INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. It Will suffice at this place to describe it as that great economic trans formation which introduced the mechanical era of manufacturing and the improited motive power for transportation and the communica tion of intelligence, together with the great social, political and intellectual changes which accompanied the economic transition. The effects of the Industrial Revolution amount in their totality to modern civilization, but only a few of the more generally recognized re sults can be mentioned here. Througl. the in troduction of machinery, the minute divi sion of labor and the specialization of indus trial processes there resulted a vast increase in the volume of commodities produced for sale and a great consequent expansion of com merce, leading to that search for new markets which constitutes the connecting link between the Industrial Revolution and the development of modern national imperialism. The factory system necessitated the congregation of work men into the new industrial cities which now sprang up for the first time and supplanted the agrarian age. The bourgeoisie were greatly increased in numbers and wealth, and evolved into a distinct capitalistic class. A sharp distinc tion now arose between capitalist and laborer, and social and economic relationships passed, as Professor Burgess has pointed out, from a personal to an impersonal basis. The laborer became progressively more and more dependent upon the capitalist and the problem of unem ployment became much more serious. Women and children were introduced as laborers in the new factories to their moral degradation and physical deterioration. The division of in dustrial processes into minute stages made it impossible for the workman to complete the manufacture of any commodity and thereby lessened• his interest in its production and created a psychological burden which had hith erto been foreign to industrial processes. The machine technology, as Professor -Veblen has explained, brought a psychic and cultural standardization correlated with the mechanical processes of the new order. In the large, however, the Industrial Revolution meant, as Professor Shotwell has insisted, a transition from an agrarian civilization based on isolation, repetition and stability to the modern order founded upon a dynamic industrialism and the development of world-wide relationships. It has constituted far the greatest transformation in the history of humanity and has produced at least a material progress more notable than the race had yet achieved from its beginnings down to the close of the 18th century.
It was inevitable that so fundamental and sweeping a transformation as this should bring great hardship upon those who suffered most from the transition. Had the proletariat been able to support itself by handicraft trades and by petty agricultural operations their lot would not have been so hard, but at the very time when the mechanical inventions were making handicraft competition impossible an agrarian revolution was taking place in England which ousted the peasantry from their agrarian hold ings. The new merchant princes, desirous of attaining the social prestige of the ancient landed nobility and encouraged by the new agricultural methods which had been intro duced by Tull, Townshend and Bakewell, pro ceeded in the period from 1760 to 1840 to buy up most of the land of England for great estates. The peasantry were bought out or evicted and were compelled to take refuge in the new industrial cities, where they became the helpless victims of the avarice and greed of the parvenu capitalist manufacturer. Those
who remained in the country and tried to com pete with mechanical industry or large-scale agriculture met a fate not less severe than that of those who migrated to the cities. In the cities the great surplus of laborers made wages low and unemployment frequent. The possibility of utilizing the labor of women and children reduced the wages paid to adult males or led to their discharge. All —men, women and children — worked at monotonous labor during excessively long days for starvation wages in dangerous and unsanitary shops amid moral conditions even more deplorable. At night they were herded into cheaply built tene ments even less healthy than the shops. As one writer has expressed it, they °lived the life of a machine while working and at other times that of a beast)) The chimneys of factories and dwellings were swept by very small children under conditions which meant the permanent distortion and dwarfing of their bodies and serious diseases of the respiratory tract, if they were not fortunate enough to meet an early death. In the mines conditions were, if anything, worse than in the factories. Women and small children, as well as men, worked in damp and dark underground pas sages amid vermin and filth for long hours at a stretch at the most severe type of physical labor for a pittance. Whatever one may think of their remedies, there is no doubt that the socialistic analysts of these conditions, such as Marx and Engels, have drawn an accurate pic ture of the horrors of the social conditions during the first stages of the Industrial Revolu tion. It would scarcely be possible to exag gerate them. One must not, however, forget to give due recognition to these early capitalists for their part in building up the industrial civilization of the modern age, probably the greatest achievement of human genius, even though it threatens at times to develop into a Frankenstein. Further, it is not necessary to assume that all of these early capitalists were fiends to allow such conditions to exist among the working classes. They were usually in little personal contact with conditions and the old business ethics that had governed the gild and domestic systems were wholly inadequate for the new circumstances, while no new sys tem of industrial morality had yet evolved. Nevertheless, it must be remembered that the conditions in the business establishments in the early stages of modern industrialism re sembled what Hobbes imagined the life of man in the state of nature to be, 'and it is, there fore, not surprising that these evils produced a literature of protest and reform which was un precedented in volume and variety.
The proletariat found it impossible to help themselves out of the serious oppression to which they had succumbed. In no important country in Europe did they exercise the right of suffrage permanently before 1848, and they played an insignificant part in politics until the last quarter of the 19th century. Labor organizations were forbidden entirely or penalized by unfavorable legislation. Violent opposition to the existing order was made well nigh impossible by the savage criminal codes of the time which reached their worst form in England where nearly 300 capital crimes were enumerated. Any far-sighted program of self-improvement by the laboring classes through education and enlightenment was impossible of realization, for no comprehen sive system of free public education existed in Europe except in Prussia, which was not vitally affected by the Industrial Revolution until the decade following 1870.