The Industrial Revolution.— Here it is needful to interrupt the political survey to trace a vast economic movement. While France had been giving the world her great social and polit ical revolution with noise and blood, in Eng land an even greater °industrial had been brought by, humble workers busied in homely toil, puzzling day after day over wheels and belts and levers, seeking some way to save time. In the days of Voltaire and George Washington men raised grain and wove cloth and carried spare products to market in the same way in which these things had been done for 4,000 years. The farmer with strenuous toil scratched the soil with a clumsy wooden plow, not unlike those pictured on Egyptian monuments 6,000 years ago. He had no other machine for horses to draw except a rude harrow and a cart. He sowed his grain by hand, cut it with the sickle of Tubal Cain and threshed it with the prehistoric flail. Car penter's tools differed little in number or style from a set, 4,000 years old, recently found in Crete. The 17th century had seen the invention of sawmills driven by water (like the still earlier grist mills) ; but these only cut logs into rough boards; all planing and dressing of lumber was still hand work. Merchandise was still carried on pack horses or mules; and travel was mainly on horseback, though slow six horse coaches toiled along on a few main roads, at perhaps four miles an hour. No woman had ever cooked by a stove. Household lights were dim, ill-smelling candles or smoky and flaring torches. If a householder carelessly let his hearth fire go out, he borrowed live coals from a neighbor or struck sparks into tinder with flint and steel. If a leg was to be amputated, the agony had to be borne without the merciful aid of anaesthetics. The few cities were still small and mediaeval, without water supply, sewerage disposal or regular police protection. London was the only town in Europe that boasted lamp posts.
The first improvements came in agriculture. By the middle of the 18th century English land lords were introducing a scientific crop rota tion — which then brought with it a helpful circle of gains—larger crops, more stock, richer soil. The increase in farm products, to gether with the new interest in agriculture, led, about the beginning of the next century, to the invention of the cast-iron plow, the cradle-scythe and the threshing machine. Even sooner it led to better facilities for transporta tion,— turnpikes, macadamized roads and lock canals.
The main change that was to revolutionize working society, however, cane not in farming but in cloth manufactures. In the 17th century the primitive distaff for drawing the fibre of flax or wool into thread had been replaced by the wheel, run first by hand, but afterward by the foot of the spinner. But the spinning wheel spun only one thread at a time, and one weaver with his clumsy hand-loom could weave into cloth all the thread eight spinners could supply. In 1761 the English Royal Society for the En couragement of Manufactures offered a prize for an invention for swifter spinning. Then in
swift succession, Hargreaves' *Jenny* (1764), Arkwright's "Water Frame* (1771) and Crompton's (1779) enabled one spinner to spin 200 threads at a time. The weavers still using the hand loom older than any records of history could not keep up with this until (1784) Cartwright invented a power loom whose shuttle automatically threw the wool back and forth through the warp. After that, both spinners and weavers needed more raw ma terial. This need was met in America after Whitney's Cotton Gin (1793) made it possible for one slave to clean as much cotton fibre from seed as 300 slaves could clean before. To use the vastly increased supply of cotton there was needed a better motive power for manufacturing machinery, and by 1785 Watt's improvements on the pumping steam engine had produced an engine that worked swiftly and economically, and which could transmit its power to wheels by an arrangement of shafts and cranks. By 1800 there were more steam-engines in England than water wheels, and the age of steam and iron had begun for that country. Since prehistoric man found ways to make fire and bake pots, and make spindles, and extract iron from the ore, there had been no change in man's work and life comparable to this tremendous change in the last quarter of the 18th century.
The English inventions were soon known in America, but they came into common use there only when the War of 1812 forced Americans for a time to manufacture all their cloth. In 1800 that country had only four steam-engines, and its four small cotton mills were run by water wheels. From the continent of Europe, too, the new age was shut out for some years by Napoleon's "continental system)); and it did not really establish itself there, even in indus trial and progressive France, until about 1830. The problems of the new system had to be met first in England.
With machinery and steam, one worker was soon producing more wealth than hundreds had produced by the old hand processes. Part of the marvelous increase went to the common gain, in lower prices, but to multitudes of the 'workers the industrial revolution meant not higher life but lower life. This was not the fault of Hargreaves and Watt; the fault lay in the imperfect organization of society. The inventors had swept away the cumbrous and outgrown *Domestic' system of manufactures for an efficient and economical "Factory' sys tem. But the new machinery was costly. Workmen could not own it as they had owned their spinning wheels and looms; nor did they know how to combine so as to own it in groups. And so far-sighted individuals of wealth built huge factories, story on story, filled them with the new machinery, furnished the raw material, paid wages to hired "hands' and took to them selves the bulk of the new wealth. The new factory system became also a capitalist system and a wage system.