth agreed to a partnership with the Preston barber; and a mill was erected at Nottingham.

It was an unpretentious establishment, that first little cotton mill; it gave employment to not more than a dozen operatives, and the machinery was turned not by a great steam engine, but by a pair of patient horses harnessed to a treadmill,—yet it contained the germ of the modern factory and the modern factory system. Later, Arkwright built another and larger factory at Cromford in Derbyshire, driven by water power—from which circumstance his spinning-machine came to be called the water-frame.

The cotton industry of England which Arkwright established developed slowly; in the five years, ending with 1775, the annual import of cotton into Great Britain was only four times the average import at the beginning of the century. But when in the year 1785 Arkwright’s patent was finally set aside and his spinning machinery became public property, a great extension of cotton manufacture followed, accompanied by a marvelous national prosperity. Arkwright, although deprived of his monopoly, was by this time so firmly established in the industry that he remained the dominant figure in the yarn market, fixing the price of the commodity for all other spinners; and thus he accumulated a great fortune.

While Arkwright was without doubt perfectly familiar with the experiments of both Wyatt and High, nevertheless it was the Preston barber and not the original inventors who first produced yarn fit for weaving. It is proverbial that inventors seldom reap the harvest of wealth which they sow; they are the dreamers and their reward is in beholding a perfected mechanism—their work of art. So it was with Wyatt and High. They dreamed of spindles turned by power and saw their spindles turn; but Arkwright dreamed of a nation made rich and powerful by these same inventions, and he, too, lived to see his dream come true.

Sir Richard Arkwright possessed all the qualities essential to success—tireless energy, enthusiasm, perseverance, and self-confidence. He believed in himself and so he compelled others to believe in him. His usual working day began at five o’clock in the morning and did not end until nine at night; when he was fifty years of age he lengthened this day by two hours, which he devoted to acquiring the education denied him in his youth. He had unbounded confidence in the success of his adventures and was accustomed to say that he would pay the national debt—an interesting circumstance, for surely by his genius the national debt was paid many times over.

In the year 1786 he was appointed high sheriff of Derbyshire, and when about that time the King narrowly escaped assassination at the hands of Margaret Nicholson, Arkwright, having presented an address of congratulation from his county to the King, received the honor of knighthood. He died on the 3d of August, 1792, at the age of sixty. The Annual Register recording that event says not so much as a single word concerning Arkwright’s masterful genius which even then had set in motion a mighty social revolution. It mentions only the great fortune which he had acquired as a manufacturer of cotton yarn,—so difficult it is for the critic to place a true value on the life work of a contemporary.

As you approach the City of the Dinner Pail from the west and gaze across the blue waters of the harbor, the eye rests upon the towering factories which line the opposite shore. Within those walls twenty-seven thousand men and women living in a degree of comfort never known before to the spinners and weavers of the world, earn their daily bread. Those towering factories are, every one, monuments to the genius of Richard Arkwright, the penny barber of Preston. If he appropriated the inventions of others, he perfected these inventions and made them of permanent value to mankind; and moreover, he arranged the machinery into series, organized the factory system, and revolutionized industry.

Says Carlyle: “Richard Arkwright, it would seem, was not a beautiful man; no romance hero with haughty eyes, Apollo lip, and gesture like the herald Mercury; a plain, almost gross, bag-cheeked, pot-bellied Lancashire man, with an air of painful reflection, yet also of copious free digestion;—a man stationed by the community to shave certain dusty beards in the northern parts of England at halfpenny each.... Nevertheless, in strapping razors, in lathering of dusty beards, and the contradictions and confusions attendant thereon the man had notions in that rough head of his; spindles, shuttles, wheels and contrivances plying ideally within the same, rather hopeless looking, which, however, he did at last bring to bear. Not without great difficulty! his townsfolk rose in mob against him, for threatening to shorten labor, to shorten wages; so that he had to fly, with broken wash pots, scattered household, and seek refuge elsewhere. Nay, his wife, too, rebelled; burned his wooden model of his spinning wheel; resolute that he should stick to his razors, rather;—for which, however, he decisively, as thou wilt rejoice to understand, packed her out of doors. Oh! reader, what a Historical Phenomenon is that bag-cheeked, pot-bellied, much-enduring, much-inventing barber! French revolutions were a-brewing, to resist the same in any measure, Imperial Kaisers were impotent without the cotton and cloth of England; and it was this man who gave to England the power of cotton.”

III