The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production
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Title: The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production
Author: J. A. Hobson
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* * * * *
_THE CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE SERIES._
EDITED BY HAVELOCK ELLIS.
EVOLUTION
OF MODERN CAPITALISM.
THE EVOLUTION
OF
MODERN CAPITALISM
A STUDY OF MACHINE PRODUCTION.
BY
JOHN A. HOBSON, M.A.,
AUTHOR OF "PROBLEMS OF POVERTY."
THE WALTER SCOTT PUBLISHING CO., LTD.,
PATERNOSTER SQUARE, LONDON, E.C.
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS,
153-157 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK.
1902.
PREFACE.
In seeking to express and illustrate some of the laws of the
structural changes in modern industry, I have chosen a focus of study
between the wider philosophic survey of treatises on Social Evolution
and the special studies of modern machine-industry contained in such
works as Babbage's _Economy of Manufactures_ and Ure's _Philosophy of
Manufactures_, or more recently in Professor Schulze-Gaevernitz's
careful study of the cotton industry. By using the term "evolution" I
have designed to mark the study as one of a subject-matter in process
of organic change, and I have sought to trace in it some of those
large movements which are characteristic of all natural growth.
The sub-title, _A Study of Machine-Production_, indicates a further
narrowing of the investigation. Selecting the operation of modern
machinery and motors for special attention, I have sought to enforce a
clearer recognition of organic unity, by dwelling upon the more
material aspects of industrial change which mark off the last century
and a half from all former industrial epochs. The position of central
importance thus assigned to machinery as a factor in industrial
evolution may be--to some extent must be--deceptive, but in bringing
scientific analysis to bear upon phenomena so complex and so
imperfectly explored, it is essential to select some single clearly
appreciable standpoint, even at the risk of failing to present the
full complexity of forces in their just but bewildering interaction.
In tracing through the Business, the Trade, and the Industrial
Organism the chief structural and functional changes which accompany
machine-development, I have not attempted to follow out the numerous
branches of social investigation which diverge from the main line of
inquiry. Two studies, however, of "the competitive system" in its
modern working are presented; one examining the process of
restriction, by which competition of capitals gives way to different
forms of combination; the other tracing in periodic Trade Depressions
the natural outcome of unrestricted competition in private capitalist
production.
In some final chapters I have sought to indicate the chief bearings of
the changes of industrial structure upon a few of the deeper issues of
social life, in particular upon the problem of the Industrial Town,
and the position of woman as an industrial competitor.
A portion of Chapters VIII., IX., and X. have already appeared in the
_Contemporary Review_ and in the _Political Science Quarterly Review_,
and I am indebted to the courtesy of the editors for permission to use
them.
I have also to acknowledge most gratefully the valuable assistance
rendered by Dr. William Smart of Glasgow University, who was kind
enough to read through the proofs of a large portion of this book, and
to make many serviceable corrections and suggestions.
JOHN A. HOBSON.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
Section.
1. Industrial Science, its Standpoint and Methods of Advance.
2. Capital as Factor in Modern Industrial Changes.
3. Place of Machinery in Evolution of Capitalism.
4. The Monetary Aspect of Industry.
5. The Literary Presentment of Organic Movement.
CHAPTER II.
THE STRUCTURE OF INDUSTRY BEFORE MACHINERY 10
1. Dimensions of International Commerce in early Eighteenth
Century.
2. Natural Barriers to International Trade.
3. Political, Pseudo-economic, and Economic Barriers--
Protective Theory and Practice.
4. Nature of International Trade.
5. Size, Structure, Relations of the several Industries.
6. Slight Extent of Local Specialisation.
7. Nature and Conditions of Specialised Industry.
8. Structure of the Market.
9. Combined Agriculture and Manufacture.
10. Relations between Processes in a Manufacture.
11. Structure of the Domestic Business: Early Stages of
Transition.
12. Beginnings of Concentrated Industry and the Factory.
13. Limitations in Size and Application of Capital--Merchant
Capitalism.
CHAPTER III.
THE ORDER OF DEVELOPMENT OF MACHINE INDUSTRY 44
1. A Machine differentiated from a Tool.
2. Machinery in Relation to the Character of Human Labour.
3. Contributions of Machinery to Productive Power.
4. Main Factors in Development of Machine Industry.
5. Importance of Cotton-trade in Machine Development.
6. History refutes the "Heroic" Theory of Invention.
7. Application of Machinery to other Textile Work.
8. Reverse order of Development in Iron Trades.
9. Leading Determinants in the General Application of
Machinery and Steam-Motor.
10. Order of Development of modern Industrial Methods in the
several Countries--Natural, Racial, Political, Economic.
CHAPTER IV.
THE STRUCTURE OF MODERN INDUSTRY 88
1. Growing Size of the Business-Unit.
2. Relative Increase of Capital and Labour in the Business.
3. Increased Complexity and Integration of Business
Structure.
4. Structure and Size of the Market for different
Commodities.
5. Machinery a direct Agent in expanding Market Areas.
6. Expanded Time-area of the Market.
7. Interdependency of Markets.
8. Sympathetic and Antagonistic Relations between Trades.
9. National and Local Specialisation in Industry.
10. Influences determining Localisation of Industry under
World-Competition.
11. Impossibility of Final Settlement of Industry.
12. Specialisation in Districts and Towns.
13. Specialisation within the Town.
CHAPTER V.
THE FORMATION OF MONOPOLIES IN CAPITAL 117
1. Productive Economies of the Large Business.
2. Competitive Economies of the Large Business.
3. Intenser Competition of the few Large Businesses.
4. Restraint of Competition and Limited Monopoly.
5. Facilities for maintaining Price-Lists in different
Industries.
6. Logical Outcome of Large-Scale Competition.
7. Different Species of "Combines."
8. Legal and Economic Nature of the "Trust."
9. Origin and _Modus Operandi_ of the Standard Oil Trust.
10. The Economic Strength of other Trusts.
11. Industrial Conditions favourable to "Monopoly"
CHAPTER VI.
ECONOMIC POWERS OF THE TRUST 143
1. Power of a Monopoly over earlier or later Processes in
Production of a Commodity.
2. Power over Actual or Potential Competitors.
3. Power over Employees of a Trust.
4. Power over Consumers.
5. Determinants of a Monopoly Price.
6. The Possibility of low Monopoly Prices.
7. Considerations of Elasticity of Demand limiting Prices.
8. Final Summary of Monopoly Prices.
CHAPTER VII.
MACHINERY AND INDUSTRIAL DEPRESSION 167
1. The external phenomena of Trade Depression.
2. Correctly described as Under-production and
Over-production.
3. Testimony to a general excess of Productive Power over the
requirement for Consumption.
4. The connection of modern Machine-production and Depression
shown by statistics of price.
5. Changing forms in which Over-supply of Capital is
embodied.
6. Summary of economic relation of Machinery to Depression.
7. Under-consumption as the root-evil.
8. Economic analysis of "Saving."
9. Saving requires increased Consumption in the future.
10. Quantitative relation of parts in the organism of
Industry.
11. Quantitative relation of Capital and Consumption.
12. Economic limits of Saving for a Community.
13. No limits to the possibility of individual Saving--Clash
of individual and social interests in Saving.
14. Objection that excess in forms of Capital would drive
interests to zero not valid.
15. Excess is in embodiments of Capital, not in real Capital.
16. Uncontrolled Machinery a source of fluctuation.
CHAPTER VIII.
MACHINERY AND DEMAND FOR LABOUR 220
1. The Influence of Machinery upon the number of Employed,
dependent on "elasticity of demand."
2. Measurement of direct effects on Employment in Staple
Manufactures.
3. Effects of Machinery in other Employments--The Evidence of
French Statistics.
4. Influence of Introduction of Machinery upon Regularity of
Employment.
5. Effects of "Unorganised" Machine-industry upon Regularity.
6. Different Ways in which modern Industry causes
Unemployment.
7. Summary of General Conclusions.
CHAPTER IX.
MACHINERY AND THE QUALITY OF LABOUR 244
1. Kinds of Labour which Machinery supersedes.
2. Influence of Machine-evolution upon intensity of physical
work.
3. Machinery and the length of the working day.
4. The Education of Working with Machinery.
5. The levelling tendency of Machinery--The subordination of
individual capacity in work.
CHAPTER X.
THE ECONOMY OF HIGH WAGES 261
1. The Economy of Low Wages.
2. Modifications of the Early Doctrine--Sir T. Brassey's
Evidence from Heavy Manual Work.
3. Wages, Hours, and Product in Machine-industry.
4. A General Application of the Economy of High Wages and
Short Hours inadmissible.
5. Mutual Determination of Conditions of Employment and
Productivity.
6. Compressibility of Labour and Intensification of Effort.
7. Effective Consumption dependent upon Spare Energy of the
Worker.
8. Growth of Machinery in relation to Standard of Comfort.
9. Economy of High Wages dependent upon Consumption.
CHAPTER XI.
SOME EFFECTS OF MODERN INDUSTRY UPON THE WORKERS AS CONSUMERS 285
1. How far the different Working Classes gain from the Fall
of Prices.
2. Part of the Economy of Machine-production compensated by
the growing Work of Distribution.
3. The Lowest Class of Workers gains least from
Machine-production.
CHAPTER XII.
WOMEN IN MODERN INDUSTRY 290
1. Growing Employment of Women in Manufacture.
2. Machinery favours Employment of Women.
3. Wages of Women lower than of Men.
4. Causes of Lower Wages for Women.
5. Smaller Productivity or Efficiency of Women's Labour.
6. Factors enlarging the scope of Women's Wage-work.
7. "Minimum Wage" lower for Women--Her Labour often
subsidised from other sources.
8. Woman's Contribution to the Family Wages--Effect of
Woman's Work upon Man's Wages.
9. Tendency of Woman's Wage to low uniform level.
10. Custom and Competition as determinants of Low Wages.
11. Lack of Organisation among Women--Effect on Wages.
12. Over-supply of Labour in Women's Employments the
root-evil.
13. Low Wages the chief cause of alleged Low "Value" of
Woman's Work.
14. Industrial Position of Woman analogous to that of
Low-skilled Men.
15. Damage to Home-life arising from Women's Wage-work.
CHAPTER XIII.
MACHINERY AND THE MODERN TOWN 324
1. The Modern Industrial Town as a Machine-product.
2. Growth of Town as compared with Rural Population in the
Old and New Worlds.
3. Limits imposed upon the Townward Movement by the Economic
Conditions of World-industry.
4. Effect of increasing Town-life upon Mortality.
5. The impaired quality of Physical Life in Towns.
6. The Intellectual Education of Town-life.
7. The Moral Education of Town-life.
8. Economic Forces making for Decentralisation.
9. Desirability of Public Control of Transport Services to
effect Decentralisation.
10. Long Hours and Insecurity of Work as Obstacles to
Reforms.
11. The Principle of Internal Reform of Town-life.
CHAPTER XIV.
CIVILISATION AND INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT 350
1. Imperfect Adjustment of Industrial Structure to its
Environment.
2. Reform upon the Basis of Private Enterprise and Free
Trade.
3. Freedom and Transparency of Industry powerless to cure the
deeper Industrial Maladies.
4. Beginnings of Public Control of Machine-production.
5. Passage of Industries into a public Non-competitive
Condition.
6. The _raison d'etre_ of Progressive Collectivism.
7. Collectivism follows the line of Monopoly.
8. Cases of "Arrested Development:" the Sweating Trades.
9. Retardation of rate of Progress in Collective Industries.
10. Will Official Machine-work absorb an Increasing
Proportion of Energy?
11. Improved Quality of Consumption the Condition of Social
Progress.
12. The Highest Division of Labour between Machinery and Art.
13. Qualitative Consumption defeats the Law of Decreasing
Returns.
14. Freedom of Art from Limitations of Matter.
15. Machinery and Art in production of Intellectual Wealth.
16. Reformed Consumption abolishes Anti-Social Competition.
17. Life itself must become Qualitative.
18. Organic Relations between Production and Consumption.
19. Summary of Progress towards a Coherent Industrial
Organism.
INDEX 385
THE EVOLUTION OF MODERN CAPITALISM.
THE EVOLUTION OF MODERN CAPITALISM.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
Sec. 1. _Industrial Science, its Standpoint and Methods of Advance._
Sec. 2. _Capital as Factor in Modern Industrial Changes._
Sec. 3. _Place of Machinery in Evolution of Capitalism._
Sec. 4. _The Monetary Aspect of Industry._
Sec. 5. _The Literary Presentment of Organic Movement._
Sec. 1. Science is ever becoming more and more historical in the sense
that it becomes more studiously anxious to show that the laws or
principles with whose exposition it is concerned not merely are
rightly derived from observation of phenomena but cover the whole
range of these phenomena in the explanation they afford. So likewise
History is ever becoming more scientific in the sense that facts or
phenomena are so ordered in their setting as to give prominence to the
ideas or principles which appear to relate them and of which they are
the outward expression. Thus the old sharp line, of distinction has
slipped away, and we see there is no ultimate barrier between a study
of facts and a study of the laws or principles which dominate these
facts. In this way the severance of History and Science becomes less
logically justifiable. Yet it is still convenient that we should say
of one branch of study that it is historical in the sense that it is
directly and consciously engaged in the collection and clear
expression of facts or phenomena as they stand objectively in place or
time without any conscious reference to the laws which relate or
explain them; of another branch of study that it is scientific because
it is engaged in the discovery, formulation, and correct expression of
the laws according to which facts are related, without affecting to
give a full presentment of those facts. The treatment in this book
belongs in this sense to economic science rather than to industrial
history as being an endeavour to discover and interpret the laws of
the movement of industrial forces during the period of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.
It cannot, however, be pretended that any high degree of exactitude
can attach to such a scientific study.
Two chief difficulties beset any attempt to explain industrial
phenomena by tracing the laws of the action of the forces manifested
in them. The first is that only a limited proportion of the phenomena
which at any given time constitute Industry are clearly and definitely
ascertainable, and it may always be possible that the laws which
satisfactorily explain the statical and dynamical relations of these
may be subordinate or even counteracting forces of larger movements
whose dominance would appear if all parts of the industrial whole were
equally known.
The second difficulty, closely related to the first, is the inherent
complexity of Industry, the continual and close interaction of a
number of phenomena whose exact size and relative importance is
continually shifting and baffles the keenest observer.
These difficulties, common to all sciences, are enhanced in
sociological sciences by the impossibility of adequate experiment in
specially prepared environments.
The degree of exactitude attainable in industrial sciences may thus
appear to be limited by the development of statistical inquiry. Since
the collection of accurate statistics, even on those matters which are
most important, and which lend themselves most easily to statistical
description, is a modern acquirement which has not yet widely spread
over the whole world, while the capacity for classifying and making
right use of statistics is still rarer, it is held by some that in a
study where so much depends upon accurate statements of quantity
little advance is at present possible.
And it is, of course, true that until the advance of organised
curiosity has provided us with a complete measurement of industrial
phenomena over a wide area of commerce and over a considerable period
of time, the inductive science of Economics cannot approach
exactitude.
But a study which cannot claim this exactness may yet be a science,
and may have its value. A hypothesis which best explains the generally
apparent relation between certain known phenomena is not the less
science because it is liable to be succeeded by other hypotheses which
with equal relative accuracy explain a wider range of similar
phenomena. It is true that in studies where we know that there exists
a number of unascertained factors we shall expect a more fundamental
displacement of earlier and more speculative hypotheses than in
studies where we know, or think we know, that most of the phenomena
with which we are concerned are equally within our ken: but the
earlier scientific treatment, so far as it goes, is equally necessary
and equally scientific.
In modern industrial changes many different factors, material and
moral, are discernibly related to one another in many complex ways.
According as one or other of the leading factors is taken for a
scientific objective the study assumes a widely different character.
For example, since the end of Industry is wealth for consumption it
would be possible to group the industrial phenomena accordingly as
they served more fully and directly to satisfy human wants, or as they
affected quantitatively or qualitatively the standard of consumption,
and to consider the reflex actions of changed consumption upon modes
of industrial activity. Or again, considering Industry to consist
essentially of organised productive human effort, those factors most
closely related to changes in nature, conditions, and intensity of
work might form the centre of scientific interest; and we might group
our facts and forces according to their bearing upon this. These
points of view would give us different objective scientific studies.
Or, once more, taking a purely subjective standpoint, we might search
out the intellectual expression of these industrial changes in the
changing thought and feeling of the age, tracing the educative
influences of industrial development upon (1) the deliberate judgments
of the business world and of economic thinkers as reflected in
economic writings; (2) politics, literature, and art through the
changes of social environment, and the direct stimulation of new ideas
and sentiments. The deeper and more important human bearings of the
changes in industrial environment might thus be brought into
prominence as well as the reaction by which, through the various
social avenues of law, public opinion, and private organised activity,
these intellectual forces have operated in their turn upon the
industrial structure.
The crowning difficulty of an adequate scientific treatment consists in
the fact that each and all of these scientific objects ought to be
pursued simultaneously; that is to say, the whole of the
phenomena--industrial, intellectual, political, moral, aesthetic--should
be presented in their just but ever-changing proportions.
This larger philosophic treatment is only named in order that it may
be realised how narrow and incomplete would be even the amplest
fulfilment of the purpose indicated in the title of this book.
Sec. 2. Industrial science has not yet sufficiently advanced to enable a
full treatment of the objective phenomena to be attempted.
The method here adopted is to take for our intellectual objective one
important factor in modern industrial movements, to study the laws of
its development and activity, and by observing the relations which
subsist between it and other leading factors or forces in industry to
obtain some clearer appreciation and understanding of the structure of
industry as a whole and its relation to the evolution of human
society. This central factor is indicated by the descriptive title
peculiarly applied to modern industry, Capitalism. A clear view of the
phenomena grouped together under the head of the Industrial Revolution
cannot fail to give prominence to the changes that have taken place in
the structure and functional character of Capital. Whatever
transformations have taken place in the character of land, the raw
material of industrial wealth, and of labour, or those abilities and
faculties of man which operate upon the raw material, have occurred
chiefly and directly through the agency of the enlarged and more
complex use of those forms of material wealth which, while embodying
some element of human effort, are not directly serviceable in
satisfying human want.
Writers upon Political Economy have brought much metaphysical acumen
to bear upon definitions of Capital, and have reached very widely
divergent conclusions as to what the term ought to mean, ignoring the
clear and fairly consistent meaning the term actually possesses in the
business world around them. The business world has indeed two views of
Capital, but they are consistent with one another. Abstractly, money
or the control of money, sometimes called credit, is Capital.
Concretely, capital consists of all forms of marketable matter which
embody labour. Land or nature is excluded except for improvements:
human powers are excluded as not being matter; commodities in the
hands of consumers are excluded because they are no longer marketable.
Thus the actual concrete forms of capital are the raw materials of
production, including the finished stage of shop goods; and the plant
and implements used in the several processes of industry, including
the monetary implements of exchange. Concrete business capital is
composed of these and of nothing but these.[1] In taking modern
industrial phenomena as the subject of scientific inquiry it is better
to accept such terminology as is generally and consistently received
by business men, than either to invent new terms or to give a private
significance to some accepted term which shall be different from that
given by other scientific students, and, if we may judge from past
experience, probably inferior in logical exactitude to the current
meaning in the business world.
Sec. 3. The chief material factor in the evolution of Capitalism is
machinery. The growing quantity and complexity of machinery applied to
purposes of manufacture and conveyance, and to the extractive
industries, is the great special fact in the narrative of the
expansion of modern industry.
It is therefore to the development and influence of machinery upon
industry that we shall chiefly direct our attention, adopting the
following method of study. It is first essential to obtain a clear
understanding of the structure of industry or "the industrial
organism" as a whole, and of its constituent parts, before the new
industrial forces had begun to operate. We must then seek to ascertain
the laws of the development and application of the new forces to the
different departments of industry and the different parts of the
industrial world, examining in certain typical machine industries the
order and pace of the application of the new machinery and motor to
the several processes. Turning our attention again to the industrial
organism, we shall strive to ascertain the chief changes that have
been brought about in the size and structural character of industry,
in the relations of the several parts of the industrial world, of the
several trades which constitute industry, of the processes within
these trades, of the businesses or units which comprise a trade or a
market, and of the units of capital and labour comprising a business.
It will then remain to undertake closer studies of certain important
special outcomes of machinery and factory production. These studies
will fall into three classes. (1) The influences of machine-production
upon the size of the units of capital, the intensification and
limitation of competition; the natural formation of Trusts and other
forms of economic monopoly of capital; trade depressions and grave
industrial disorders due to discrepancies between individual and
social interests in the working of modern methods of production. (2)
Effects of machinery upon labour, the quantity and regularity of
employment, the character and remuneration of work, the place of women
in industry (3) Effects upon the industrial classes in the capacity of
consumers, the growth of the large industrial town and its influences
upon the physical, intellectual, moral life of the community. Lastly,
an attempt will be made to summarise the net influences of modern
capitalist production in their relation to other social progressive
forces, and to indicate the relations between these which seem most
conducive to the welfare of a community measured by generally accepted
standards of character or happiness.
Sec. 4. Since every industrial act in a modern community has its monetary
counterpart, and its importance is commonly estimated in terms of
money, it will be evident that the growth of capitalism might be
studied with great advantage in its monetary aspect. Corresponding to
the changes in productive methods under mechanical machinery we should
find the rapid growth of a complex monetary system reflecting in its
international and national character, in its elaborate structure of
credit, the leading characteristics which we find in modern productive
and distributive industry. The whole industrial movement might be
regarded from the financial or monetary point of view. But though such
a study would be capable of throwing a flood of light upon the
movements of concrete industrial factors at many points, the
intellectual difficulties involved in simultaneously following the
double study, in constantly passing from the more concrete to the more
abstract contemplation of industrial phenomena, would tax the mental
agility of students too severely, and would greatly diminish the
chance of a substantially accurate understanding of either aspect of
modern industry. We shall therefore in this study confine our
attention to the concrete aspect of capitalism, merely indicating by
passing references some of the direct effects upon industrial methods,
especially in the expansion and complexity of markets, of the
elaborate monetary system of modern exchange.
Sec. 5. The inherent difficulty which besets every literary presentation
of the study of a living and changing organism is here present in no
ordinary degree. A book of physiology is necessarily defective in that
it can neither present the just simultaneity of phenomena which occur
together, nor the just sequence of phenomena which are successive.
Diagrams may serve effectively to set forth tolerably simple
simultaneity, but a complex diagram inevitably fails of its object;
for it confuses the sight of one who seeks to simultaneously grasp the
whole, and thus compels a successive examination of different parts
which is generally inferior to skilled narration, in that it affords
no security of the fittest order of examination of the parts. For
certain simple relations between the movements of a few definite
objects a working model may be serviceable; but when complex changes
of shape, pace, and local relations exist, when intricate interaction
takes place, and when new phenomena arise affecting by their presence
all former ones, little can be effected by such visual presentment.
Still less can a succession of diagrams assist us to realise the
continuity of the working of such shifting forces as are presented in
industrial movements.
Thus while the impossibility of adequate experimentation, the
difficulties of scientific observations of phenomena so vast in scope
and so intricate in their relations, make the student of sociological
subjects more dependent upon printed records for his material than is
the case in most other sciences, these printed records induce a
sequence of thought antagonistic to the grasp of a living and moving
unity. This cause is primarily responsible for the failure of many of
the ablest and subtlest economic treatises to impress upon the reader
a clear conception of the industrial world as a single "going
concern." Each piece of the mechanism is clearly described, and the
reader is informed how it fits into the parts which are most closely
related to it, but no simultaneous grasp of the mechanism as a working
whole is attained. When we graft upon the idea of a mechanism that
character of continuous self-development which transforms it into an
"organism," the synthesis of the changing phenomena is still more
difficult to comprehend. These difficulties can only be overcome by a
recognition that the scientific imagination must play a larger part
here than it does in those sciences whose subject-matter is more
amenable to direct observation. In the latter the chief function of
the imagination will be the increase of knowledge by means of
hypotheses which tentatively transcend the region of known facts.
In economic science, as Cairnes has ably shown, the use of hypothesis
is much wider, serving in large measure as a substitute for
experiment.[2] But the scientific imagination has another constant
service to perform. Its exercise is constantly required by the
economist, and in general by the sociologist, to gather into true
relations of time, space, and causality those intricately connected
phenomena which, though individually amenable to sensuous
presentation, are not able to be thus presented as an aggregate in
their right organic order.
The attempts to construct a deductive economic science upon a
piece-meal basis by framing special and separate theories of wages,
rent, value, the functions of money, and so forth, are now recognised
to be in large measure failures precisely because they involve the
fundamental scientific fallacy of supposing that the several parts of
an organic whole can be separately studied, and that from this study
of the parts we can construct a correct idea of the whole. As in
economic theory so in the comprehension of industrial history, no
detailed investigation of a number of different heaps of facts
laboriously collected by intellectual moles will suffice for our
purpose. To understand the evolution of the system of modern industry
we must apply to the heaps of bare unordered facts those principles of
order which are now recognised as the widest generalisations or the
most valid assumptions derivable from other sciences, and endeavour
without slavish conformity to the formulae of these other sciences to
trace in the growth of industrial organisms those general laws of
development which seem common to all bodies of closely-related
phenomena.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Professor Marshall regards this restricted use of capital as
"misleading," rightly urging that "there are many other things which
truly perform the services commonly attributed to capital"
(_Principles_ Bk. II., chap. iv.). But if we enlarge our definition so
as to include all these "other things" we shall be driven to a
political economy which shall widely transcend Industry as we now
understand the term, and shall comprehend the whole science and art of
life so far as it is concerned with human effort and satisfaction. If
it is convenient and justifiable to retain for certain purposes of
study the restricted connotation of Industry now in vogue, the
confinement of Capital as above to Trade Capital is logically
justified. For a fuller treatment of the question of the use of the
term Capital in forming a terminology descriptive of the parts of
Industry the reader is referred to Chapter VII., and in particular to
Appendix I.
[2] _Logical Method of Political Economy_, p. 81, etc.
CHAPTER II.
THE STRUCTURE OF INDUSTRY BEFORE MACHINERY.
Sec. 1. _Dimensions of International Commerce in early Eighteenth
Century._
Sec. 2. _Natural Barriers to International Trade._
Sec. 3. _Political, Pseudo-economic, and Economic Barriers--
Protective Theory and Practice._
Sec. 4. _Nature of International Trade._
Sec. 5. _Size, Structure, Relations of the several Industries._
Sec. 6. _Slight Extent of Local Specialisation._
Sec. 7. _Nature and Conditions of Specialised Industry._
Sec. 8. _Structure of the Market._
Sec. 9. _Combined Agriculture and Manufacture._
Sec. 10. _Relations between Processes in a Manufacture._
Sec. 11. _Structure of the Domestic Business: Early Stages of
Transition._
Sec. 12. _Beginnings of Concentrated Industry and the Factory._
Sec. 13. _Limitations in Size and Application of Capital--
Merchant Capitalism._
Sec. 1. In order to get some clear understanding of the laws of the
operation of the new industrial forces which prevail under
machine-production it is first essential to know rightly the structure
and functional character of the "industrial organism" upon which they
were destined to act. In order to build up a clear conception of
industry it is possible to take either of two modes of inquiry. Taking
as the primary cell or unit that combination of labour and capital
under a single control for a single industrial purpose which is termed
a Business, we may examine the structure and life of the Business,
then proceed to discover how it stands related to other businesses so
as to form a Market, and, finally, how the several Markets are
related locally, nationally, internationally so as to yield the
complex structure of Industry as a whole. Or reversely, we may take
Industry as a whole, the Industrial Organism as it exists at any given
time, consider the nature and extent of the cohesion existing between
its several parts, and, further, resolving these parts into their
constituent elements, gain a close understanding of the extent to
which differentiation of industrial functions has been carried in the
several divisions.
Although in any sociological inquiry these two methods are equally
valid, or, more strictly speaking, are equally balanced in virtues and
defects, the latter method is here to be preferred, because by the
order of its descent from the whole to the constituent parts it brings
out more definitely the slight cohesiveness and integration of
industry beyond the national limits, and serves to emphasise those
qualities of nationalism and narrow localism which mark the character
of earlier eighteenth century industry. We are thus enabled better to
recognise the nature and scope of the work wrought by the modern
industrial forces which are the central object of study.
While the Market or the Trade is less and less determined or confined
by national or other political boundaries in modern times, and
nationalism is therefore a factor of diminishing importance in the
modern science of economics, the paramount domination of politics over
large commerce in the last century, acting in co-operation with other
racial and national forces, obliges any just analysis of eighteenth
century industry to give clear and early emphasis to the slight
character of the commercial interdependency among nations. The degree
of importance which statesmen and economists attached to this foreign
commerce as compared with home trade, and the large part it played in
the discussion and determination of public conduct, have given it a
prominence in written history far beyond its real value.[3]
It is true that through the Middle Ages a succession of European
nations rose to eminence by the development of navigation and
international trade, Italy, Portugal, Spain, France, Holland, and
England; but neither in size nor in character was this trade of the
first importance. Even in the case of those nations where it was most
developed it formed a very small proportion of the total industry of
the country, and it was chiefly confined to spicery, bullion,
ornamental cloths, and other objects of art and luxury.
It is important to recognise that in the first half of the eighteenth
century international trade still largely partook of this character.
Not only did it bear a far smaller proportion to the total industry of
the several countries than does foreign trade to-day, but it was still
engaged to a comparatively small extent with the transport of
necessaries or prime conveniences of life. Each nation, as regards the
more important constituents of its consumption, its staple foods,
articles of clothing, household furniture, and the chief implements of
industry, was almost self-sufficing, producing little that it did not
consume, consuming little it did not produce.
In 1712 the export trade of England is officially estimated at
L6,644,103,[4] or considerably less than one-sixth of the home trade
of that date as calculated by Smith in his _Memoirs of Wool_. Such an
estimate, however, gives an exaggerated impression of the relation of
foreign to home trade, because under the latter no account is taken of
the large domestic production of goods and services which figure in no
statistics. A more instructive estimate is that which values the total
consumption of the English people in 1713 at forty-nine or fifty
millions, out of which about four millions covers the consumption of
foreign goods.[5] In 1740 imports amounted to L6,703,778, exports to
L8,197,788. In 1750 they had risen respectively to L7,772,339 and
L12,699,081,[6] and ten years later to L9,832,802 and L14,694,970.
Macpherson, whose _Annals of Commerce_ are a mine of wealth upon the
history of foreign commerce in the eighteenth century, after
commenting upon the impossibility of obtaining a just estimate of the
value of home trade, alludes to a calculation which places it at
thirty-two times the size of the export trade. Macpherson contents
himself with concluding that it is "a vast deal greater in value than
the whole of the foreign trade."[7] There is every reason to believe
that in the case of Holland and France, the only two other European
nations with a considerable foreign trade, the same general conclusion
will apply.
[Illustration: PROGRESS OF FOREIGN TRADE IN ENGLAND.]
The smallness of the part which foreign trade played in industry
signifies that in the earlier part of the eighteenth century the
industrial organism as a whole must be regarded as a number of
tolerably self-sufficing and therefore homogeneous national forms
attached to one another by bonds which are few and feeble. As yet
there was little specialisation in national industry, and therefore
little integration of national parts of the world-industry.
Sec. 2. Since the breaking-down of international barriers and the
strengthening of the industrial bonds of attachment between nations
will be seen to be one of the most important effects of the
development of machine-industry, some statement of the nature of these
barriers and their effect upon the size and character of international
trade is required.
Though considerable advances had been made by England and Holland at
the beginning of the eighteenth century in the improvement of
harbours, the establishment of lighthouses, and the development of
marine insurance,[8] navigation was still subject to considerable
risks of the loss of life and of investments, while these "natural"
dangers were increased by the prevalence of piracy. Voyages were slow
and expensive, commerce between distant nations being necessarily
confined to goods of a less perishable character which would stand the
voyage. Trade in fresh foods, which forms so large a part of modern
commerce, would have been impossible except along the coasts of
adjoining nations. With these natural barriers to commerce may be
reckoned the defective knowledge of the position, resources, and
requirements of large parts of the earth which now fill an important
place in commerce. The new world was but slightly opened up, nor could
its known resources be largely utilised before the development of more
adequate machinery of transport. We can scarcely realise the
inconveniences, costs, and risks entailed by the more distant branches
of foreign trade at a time when the captain of a merchant-ship still
freighted his vessel at his own expense, and when each voyage was a
separate speculation. Even in the early nineteenth century the
manufacturer commonly shipped his surplus produce at his own risk,
employing the merchant upon commission, and in the trade with the
Indies, China, or South America he had frequently to lie out of his
money or his return freight of indigo, coffee, tea, etc., for as long
as eighteen months or two years, and to bear the expense of
warehousing as well as the damage which time and tide inflicted on his
goods.
Sec. 3. Next come a series of barriers, partly political, partly
pseudo-economic, in which the antagonism of nations took shape, the
formation of political and industrial theories which directed the
commercial intercourse of nations into certain narrow and definite
channels.
Two economic doctrines, separate in the world of false ideas, though
their joint application in the world of practice has led many to
confuse them, exercised a dominant influence in diminishing the
quantity, and determining the quality of international trade in the
eighteenth century. These doctrines had reference respectively to the
construction and maintenance of home industries and the balance of
trade. The former doctrine, which was not so much a consciously-evolved
theory as a short-sighted, intellectual assumption driven by the urgent
impulse of vested interests into practical effect, taught that, on the
one hand, import trade should be restricted to commodities which were
not and could not with advantage be produced at home, and to the
provision of cheap materials for existing manufactures; while export
trade, on the other hand, should be generally encouraged by a system of
bounties and drawbacks. This doctrine was first rigidly applied by the
French minister, Colbert, but the policy of France was faithfully
copied by England and other commercial nations and ranked as an
orthodox theory of international trade.
The Balance of Trade doctrine estimated the worth of a nation's
intercourse with another by the excess of the export over the import
trade, which brought a quantity of bullion into the exporting country.
This theory was also widely spread, though obviously its general
application would have been destructive of all international commerce.
The more liberal interpretation of the doctrine was satisfied with a
favourable balance of the aggregate export over the aggregate import
trade of the country, but the stricter interpretation, generally
dominant in practice, required that in the case of each particular
nation the balance should be favourable. In regarding England's
commerce with a foreign nation, any excess in import values over
export was spoken of as "a loss to England." England deliberately cut
off all trade with France during the period 1702 to 1763 by a system
of prohibitive tariffs urged by a double dread lest the balance should
be against us, and lest French textile goods might successfully
compete with English goods in the home markets. On the other hand, we
cultivated trade with Portugal because "we gain a greater balance from
Portugal than from any other country whatever." The practical policy
prevalent in 1713 is thus summarised by one of its enthusiastic
upholders--"We suffer the goods and merchandises of Holland, Germany,
Portugal, and Italy to be imported and consumed among us; and it is
well we do, for we expect a much greater value of our own to those
countries than we take from them. So that the consumption of those
nations pays much greater sums to the rents of our lands and the
labour of our people than ours does to theirs. But we keep out as much
as possible the goods and merchandises of France, because our
consumption of theirs would very much hinder the consumption of our
own, and abate a great part of forty-two millions which it now pays to
the rents of our lands and the labour of our people."[9] Thus our
policy was to confine our import trade to foreign luxuries and raw
materials of manufacture which could not be here produced, drawn
exclusively from countries where such trade would not turn the balance
against us, and, on the other hand, to force our export trade on any
country that would receive it. Since every European nation was largely
influenced by similar ideas and motives, and enforced upon their
colonies and dependencies a like line of conduct, many mutually
profitable exchanges were prevented, and commerce was confined to
certain narrow and artificial grooves, while the national industrial
energy was wasted in the production of many things at home which could
have been more cheaply obtained from foreign countries through
exchange.
The following example may suffice to illustrate the intricacy of the
legislation passed in pursuance of this policy. It describes a change
of detailed policy in support and regulation of textile trade:--
"A tax was laid on foreign linens in order to provide a fund for
raising hemp and flax at home; while bounties were given on these
necessary articles from our colonies, the bounty on the exportation of
hemp was withdrawn. The imposts on foreign linen yarn were withdrawn.
Bounties were given on British linen cloth exported; while the making
of cambricks was promoted, partly by prohibiting the foreign and
partly by giving fresh incentives, though without success, to the
manufacture of cambricks within our island. Indigo, cochineal, and
logwood, the necessaries of dyes, were allowed to be freely
imported."[10]
The encouragement of English shipping (partly for commercial, partly
for political reasons) took elaborate shape in the Navigation Acts,
designed to secure for English vessels a monopoly of the carrying
trade between England and all other countries which sent goods to
English or to colonial shores. This policy was supported by a network
of minor measures giving bounties to our colonies for the exportation
of shipping materials, pitch, tar, hemp, turpentine, masts, and spars,
and giving bounties at home for the construction of defensible ships.
This Navigation policy gave a strong foundational support to the whole
protective policy. Probably the actuating motives of this policy were
more political than industrial. Holland, the first to apply this
method systematically, had immensely strengthened her maritime power.
France, though less successfully, had followed in her wake. Doubtless
there were many clear-thinking Englishmen who, though aware of the
damage done to commerce by our restrictive regulations about shipping,
held that the maintenance of a powerful navy for the defence of the
kingdom and its foreign possessions was an advantage which outweighed
the damage.[11]
The selfish and short-sighted policy of this protective system found
its culminating point in the treatment of Ireland and the American
plantations. The former was forbidden all manufacture which might
either directly or indirectly compete with English industry, and was
compelled to deal exclusively with England; the American colonies were
forbidden to weave cloth, to make hats, or to forge a bolt, and were
compelled to take all the manufactured goods required for their
consumption from England.
The freedom and expansion of international commerce was further
hampered by the policy of assigning monopolies of colonial and foreign
trade to close Chartered Companies. This policy, however, defensible
as an encouragement of early mercantile adventure, was carried far
beyond these legitimate limits in the eighteenth century. In England
the East Indian was the most powerful and successful of these
companies, but the assignment of the trade with Turkey, Russia, and
other countries to chartered companies was a distinct hindrance to the
development of foreign trade.
Our foreign trade at that period might indeed be classed or graded in
accordance with the degree of encouragement or discouragement offered
by the State.
Imports would fall into four classes.
1. Imports forbidden either (_a_) by legislative prohibition,
or (_b_) by prohibitive taxation.
2. Imports admitted but taxed.
3. Free imports.
4. Imports encouraged by bounties.
Exports might be graded in similar fashion.
1. Prohibited exports (_e.g._, sheep and wool, raw hides,
tanned leather, woollen yarn, textile implements,[12]
certain forms of skilled labour).
2. Exports upon which duties are levied (_e.g._, coals[13]).
3. Free exports.
4. Exports encouraged by bounties, or by drawbacks.
The unnatural and injurious character of most of this legislation is
best proved by the notable inability to effectively enforce its
application. The chartered companies were continually complaining of
the infringement of their monopolies by private adventurers, and more
than one of them failed through inability to crush out this illegal
competition. A striking condemnation of our policy towards France
consisted in the growth of an enormous illicit trade which, in spite
of the difficulties which beset it, made a considerable part of our
aggregate foreign trade during the whole of the century. The lack of
any clear perception of the mutuality of advantage in foreign and
colonial trade was the root fallacy which underlay these restrictions.
Professor Cunningham rightly says of the colonial policy of England,
that it "implied that each distinct member should strengthen the head,
and not at all that these members should mutually strengthen each
other."[14]
So, as we tried to get the better of our colonies, still more
rigorously did we apply the same methods to foreign countries,
regarding each gain which accrued to us as an advantage which would
have wholly gone to the foreigner if we had not by firmness and
enterprise secured it for ourselves.
The slight extent of foreign intercourse was, however, partly due to
causes which are to be regarded as genuinely economic. The life and
experience of the great mass of the population of all countries was
extremely restricted; they were a scattered and rural folk whose wants
and tastes were simple, few, home-bred, and customary. The customary
standard of consumption, slowly built up in conformity with local
production, gave little encouragement to foreign trade. Moreover, to
meet the new tastes and the more varied consumption which gradually
found its way over this country, it was in conformity with the
economic theory and practice of the day to prefer the establishment of
new home industries, equipped if necessary with imported foreign
labour, to the importation of the products of such labour from abroad.
So far as England, in particular, is concerned, the attitude was
favoured by the political and religious oppression of the French
government which supplied England in the earlier eighteenth century
with a constant flow of skilled artisan labour. Many English
manufacturers profited by this flow. Our textile industries in silk,
wool, and linen, calico-printing, glass, paper, and pottery are
special beholden to the new arts thus introduced.
Among the economic barriers must be reckoned the slight development
of international credit, and of the machinery of exchange.
Sec. 4. These barriers, natural, political, social, economic, against
free international intercourse, throw important light upon the general
structure of world-industry in the eighteenth century.
In this application they determined and strictly limited not only the
quantity but the nature of the international trade. The export trade
of England, for example, in 1730 was practically confined to woollen
goods and other textile materials, a small quantity of leather, iron,
lead, silver, and gold plate, and a certain number of re-exported
foreign products, such as tobacco and Indian calicoes. The import
trade consisted of wine and spirits, foreign foods, such as rice,
sugar, coffee, oil, furs, and some quantity of foreign wool, hemp,
silk, and linen-yarn, as material for our specially favoured
manufactures. Having regard to the proportion of the several
commodities, it would not be much exaggeration to summarise our
foreign trade by saying that we sent out woollen goods and received
foreign foods. These formed the great bulk of our foreign trade.[15]
Excepting the woollen goods and a small trade in metals, leather is
the only manufactured article which figured to any appreciable extent
in our export of 1730. At that time it is clear that in the main
English manufacture, as well as English agriculture, was for the
supply of English wants. The same was true of other industrial
countries. Holland and France, who divided with England the shipping
supremacy, had a foreign trade which, though then deemed considerable,
bore no greater proportion to the total industry of these countries
than in the case of England. Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain, and even
Portugal were almost wholly self-sustained.
Regarding, then, the known and related world of that time in the light
of an industrial organism, we must consider it as one in which the
processes of integration and of differentiation of parts has advanced
but a little way, consisting as yet of a number of homogeneous and
incoherent national cells.
This homogeneity is of course qualified by differences in production
and consumption due to climate, natural products, national character
and institutions, and the development of industrial arts in the
several nations.
Sec. 5. This consideration of the approximate homogeneity of the national
units of world-industry gives a higher scientific value to the
analysis of a single typical industrial nation such as England, than
would be the case in modern times, when the work of differentiation of
industrial functions among the several nations has advanced much
further.
Taking, therefore, the national industry of England as the special
subject of analysis, we may seek to obtain a clear conception of the
size, structure, and connections, of the several branches of industry,
paying special regard to the manufactures upon which the new
industrial forces were chiefly to operate.
It is not possible to form a very accurate estimate of the relative
importance of the different industries as measured either by the money
value of their products, or by the amount of labour engaged in
producing them. Eighteenth century statistics, as we saw, furnished no
close estimate of the total income of the nation or of the value of
home industries. Since no direct census of the English population was
taken before 1805, the numbers were never exactly known, and
eighteenth century economists spent much time and ingenuity in trying
to ascertain the growth of population by calculations based upon the
number of occupied houses, or by generalising from slender and
unreliable local statistics, without in the end arriving at any close
agreement. Still less reliable will be the estimates of the relative
size and importance of the different industries.
Two such attempts, however, one slightly prior to the special period
we are investigating, and one a little later, may be taken as general
indications of the comparative importance of the great divisions of
industry, agriculture, manufacture, distribution or commerce.
The first is that of Gregory King in the year 1688. King's
calculation, however, can only be regarded as roughly approximate. The
quantity of combined agriculture and manufacture, and the amount of
domestic industry for domestic consumption, renders the manufacturing
figures, however carefully they might have been collected, very
deceptive. The same criticism, though to a less degree, applies to the
estimate of Arthur Young for 1769.
[Illustration]
If to Young's estimate of the population dependent upon agriculture we
add the class of landlords and their direct dependents and a proper
proportion of the non-industrious poor, who, though not to be so
classed in a direct measurement of occupations, are supported out of
the produce of agriculture, we shall see that in 1769 we are justified
in believing that agriculture was in its productiveness almost
equivalent to the whole of manufactures and commerce.
In turning to the several branches of manufacture, the abnormal
development of one of them, viz. the woollen, for purposes of foreign
trade, marks the first and only considerable specialisation of English
industry before the advent of steam machinery. With the single
exception of woollen goods almost the whole of English manufactures
were for home consumption. At the opening of the eighteenth century,
and even as late as 1770, no other single manufacture played any
comparable part in the composition of our export trade.
According to Chalmers,[16] in the period 1699-1701, the annual value
of woollen exports was over two and a half million pounds, or about
two-fifths of the total export trade, while in 1769-71 it still
amounted to nearly one-third of the whole, giving entire or partial
employment to no fewer than "a million and a half of people," or half
of the total number assigned by Young to manufacture.
Next to the woollen, but far behind in size and importance, came the
iron trade. In 1720 England seems to have developed her mining
resources so imperfectly as to be in the condition of importing from
foreign countries 20,000 out of the 30,000 tons required for her
hardware manufactures.[17] Almost all this iron was destined to home
consumption with the exception of hardware forced upon the American
colonies, who were forbidden to manufacture for themselves. In 1720 it
is calculated that mining and manufacture of iron and hardware
employed 200,000 persons.[18]
Copper and brass manufactures employed some 30,000 persons in
1720.[19]
Silk was the only other highly developed and considerable
manufacture. It had, however, to contend with Indian competition,
introduced by the East India Company, and also with imported
calicoes.[20] In 1750 there were about 13,000 looms in England, the
product of which was almost entirely used for home consumption. Cotton
and linen were very small manufactures during the first half of the
eighteenth century. At the beginning of the century the linen trade
was chiefly in the hands of Russia and Germany, although it had taken
root in Ireland as early as the close of the seventeenth century, and
was worked to some extent in Lancashire, Leicestershire, and round
Darlington in Yorkshire, which districts supplied the linen-warp to
the cotton weavers.[21] As for cotton, even in 1760 not more than
40,000 persons were engaged in the manufacture, and in 1764 the cotton
exports were but one-twentieth of the value of the woollen
exports.[22] The small value of the cotton trade and an anticipatory
glance at its portentous after-growth is conveyed in the following
figures:--
Home Market. Export Trade.
1766 L379,241 L220,759 (Postletwayte)
1819-21 13,044,000 15,740,000 }
1829-31 13,351,000 18,074,000 } (Ellison[23])
The many other little manufactures which had sprung up, such as glass,
paper, tin-plate, produced entirely for home consumption, and employed
but a small number of workers.
Sec. 6. If we turn from the consideration of the size of English industry
and the several departments to the analysis of its structure and the
relation to the several trades, we shall find the same signs of
imperfect organic development which we found in the world-industry,
though not so strongly marked. Just as we found each country in the
main self-sufficing, so we find each district of England (with a few
significant exceptions) engaged chiefly in producing for its own
consumption. There was far less local specialisation in industry than
we find to-day. The staple industries, tillage, stock-raising, and
those connected with the supply of the common articles of clothing,
furniture, fuel, and other necessaries were widespread over the whole
country.
Though far more advanced than foreign intercourse, the internal trade
between more distant parts of England was extremely slight. Defective
facilities of communication and transport were of course in large
measure responsible for this.
The physical obstructions to such freedom of commerce as now subsists
were very considerable in the eighteenth century. The condition of the
main roads in the country at the opening of the century was such as to
make the carriage of goods long and expensive. Agricultural produce
was almost entirely for local consumption, with the exception of
cattle and poultry, which were driven on foot from the neighbouring
counties into London and other large markets.[24] In the winter, even
round London, bad roads were a great obstacle to trade. The
impossibility of driving cattle to London later than October often led
to a monopoly of winter supply and high prices.[25] The growth of
turnpike roads, which proceeded apace in the first half of the
century, led to the large substitution of carts for pack horses, but
even these roads were found "execrable" by Arthur Young, and off the
posting routes and the neighbourhood of London the communication was
extremely difficult. "The great roads of England remained almost in
this ancient condition even as late as 1752 and 1754, when the
traveller seldom saw a turnpike for two hundred miles after leaving
the vicinity of London."[26]
Rivers rather than roads were the highways of commerce, and many Acts
were passed in the earlier eighteenth century for improving the
navigability of rivers, as the Trent, Ouse, and Mersey, partly in
order to facilitate internal trade and partly to enable towns like
Leeds and Derby to engage directly in trade by sea,[27] and to connect
adjoining towns such as Liverpool and Manchester. In 1755 the first
canal was constructed, and in the latter part of the century the part
played by canals in the development of the new factory system was
considerable. But in spite of these efforts to improve methods of
transport in the earlier eighteenth century, it is evident that the
bulk of industry was engaged in providing articles for local
consumption, and that the area of the market for most products was
extremely narrow.
The facile transport of both capital and labour, which is essential to
highly specialised local industry, was retarded not merely by lack of
knowledge of the opportunities of remunerative investment, but also by
legal restrictions which had the influence of checking the free
application and migration of labour. The Statute of Apprentices by
requiring a seven years' apprenticeship[28] in many trades, and the
Law of Settlement by impairing mobility of labour, are to be regarded
as essentially protective measures calculated to prevent that
concentrated application of capital and labour required for
specialisation of industry.
Within the nation we had for the most part a number of self-sufficing
communities, or, in other words, there was little specialisation of
function in the several parts, and little integration in the national
industry. With the single exception of Holland, whose admirable
natural and artificial water communication seemed to give unity to its
commerce, the other countries of Europe, France, Germany, Italy,
Spain, Russia, were still more disintegrated in their industry.
Sec. 7. In regarding those districts of England in which strong
indications of growing industrial specialisation showed themselves, it
is important to observe the degree and character of that
specialisation.
We find various branches of the woollen, silk, cotton, iron, hardware,
and other manufactures allocated to certain districts. But if we
compare this specialisation with that which obtains to-day we shall
observe wide differences.
In the first place, it was far less advanced. The woollen industry of
England, though conveniently divided into three districts--one in the
Eastern Counties, with Norwich, Colchester, Sandwich, Canterbury,
Maidstone, for principal centres; one in the West, with Taunton,
Devizes, Bradford (in Wilts), Frome, Trowbridge, Stroud, and Exeter;
and the third, in the West Riding, is in reality distributed over
almost the whole of England south of the Thames, and over a large part
of Yorkshire, to say nothing of the widespread production, either for
private consumption or for the market, in Westmoreland, Cumberland,
and indeed all the North of England. Where the land was richer in
pasture or with easier access to large supplies of wool, the clothing
manufactures were more flourishing and gave more employment, but over
all the southern and most of the northern counties some form of
woollen manufacture was carried on.
[Illustration: INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND IN 1830.]
The only part of England which Defoe regarded as definitely
specialised in manufacture is part of the West Riding, for though
agriculture is carried on here to some extent, the chief manufacturing
district is dependent upon surrounding districts for its main supply
of food.[29]
Iron, the industry of next, though of far inferior importance, was of
necessity less widely distributed. But in 1737 the fifty-nine furnaces
in use were distributed over no fewer than fifteen counties, Sussex,
Gloucester, Shropshire, Yorkshire, and Northumberland taking the
lead.[30] So too the industries engaged in manufacturing metal goods
were far less concentrated than in the present day. Though Sheffield
and Birmingham even in Defoe's time were the great centres of the
trade, of the total consumption of the country the greater part was
made in small workshops scattered over the land.
Nottingham and Leicester were beginning to specialise in cotton and
woollen hosiery, but a good deal was made round London, and generally
in the woollen counties of the south. Silk was more specialised owing
to the importation of special skill and special machinery to
Spitalsfield, Stockport, Derby, and a few other towns. In Coventry it
was only the second trade in 1727.[31]
The scattered crafts of the wheelwright, the smith, carpenter, turner,
carried on many of the subsidiary processes of building, manufacture
of vehicles and furniture, which are now for the most part highly
centralised industries.
When we come presently to consider the structure of the several
industries we shall see that even those trades which are allocated to
certain local areas are much less concentrated within these areas than
is now the case.
But though stress is here laid upon the imperfect differentiation of
localities in industry, it is not to be supposed that the eighteenth
century shows England a simple industrial community with no
considerable specialisation.
Three conditions of specialised industry are clearly discernible in
the early eighteenth century--conditions which always are among the
chief determinants.
1. _Physical aptitudes of soil_--_e.g._, since timber was still used
almost entirely for smelting, iron works are found where timber is
plentiful or where river communication makes it easily procurable. So
the more fertile meadows of Gloucester and Somerset led these
districts to specialise in the finer branches of the woollen trade. A
still more striking example is that of South Lancashire. By nature it
was ill-suited for agriculture, and therefore its inhabitants employed
themselves largely in the cotton and woollen trades. The numerous
little streams which flowed from the hills to the neighbouring sea
gave plenty of water-power, and thus made this district the home of
the earlier mills and the cradle of machine-industry.[32] The "grit"
of the local grindstones secured the supremacy of Sheffield cutlery,
while the heavy clay required for the "seggars," or boxes in which
pottery is fired, helped to determine the specialisation of
Staffordshire in this industry.[33]
2. _Facility of Market._--The country round London, Bristol, and other
larger towns became more specialised than the less accessible and more
evenly populated parts, because the needs of a large town population
compelled the specialisation in agriculture of much of the surrounding
country; cottagers could more easily dispose of their manufactures;
improved roads and other facilities for conveyance induced a
specialisation impossible in the purely rural parts.
3. _The Nature of the Commodity._--When all modes of conveyance were
slow the degree of specialisation depended largely upon the keeping
quality of the goods. From this point of view hardware and textiles
are obviously more amenable to local specialisation than the more
perishable forms of food. Where conveyance is difficult and expensive
a commodity bulky for its value is less suitable for local
specialisation in production than one containing a high value in small
weight and bulk. So cloth is more suitable for trade than corn;[34]
and coal, save where navigation is possible, could not be profitably
taken any distance.[35]
The common commodities consumed, as food, fuel, and shelter, were thus
excluded from any considerable amount of specialisation in their
production.
Sec. 8. Turning from consideration of the attributes of goods and of the
means of transport which served to limit the character of internal
trade and determine the size of the market, let us now regard the
structure of the market, the central object in the mechanism of
internal commerce.
The market, not the industry, is the true term which expresses the
group of organically related businesses. How far did England present a
national market? How far was the typical market a district or purely
local one?
The one great national market town was London. It alone may be said to
have drawn supplies from the whole of England, and there alone was it
possible to purchase at any season of the year every kind of produce,
agricultural or manufactured, made anywhere in England or imported
from abroad. This flow to and from the great centre of population was
incessant, and extended to the furthermost parts of the land. Other
large towns, such as Bristol, Leeds, Norwich, maintained close and
constant relations with the neighbouring counties, but exchanged their
produce for the most part only indirectly with that of more distant
parts of the country.
The improving communication of the eighteenth century enabled the
clothiers and other leading manufacturers to distribute more of their
wares even in the remotest parts of the country, but the value paid
for their wares reached the vendors by slow and indirect channels of
trade, passing for the most part through the metropolis.
But while London was the one constant national market-place, national
trade was largely assisted by fairs held for several weeks each year
at Stourbridge, Winchester, and other convenient centres. At the most
important of these the large merchants and manufacturers met their
customers, and business was transacted between distant parts of the
country, including all kinds of wares, English and foreign. Thus we
had one constant and two or three intermittent avenues of free
national trade. The great bulk of markets, however, were confined
within far smaller areas.
In the more highly developed and specialised textile trades certain
regular market-places were established of wide local importance. The
largest of these specialised district markets were at Leeds, Halifax,
Norwich, and Exeter. Here the chief local manufacturers of cloth,
worsted, or crape met the merchants and factors and disposed of their
wares to these distributing middlemen.
It was, however, in the general market-places of the county town or
smaller centres of population that the mass of the business of
exchange was transacted. There the mass of the small workers in
agriculture and manufacture brought the product of their labour and
sold it, buying what they needed for consumption and for the pursuance
of their craft. Only in considerable towns were there to be found in
the earlier eighteenth century any number of permanent shops where all
sorts of wares could be bought at any time. The weekly market in the
market-town was the chief medium of commerce for the great mass of the
population.
Regarding the general structure of Industry we see that not only are
international bonds slight and unessential, but that within the nation
the elements of national cohesion are feeble as compared with those
which subsist now. We have a number of small local communities whose
relations, though tolerably strong with other communities in their
immediate neighbourhood, become greatly weakened by distance. For the
most part these small communities are self-sufficing for work and
life, producing most of their own necessaries, and only dependent on
distant and unknown producers for their comforts and luxuries.
Trade is for the most part conducted on a small steady local basis
with known regular customers.
Outside of agriculture the elements of speculation and fluctuation are
almost entirely confined to foreign trade. Capital and labour are
fixed to a particular locality and a particular business.[36]
Sec. 9. Turning to the structure of the several industries we find that
different employments are not sharply separated from one another. In
the first place, agriculture and manufacture are not only carried on
in the same locality but by the same people. This combined agriculture
and manufacture took several forms.
The textile industries were largely combined with agriculture. Where
spinning was carried on in agricultural parts there was, for the most
part, a division of labour within the family. The women and children
spun while the men attended to their work in the fields.[37] Every
woman and child above the age of five found full employment in the
spinning and weaving trades of Somerset and the West Riding.[38]
This method prevailed more largely in the spinning than in the weaving
trades, for before the introduction of the spinning-jenny the weaving
trade was far more centralised than the other. For example, a large
quantity of weaving was done in the town of Norwich while the earlier
process was executed in the scattered cottages over a wide district.
But even these town workers were not specialised in manufacture to the
extent which prevails to-day. Large numbers of them had allotments in
the country to which they gave their spare time, and many had pasture
rights and kept their cattle on the common lands. This applied not
merely to the textile but to other industries. At West Bromwich, a
chief centre of the metal trade, agriculture was still carried on as a
subsidiary pursuit by the metal workers.[39] So too the cutlers of
Sheffield living in the outskirts of the town had their plot of land
and carried on agriculture to a small extent, a practice which has
lasted almost up to the present day. The combined agriculture and
manufacture often took the form of a division of labour according to
season. Where the weaving was not concentrated in towns it furnished a
winter occupation to many men who gave the bulk of their summer time
to agriculture. Generally speaking, we may take as fairly
representative of the manufacturing parts of England the picture which
Defoe gave of the condition of affairs in the neighbourhood of
Halifax. He found "the land divided into small enclosures from two
acres to six or seven acres each, seldom more; every three or four
pieces of land had a house belonging to it--one continued village,
hardly a house standing out of speaking distance from another--at
every house a tenter, and on almost every tenter a piece of cloth or
kersie or shalloon--every clothier keeps a horse--so every one
generally keeps a cow or two for his family."[40]
Not only were agriculture and many forms of manufacture conjoined, but
the division of labour and differentiation of processes within the
several industries was not very far advanced. The primitive tillage of
the common-fields which still prevailed in the early eighteenth
century, though the rapid enclosure of commons was effecting a
considerable, and from the wealth-producing point of view, a very
salutary change, did not favour the specialisation of land for pasture
or for some particular grain crops. Each little hamlet was engaged in
providing crops of hay, wheat, barley, oats, beans, and had to fulfil
the other purposes required by a self-subsisting community. This
partly arose from the necessity of the system of land tenure, partly
from ignorance of how to take advantage of special qualities and
positions of soil, and partly from the self-sufficiency improved by
difficulties of conveyance. As the century advanced, the enclosure of
commons, the increase of large farms, the application of new science
and new capital led to a rapid differentiation in the use of land for
agricultural purposes. But in the earlier part of the century there
was little specialisation of land except in the West Riding and round
the chief centres of the woollen trade, and to a less extent in the
portions of the counties round London whose position forced them to
specialise for some particular market of the metropolis.
Sec. 10. As the small agriculturist on a self-sufficing farm must perform
many different processes, so the manufacturer was not narrowed down to
a single process of manufacture. A large part of the ruder
manufactures were home productions for home consumption, and the same
hands tended the sheep which furnished the wool, and spun and wove the
wool for family use. The smith was in a far fuller sense the maker of
the horse-shoe or the nail or bolt than he is to-day; the wheelwright,
the carpenter, and other handicraftsmen performed a far larger number
of different processes than they do now. Moreover, each household, in
addition to its principal employments of agriculture and manufacture,
carried on many minor productive occupations, such as baking, brewing,
butter-making, dressmaking, washing, which are now for the most part
special and independent branches of employment.
In the more highly-developed branches of the textile and metal trades
the division of processes appears at first sight more sharply marked
than to-day. The carder, spinner, weaver, fuller in the cloth trade
worked in the several processes of converting raw wool into finished
cloth, related to one another only by a series of middlemen who
supplied them with the material required for their work and received
it back with the impress of their labour attached, to hand it out once
more to undergo the next process.[41] But though modern
machine-production will show us these various processes drawn together
into close local proximity, sometimes performed under the same roof
and often making use of the same steam power, we shall find that a
chief object and effect of this closer local co-ordination of the
several processes is to define and narrow more precisely the labour of
each worker and to make the spinner and the weaver confine himself to
the performance of a fractional part of the full process of spinning
or weaving. Thus we find that English industry in the early eighteenth
century is marked on the one hand by a lack of clear differentiation
as regards industries, and on the other hand by a lack of minute
differentiation of processes within the industry.
Sec. 11. We must now descend from the consideration of the Industry and
the Market, or group of related businesses, to examine the character
and structure of the unit of industry--the Business.
In a study of the composition or co-operation of labour and capital in
a Business before the era of machine-production there are five points
of dominant importance--(1) The ownership of the material; (2) the
ownership of the tools; (3) the ownership of the productive power; (4)
the relations subsisting between the individual units of labour; (5)
the work-place.
English manufacturing industry in the first half of the eighteenth
century furnishes a variety of different forms of business of widely
different nature and complexity. The simplest form of manufacturing
industry is that in which an industrial family owning the raw material
and the requisite tools, and working with the power of their own
bodies in their own homes, produce commodities for their own
consumption. This private production for private consumption survived
largely in the eighteenth century, not merely in the case of
agriculturists who produced the more necessary articles of food for
themselves as well as for the market, but also in the case of farmers
and cottagers in the remotest parts of the country who produced their
own wool and flax, and spun and wove it for their own use.[42]
From this primitive form which required no commerce and no industrial
organisation we may trace the growth of various forms of higher
industrial development, many of which co-existed in eighteenth century
England.
The simplest structure of "domestic" manufacture is that in which the
farmer-manufacturer is found purchasing his own material, the raw wool
or flax if he is a spinner, the warp and weft if he is a weaver, and,
working with his family, produces yarn or cloth which he sells
himself, either in the local market or to regular master-clothiers or
merchants. The mixed cotton weaving trade was in this condition in the
earlier years of the eighteenth century. "The workshop of the weaver
was a rural cottage, from which, when he was tired of sedentary
labour, he could sally forth into his little garden, and with the
spade or the hoe tend its culinary productions. The cotton-wool which
was to form his weft was picked clean by the fingers of his younger
children, and was carded and spun by the older girls assisted by his
wife, and the yarn was woven by himself assisted by his sons."[43]
Following as the central point the ownership of the requisites of
production, we find in the next stage that the ownership of the
material has passed from the workman into the hands of the organising
merchant or middleman, who usurps the title "manufacturer." The
workman, however, still retains the ownership of the implements of his
craft and works in his own house. The condition of the worsted trade
later in the century, about 1770, well illustrates this industrial
form.
"The work was entirely domestic, and its different branches widely
scattered over the country. First, the manufacturer had to travel on
horseback to purchase his raw material among the farmers, or at the
great fairs held in those old towns that had formerly been the
exclusive markets, or, as they were called, 'staples' of wool. The
wool, safely received, was handed over to the sorters, who rigorously
applied their gauge of required length of staple and mercilessly
chopped off by shears or hatchet what did not reach the standard as
wool fit for the clothing trade. The long wool thus passed into the
hands of the combers, and, having been brought back to them into the
combed state, was again carefully packed and strapped on the back of
the sturdy horse, to be taken into the country to be spun.... Here, at
each village, he had his agents, who received the wool, distributed it
amongst the peasantry and received it back as yarn. The machine
employed was still the old one-thread wheel, and in summer weather on
many a village green might be seen the housewives plying their busy
trade, and furnishing to the poet the vision of contentment spinning
at the cottage door. Returning in safety with his yarn, the
manufacturer had now to seek out his weavers, who ultimately delivered
to him his camblets or russels, or tammies or calimancoes (such were
the leading names of the fibres) ready for sale to the merchant or
delivery to the dyer."[44]
The condition of the cotton-trade in Lancashire about 1750
illustrates most clearly the transition from the independent weaver to
the dependent weaver. So far as the linen warp of his fabric was
concerned he had long been in the habit of receiving it from the
larger "manufacturer" in Bolton or in Manchester, but the cotton yarn
he had hitherto supplied himself, using the yarn spun by his own
family or purchased by himself in the neighbourhood. The difficulty of
obtaining a steady, adequate supply, and the waste of time involved in
trudging about in search of this necessary material, operated more
strongly as the market for cotton goods expanded and the pressure of
work made itself felt.[45] It was this pressure which we shall see
acting as chief stimulus to the application of new inventions in the
spinning[46] trade. In the interim, however, the habit grew of
receiving not only linen warp but cotton weft from the merchant or
middleman. Thus the ownership of the raw material entirely passed out
of the weaver's hands, though he continued to ply his domestic craft
as formerly.[47] This had grown into the normal condition of the trade
by 1750. The stocking-trade illustrates one further encroachment of
the capitalist system upon domestic industry. In this trade not only
was the material given out by merchants, but the "frames" used for
weaving were likewise owned by them, and were rented out to the
workers, who continued, however, to work in their own homes.[48]
Sec. 12. Two further steps remained to be taken in the transition from
the "domestic" to the "factory" system, the one relating to the
ownership of "power," the other to the work-place, (_a_) The
substitution of extra-human power owned by the employer for the
physical power of the worker; (_b_) the withdrawal of the workers from
their homes, and the concentration of them in factories and
work-places owned by the capitalists.
Although these steps were not completely taken until the age of steam
had well set in, before the middle of the eighteenth century there
were found examples of the factory, complete in its essential
character, side by side and in actual competition with the earlier
shapes of domestic industry.
Capitalist ownership of extra-human industrial "power" was of course
narrowly restricted before the age of steam. Water-power, horse-power,
and to a much smaller extent, wind-power, were utilised. But the most
important services water rendered to industry prior to the great
inventions were in facilitating the transport of goods, and in certain
subsidiary processes of manufacture such as dyeing. Though a
considerable number of water-mills existed early in the century, they
played no large part in manufacture. A natural force so strictly
confined in quantity and in local application, and subject to such
great waste from the backward condition of mechanical art, was not
able to serve to any great extent as a substitute for or aid to the
muscular activity of man.
But although the economy of mechanical power was not yet operative to
any appreciable extent in concentrating labour, certain other notable
economics of large-scale production were beginning to assert
themselves in all the leading manufactures. Indeed so powerful are
some of the economies of division of labour and co-operation even in a
primitive condition of the industrial arts, that Professor Ashley
considers it not improbable that the great manufactory might have
become an important or even a dominant feature of the woollen trade as
early as the sixteenth century, if legislative enactments had not
stood in the way.[49] As it was, these earlier centralising forces,
while they drove the workers to work and live in closer and compacter
masses, did not at first dispose them in factories to any great
extent. They continued for the most part to work in their own houses,
though for material and sometimes for the implements of their craft
they were dependent upon some merchant or large master-manufacturer.
This was the condition of industry in the neighbourhood of Leeds in
1725. "The houses are not scattered and dispersed as in the vicarage
of Halifax, one by one, but in villages, and those houses thronged
with people and the whole country infinitely populous."[50] In the
more highly-developed branches of the cloth trade, however, where the
best looms were a relatively costly form of capital, the foundation of
the factory system was clearly laid. In Norwich, Frome, Taunton,
Devizes, Stourbridge, and other clothing centres, Defoe found the
weaving industry highly concentrated, and rich employers owning
considerable numbers of looms. Some of this work was put out by the
master-manufacturers, but other work was done in large sheds or other
premises owned by the master. This large organised "business," half
factory, half domestic, continued to prevail in the important West of
England clothing industry up to the close of the eighteenth century.
"The master clothier of the West of England buys his wool from the
importer, if it be foreign, or in the fleece if it be of domestic
growth; after which, in all the different processes through which it
passes, he is under the necessity of employing as many distinct
classes of persons; sometimes working in their own houses, sometimes
in that of the master clothier, but none of them going out of their
proper line. Each class of workman, however, acquires great skill in
performing its particular operation, and hence may have arisen the
acknowledged excellence, and, till of late, the superiority of the
cloths of the West of England."[51]
So again, in the cotton industry of Lancashire, the hold which the
merchants had got over the weavers by supplying them with warp and
weft led in some cases, before the middle of the century, to the
establishment of small factories containing a score or two of looms,
in which hired men were employed to weave. A little later, though long
before steam power, Arthur Young finds a factory at Darlington with
over fifty looms, a factory at Boynton with 150 workers, and a silk
mill at Sheffield with 152 workers. Even where the final step of
substituting the factory for the home had not been taken the
subordination of the handicraftsman to the master who provided the
materials and paid the wages was tolerably complete. By the middle of
the century the free artisan was gradually passing into the condition
of a hired "hand." Improved means of communication were beginning to
expand the area of the market, enlarged businesses enabled labour to
be profitably divided, and required a more effective control over the
workers than could be obtained over a scattered population of
agricultural manufacturers.
Sec. 13. Regarding the Business as a combination of Labour and Capital,
we perceive that one strongly distinctive characteristic of the
pre-machinery age is the small proportion which capital bears to
labour in the industrial unit. It is this fact that enabled the
"domestic" worker to hold his own so long in so many industries as the
owner of a separate business. So long as the mechanical arts are
slightly developed and tools are simple, the proportion of "fixed
capital" to the business is small and falls within the means of the
artisan who plies his craft in his home. So long as tools are simple,
the processes of manufacture are slow, therefore the quantity of raw
material and other "circulating capital" is small and can also be
owned by the worker. The growing divorcement in the ownership of
capital and labour in the industrial unit will be found to be a direct
and most important result of those improvements in mechanical arts
which, by continually increasing the proportion of capital to labour
in a business, placed capital more and more beyond the possession of
those who supplied the labour power required to co-operate in
production.
In the middle of last century there were very few instances of a
manufacturing business in which a large capital was engaged, or in
which the capital stood to the labour in anything like modern
proportion. It was indeed the merchant and not the manufacturer who
represented the most advanced form of Capitalism in the eighteenth
century. Long before Dr. Johnson's discovery that "an English merchant
is a new species of gentleman," Defoe had noted the rise of
merchant-princes in the Western clothing trades, observing that "many
of the great families who now pass for gentry in these counties have
been originally raised from and built out of this truly noble
manufacture."[52] These wealthy _entrepreneurs_ were sometimes spoken
of as "manufacturers," though they had no claim either upon the old or
the new signification of that name. They neither wrought with their
hands nor did they own machinery and supervise the labour which worked
with it. They were, as has been shown above, merchant-middlemen. The
clothing trade being the most highly developed, evolved several
species of middlemen, including under that term all collectors and
distributors of the raw material or finished goods.
(_a_) One important class of "factors" engaged themselves in buying
wool from farmers and selling it to clothiers, and appear to have
sometimes exercised an undue and tyrannous control over the latter by
an unscrupulous manipulation of the credit system which was growing up
in trade.[53]
(_b_) The "clothiers" themselves must be regarded in large measure as
middleman-collectors, analogous in function to the distributors, who
still rank as one of the grades of middlemen in the cheap clothing
trade of London to-day.[54]
(_c_) After the cloth was made three classes of middlemen were engaged
in forwarding it to the retailer--(1) travelling merchants or
wholesale dealers who attended the big fairs or the markets at Leeds,
Halifax, Exeter, etc., and made large purchases, conveying the goods
on pack-horses over the country to the retail trader; (2) middlemen
who sold on commission through London factors and warehousemen, who in
their turn disposed of the goods to shopkeepers or to exporters; (3)
merchants directly engaged in the export trade.
With the exception of shipping and canal transport (which became
important after the middle of the century) there were no considerable
industries related to manufacture where large capitals were laid down
in fixed plant. Even the capital sunk in permanent improvements of
land, which played so important a part in the development of
agriculture, belonged chiefly to the latter years of the eighteenth
century. Almost the only persons who wielded large capitals within the
country were those merchants, dealers, or middlemen, whose capital at
any given time consisted of a large stock of raw material or finished
goods. Even the latter were considerably restricted in the magnitude
of their transactions by the imperfect development of the machinery of
finance and the credit system. In 1750 there were not more than twelve
bankers' shops out of London.[55] Until 1759 the Bank of England
issued no notes of less value than L20.
Joint-ownership of capital and effective combination of the labour
units in a business were only beginning to make progress. The Funded
Debt, the Bank of England, the East India Company were the only
examples of really large and safe investments at the opening of the
eighteenth century. Joint-ownership of large capitals for business
purposes made no great progress before the middle of the eighteenth
century, except in the case of chartered companies for foreign trade,
such as the East India Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, the Turkish,
Russian, Eastland, and African companies. Insurance business became a
favourite form of joint-stock speculation in the reign of George I.
The extraordinary burst of joint-stock enterprise culminating in the
downfall of the South Sea Company shows clearly the narrow limitations
for sound capitalist co-operation. Even foreign trade on joint-stock
lines could only be maintained successfully on condition that the
competition of private adventurers was precluded.
Joint-capital had yet made no inroad into manufacture, one of the
earliest instances being a company formed in 1764 with a capital of
L100,000 for manufacturing fine cambrics.[56]
The limits of co-operative capitalism at the opening of the period of
Industrial Revolution are indicated by Adam Smith in a passage of
striking significance:--"The only trades which it seems possible for a
joint-stock company to carry on successfully, without an exclusive
privilege, are those of which all the operations are capable of being
reduced to what is called a routine, or to such a uniformity of method
as admits of little or no variation. Of this kind is, first, the
banking trade; secondly, the trade of insurance from fire and from sea
risk and capture in time of war; thirdly, the trade of making and
maintaining a navigable cut or canal; and fourthly, the similar trade
of bringing water for the supply of a great city."[57]
In other words, the businesses amenable to joint-stock enterprise are
those where skilled management can be reduced to a minimum, and where
the scale of the business or the possession of a natural monopoly
limits or prohibits competition from outside.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] A. Smith, _Wealth of Nations_, Bk. iv., chap. i.
[4] Macpherson, _Annals of Commerce_, vol. ii. p. 728.
[5] Smith, _Memoirs_, vol. ii., chap. iii. As the approximate
calculation of a very competent business man these figures are more
reliable than the official figures of imports and exports, the value
of which throughout the eighteenth century is seriously impaired by
the fact that they continued to be estimated by the standard of values
of 1694.
[6] Whitworth's _State_ quoted, Macpherson, vol. iii. p. 283.
[7] _Annals_, vol. iii. p. 340.
[8] Cunningham, _History of English Industry_, vol. ii. p. 287, etc.
[9] Smith, _Memoirs of Wool_, vol. ii. p. 113.
[10] Chalmers, _Estimates_, p. 148.
[11] Cf. Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry_, vol. ii. p. 292.
[12] Smith, _Wealth of Nations_, Bk. iv., chap. viii.
[13] _Ibid._
[14] _Growth of English Industry_, vol. ii. p. 303.
[15] Macpherson, _Annals_, vol. iii. pp. 155, 156.
[16] Chalmers, _Estimate_, p. 208. See, however, Baines, who gives a
slightly smaller estimate, _History of the Cotton Manufacture_, p.
112.
[17] Macpherson, _Annals_, vol. iii. p. 114.
[18] _Ibid._, vol. iii. p. 73.
[19] _Ibid._, vol. iii. p. 73.
[20] Smith, _Memoirs of Wool_, vol. ii. pp. 19, 45.
[21] Smith, _ibid._, vol. ii. p. 270; cf. also Cunningham, _Growth of
English Industry_, vol. ii. p. 300.
[22] Toynbee, _Industrial Revolution_, p. 50.
[23] Schulze-Gaevernitz, _Der Grossbetrieb_, p. 77.
[24] Defoe, _Tour_, vol. ii. p. 371.
[25] _Ibid._, vol. ii. p. 370.
[26] Chalmers, pp. 124, 125.
[27] Defoe, _Tour_, vol. iii. p. 9, etc.
[28] Smith, _Wealth of Nations_, vol. i., chap. x., part 2.
[29] Defoe, _Tour_, vol. iii. p. 84.
[30] Scrivener, _History of the Iron Trade._
[31] Defoe, _Tour_, vol. ii. p. 323.
[32] Schulze-Gaevernitz, _Der Grossbetrieb_, p. 52.
[33] Cf. Marshall, _Principles_, p. 328. In the case of Staffordshire,
however, there existed an early trade in wooden platters dependent on
quality of timber and traditional skill. When the arts of pottery came
in, the new trade taken up in the same locality ousted the old, though
there was no particular local advantage in materials.
[34] Smith, _Wealth of Nations_, Book III., chap. iii.
[35] Westmoreland coal did not compete in the Newcastle
market,--_Wealth of Nations_, Book I., chap. xi. p. 2.
[36] Adam Smith, writing later in the century, observes with some
exaggeration, "A merchant, it has been said very properly, is not
necessarily the citizen of a particular country. It is in a great
measure indifferent to him from what place he carries on his trade,
and a very trifling disgust will make him remove his capital, and
together with it all the industry which it supports, from one country
to another."--Book III., chap. iv.
[37] Defoe, vol. ii. p. 37.
[38] _Ibid._, vol. ii. p. 17.
[39] _Annals of Agriculture_, chap. iv. p. 157.
[40] Defoe, vol. iii. pp. 78, 79.
[41] Cf. Burnley, _Wool and Wool-combing_, p. 417.
[42] Smith, _Memoirs of Wool_, vol. ii. p. 297.
[43] Ure, _History of the Cotton Manufacture_, vol. i. p. 224.
[44] James, _History of the Worsted Manufacture_, p. 323 (quoted
Taylor, _The Modern Factory System_, p. 61).
[45] Baines, _History of the County Palatine of Lancashire_, vol. ii.
p. 413.
[46] Ure, _History of Cotton Manufacture_, vol. i. p. 224, etc.
[47] Dr. Aikin, _History of Manchester_ (quoted Baines, p. 406).
[48] Taylor, _The Modern Factory System_, p. 69.
[49] _Economic History_, vol. ii. p. 237.
[50] Defoe, _Tour_, vol. iii. p. 89.
[51] _Report from the Committee on the Woollen Manufacture of
England_, (1806).
[52] _Tour_, vol. ii. p. 35.
[53] For an interesting account of the cunning devices of "factors"
see Smith's _Memoirs of Wool_, vol. ii. p. 311, etc.
[54] Cf. Booth, _Labour and Life of the People_, vol. i. p. 486, etc.
[55] Toynbee, _Industrial Revolution_, p. 55.
[56] Cunningham, vol. ii. p. 350.
[57] _Wealth of Nations_, Bk. V., chap. i., part 3.
CHAPTER III.
THE ORDER OF DEVELOPMENT OF MACHINE INDUSTRY.
Sec. 1. _A Machine differentiated from a Tool._
Sec. 2. _Machinery in Relation to the Character of Human Labour._
Sec. 3. _Contributions of Machinery to Productive Power._
Sec. 4. _Main Factors in Development of Machine Industry._
Sec. 5. _Importance of Cotton-trade in Machine Development._
Sec. 6. _History refutes the "Heroic" Theory of Invention._
Sec. 7. _Application of Machinery to other Textile Work._
Sec. 8. _Reverse order of Development in Iron Trades._
Sec. 9. _Leading Determinants in the General Application of
Machinery and Steam-Motor._
Sec. 10. _Order of Development of modern Industrial Methods in the
several Countries--Natural, Racial, Political, Economic._
Sec. 1. It appears that in the earlier eighteenth century, while there
existed examples of various types of industrial structure, the
domestic system in its several phases may be regarded as the
representative industrial form. The object of this chapter is to
examine the nature of those changes in the mechanical arts which
brought about the substitution of machine-industry conducted in
factories or large workshops for the handicrafts conducted within the
home or in small workshops, with the view of discovering the economic
bearing of these changes.
A full inductive treatment would perhaps require this inquiry to be
prefaced by a full history of the inventions which in the several
industries mark the rise of the factory system and the adoption of
capitalist methods. This, however, is beyond the scope of the present
work, nor does it strictly belong to our scientific purpose, which is
not to write the narrative of the industrial revolution, but to bring
such analysis to bear upon the records of industrial changes as shall
enable us to clearly discern the laws of those changes.
The central position occupied by machinery as the chief material
factor in the modern evolution of industry requires that a distinct
answer should be given to the question, What is machinery?
In distinguishing a machine from a mere tool or handicraft implement
it is desirable to pay special attention to two points, complexity of
structure and the activity of man in relation to the machine. Modern
machinery in its most developed shape consists, as Karl Marx points
out, of three parts, which, though mechanically connected, are
essentially distinct, the motor mechanism, the transmitting mechanism,
and the tool or working machine.
"The motor mechanism is that which puts the whole in motion. It either
generates its own motive power, like the steam-engine, the caloric
engine, the electro-magnetic machine, etc., or it receives its impulse
from some already existing natural force, like the water-wheel from a
head of water, the windmill from wind, etc. The transmitting
mechanism, composed of fly-wheels, shafting, toothed wheels, pullies,
straps, ropes, bands, pinions, and gearing of the most varied kind,
regulates the motion, changes its form where necessary, as, for
instance, from linear to circular, and divides and distributes it
among the working machines. These two first parts of the whole
mechanism are there solely for putting the working machines in motion,
by means of which motion the subject of labour is seized upon and
modified as desired."[58]
Although the development of modern machinery is largely concerned with
motor and transmitting mechanisms, it is to the working machine we
must look in order to get a clear idea of the differences between
machines and tools. A tool may be quite simple in form and action as a
knife, a needle, a saw, a roller, a hammer, or it may embody more
complex thought in its construction, more variety in its movement, and
call for the play of higher human skill. Such tools or implements are
the hand-loom, the lathe, the potter's-wheel. To these tools man
stands in a double relation. He is handicraftsman in that he guides
and directs them by his skill within the scope of activity to which
they are designed. He also furnishes by his muscular activity the
motive force with which the tool is worked. It is the former of these
two relations which differentiates the tool from the machine. When the
tool is removed from the direct and individual guidance of the
handicraftsman and placed in a mechanism which governs its action by
the prearranged motion of some other tool or mechanical implement, it
ceases to be a tool and becomes part of a machine. The economic
advantage of the early machines consisted chiefly in the economy of
working in combined action a number of similar tools by the agency of
a single motor. In the early machine the former tool takes its place
as a central part, but its movements are no longer regulated by the
human touch.[59] The more highly evolved modern machinery generally
represents an orderly sequence of processes by which mechanical unity
is given to the labour once performed by a number of separate
individuals, or groups of individuals with different sorts of tools.
But the economy of the earlier machines was generally of a different
character. For the most part it consisted not in the harmonious
relation of a number of different processes, but rather in a
multiplication of the same process raised sometimes to a higher size
and speed by mechanical contrivances. So the chief economic value of
the earlier machinery applied to spinning consisted in the fact that
it enabled each spinner to work an increased number of spindles,
performing with each the same simple process as that which he formerly
performed with one. In other cases, however, the element of
multiplication was not present, and the prime economy of the machine
consisted in the superior skill, regularity, pace, or economy of power
obtained by substituting mechanical direction of the tool for close
and constant human direction. In modern machinery the sewing-machine
illustrates the latter, as the knife-cleaning machine illustrates the
former.
The machine is inherently a more complex structure than the tool,
because it must contain within itself the mechanical means for working
a tool, or even for the combined working of many tools, which formerly
received their direction from man. In using a tool man is the direct
agent, in using a working machine the transmitting mechanism is the
direct agent, so far as the character of the several acts of
production is not stamped upon the form of the working machine itself.
The man placed in charge of a machine determines whether it shall act,
but only within very narrow limits how it shall act. The two
characteristics here brought out in the machine, complexity of action
and self-direction or automatic character, are in reality the
objective and subjective expression of the same factor--namely, the
changed relation of man towards the work in which he co-operates.
Some of the directing or mental effort, skill, art, thought, must be
taken over, that is to say, some of the processes must be guided not
directly by man but by other processes, in order to constitute a
machine. A machine thus becomes a complex tool in which some of the
processes are relatively fixed, and are not the direct expression of
human activity. A machinist who feeds a machine with material may be
considered to have some control over the pace and character of the
first process, but only indirectly over the later processes, which are
regulated by fixed laws of their construction which make them
absolutely dependent on the earlier processes. A machine is in the
nature of its work largely independent of the individual control of
the "tender," because it is in its construction the expression of the
individual control and skill of the inventor. A machine, then, may be
described as a complex tool with a fixed relation of processes
performed by its parts. Even here we cannot profess to have reached a
definition which enables us in all cases to nicely discriminate
machine from tool. It is easy to admit that a spade is a tool and not
a machine, but if a pair of scissors, a lever, or a crane are tools,
and are considered as performing single simple processes, and not a
number of organically relative processes, we may by a skilfully
arranged gradation be led on to include the whole of machinery under
tools. This difficulty is of course one which besets all work of
definition.
But while it is not easy by attention to complexity of structure
always to distinguish a tool from a machine, nothing is gained by
making the differentia of a machine to consist in the use of a steam
or other non-human motor.
A vast amount of modern machinery is of course directed not to
combining tools or series of productive processes upon which the
productive skill of man is closely engaged, but to substituting other
motors for the muscular power of man. But though certain tools as well
as certain forms of human effort are here replaced by machines, these
tools are not commonly embodied in the machinery for generating and
transmitting the new force, so that the mere consideration of the
different part played by the worker in generating productive force
does not assist us to distinguish a machine from a tool. A
type-writer, a piano, which receive their impulse from the human
muscles, must evidently be included among machines. It is indeed true
that these, like others of the same order, are exceptional machines,
not merely in that the motive power is derived more essentially from
human muscles, but in that the _raison d'etre_ of the mechanism has
been to provide scope for human skill and not to destroy it. But
though it is true that a high degree of skill may be imparted to the
first process of the working of a piano or type-writer, it is none the
less true that the "tool," the implement which strikes the sound or
makes the written mark, is not under immediate control of human touch.
The skill is confined to an early process, and the mechanism as a
whole must be classed under machinery. Nothing would indeed be gained
in logical distinctness if we were to abandon our earlier differentia
of the machine and confine that term to such mechanical appliances as
derived their power from non-human sources--the fact which commonly
marks off modern from earlier forms of machine production. For we
should find that this substitution of non-human for human power was
also a matter of degree, and that the most complex steam-driven
machinery of to-day cannot entirely dispense with some directing
impulse of human muscular activity, such as the shovelling of coal
into a furnace, though the tendency is ever to reduce the human effort
to a minimum in the attainment of a given output.
This consideration of the difficulties attending exact definitions of
machinery is not idle, for it leads to a clearer recognition of the
nicely graded evolution which has changed the character of modern
industry, not by a catastrophic substitution of radically different
methods, but by the continuous steady development of certain elements,
common to all sorts of industrial activity, and a corresponding
continuous degeneration of certain other elements.
Sec. 2. The growth of machine-industry then may be measured by the
increased number and complexity of the processes related to one
another in the mechanical unit or machine, and by a corresponding
shrinkage of the dependence of the product upon the skill and volition
of the human being who tends or co-operates with the machine. Every
product made by tool or machine is _qua_ industrial product or
commodity the expression of the thought and will of man; but as
machine-production becomes more highly developed, more and more of the
thought and will of the inventor, less and less of that of the
immediate human agent or machine-tender is expressed in the product.
But it is evidently not enough to say that the labour-saving machine
has merely substituted the stored and concentrated effort of the
inventor for that labour of the handicraftsman which is saved. This
would be to ignore the saving of muscular power due to the
substitution of forces of nature--water, steam, electricity, etc., for
the painful effort of man. It is the thought of the inventor, plus the
action of various mechanical and other physical forces, which has
saved the labour of man in the production of a commodity. The further
question--how far this saving of labour in respect of a given
commodity is compensated by the increased number of commodities to
which human labour is applied--is a consideration which belongs to a
later chapter.
In tracing the effect of the application of modern machinery to
English industry there appear two prominent factors, which for certain
purposes require separate treatment--the growth of improved mechanical
apparatus, and the evolution of extra-human motor power.
We speak of the industry which has prevailed since the middle of the
eighteenth century as machine-production, not because there were no
machines before that time, but firstly, because a vast acceleration in
the invention of complex machinery applied to almost all industrial
arts dates from that period, and secondly, because the application
upon an extensive scale of non-human motor powers manifested itself
then for the first time.
One important external effect and indication of the momentous
character of these changes is to be found in the quickening of that
operation, the beginning of which was observable before the great
inventions, the substitution of the Factory System for the Domestic
System.
The peculiar relation of Machinery to the Factory System consists in
the fact that the size, expensiveness, and complexity of machinery on
the one hand, and the use of non-human power on the other hand, were
forces which united to drive labour from the home workshop to the
large specialised workshop--the Factory.
"The water frame, the carding engine, and the other machines which
Arkwright brought out in a finished state, required both more space
than could be found in a cottage, and more power than could be applied
by the human arm. Their weight also rendered it necessary to place
them in strongly-built walls, and they also could not be
advantageously turned by any power then known but that of water.
Further, the use of machinery was accompanied by a greater division of
labour, and therefore a greater co-operation was requisite to bring
all the processes of production into harmony and under a central
superintendence."[60] Hence the growth of machine-production is to a
large extent synonymous with the growth of the modern Factory System.
Sec. 3. Man does his work by moving matter. Hence machinery can only aid
him by increasing the motive power at his disposal.
(1) Machinery enables forces of man or nature to be more effectively
applied by various mechanical contrivances composed of levers,
pulleys, wedges, screws, etc.
(2) Machinery enables man to obtain the use of various motor forces
outside his body--wind, water, steam, electricity, chemical action,
etc.[61]
Thus by the provision of new productive forces, and by the more
economical application of all productive forces, machinery improves
the industrial arts.
Machinery can increase the scope of man's productive ability in two
ways. The difficulty of concentrating a large mass of human force upon
a given point at the same time provides certain quantitative limits to
the productive efficiency of the human body. The steam-hammer can
perform certain work which is quantitatively outside the limit of the
physical power of any number of men working with simple tools and
drawing their motor power from their own bodies. The other limit to
the productive power of man arises from the imperfect continuity of
human effort and the imperfect command of its direction. The
difficulty of maintaining a small, even, accurate pressure, or a
precise repetition of the same movement, is rather a qualitative than
a purely quantitative limit. The superior certainty and regularity of
machinery enables certain work to be done which man alone could not do
or could do less perfectly. The work of the printing machine could not
be achieved by man. Machinery has improved the texture and quality of
certain woollen goods;[62] recent improvements in milling result in
improved quality of flour and so on. Machinery can also do work which
is too fine or delicate for human fingers, or which would require
abnormal skill if executed by hand. Economy of time, which Babbage[63]
accounts a separate economy, is rightly included in the economies just
named. The greater rapidity with which certain manufacturing
processes--_e.g._, dyeing--can be achieved arises from the superior
concentration and continuity of force possible under machinery. All
advantages arising from rapid transport are assignable to the same
causes.
The continuity and regularity of machine work are also reflected in
certain economies of measurement. The faculty of self-registering,
which belongs potentially to all machinery, and which is more utilised
every day, performs several services which may be summed up by saying
that they enable us to know exactly what is going on. When to
self-registration is applied the faculty of self-regulation, within
certain limits a new economy of force and knowledge is added. But
machinery can also register and regulate the expenditure of human
power. Babbage well says:--"One of the most singular advantages we
derive from machinery is in the check which it affords against the
inattention, the idleness, or the knavery of human agents."[64] This
control of the machine over man has certain results which belong to
another aspect of machine economy.[65]
These are the sources of all the improvements of economies imputed to
machine-production. All improvements in machinery, as applied to
industrial arts, take therefore one of the following forms:--
(1) Re-arrangement or improvement of machinery so as to utilise more
fully the productive power of nature or man. Improvements enabling one
man to tend more spindles, or enabling the same engine at the same
boiler-pressure to turn more wheels, belong to this order of
improvement.
(2) Economies in the source of power. These will fall under four
heads--
1. Substitution of cheaper for dearer kinds of human power.
Displacement of men's labour by women's or children's.
2. Substitution of mechanical power for human power. Most
great improvements in the "labour-saving" character of
machinery properly come under this head.
3. Economies in fuel or in steam. The most momentous
illustration is the adoption of the hot blast and the
substitution of raw coal for coke in the iron trade.[66]
4. The substitution of a new mechanical motor for an old one
derived from the same or from different stores of
energy--_e.g._, steam for water power, natural gas for
steam.
(3) Extended application of machinery. New industrial arts owing their
origin to scientific inventions and their practice to machinery arise
for utilising waste products. Under "waste products" we may include
(_a_) natural materials, the services of which were not recognised or
could not be utilised without machinery--_e.g._, nitrates and other
"waste" products of the soil; (_b_) the refuse of manufacturing
processes which figured as "waste" until some unsuspected use was
found for it. Conspicuous examples of this economy are found in many
trades. During the interval between great new inventions in machinery
or in the application of power many of the principal improvements are
of this order. Gas tar, formerly thrown into rivers so as to pollute
them, or mixed with coal and burnt as fuel, is now "raw material for
producing beautiful dyes, some of our most valued medicines, a
saccharine substance three hundred times sweeter than sugar, and the
best disinfectants for the destruction of germs of disease." "The
whole of the great industries of dyeing and calico-printing have been
revolutionised by the new colouring matters obtained from the old
waste material gas tar."[67] These economies both in fuel and in the
utilisation of waste material are largely due to the increased scale
of production which comes with the development of machine industry.
Many waste products can only be utilised where they exist in large
quantities.
Sec. 4. If we trace historically the growth of modern capitalist
economies in the several industries we shall find that they fall
generally into three periods--
1. The period of earlier mechanical inventions, marking the
displacement of domestic by factory industry.
2. The evolution of the new motor in manufacture. The
application of steam to the manufacturing processes.
3. The evolution of steam locomotion, with its bearing on
industry.
As these periods are not materially exclusive, so also there are close
economic relations subsisting between the development of machinery and
motor, and between the improvements in manufacture and in the
transport industry. But in order to understand the nature of the
irregularity which is discernible in the history of the development of
machinery, it is essential to consider these factors both separately
and in the historical and economic relation they stand to each other.
For this purpose we will examine two large staple industries, the
textile and the iron industries of England, in order that we may trace
in the chief steps of their progress the laws of the evolution of
modern machinery.
The textile industry offers special facilities to such a study. The
strongest and most widespread of English manufactures, it furnishes in
the early eighteenth century the clearest examples of the several
forms of industry. To the several branches of this industry the
earliest among the great inventions were applied. This start in
industrial development has been maintained, so that the most advanced
forms of the modern factory are found in textile industry. Moreover,
the close attention which has been given to, and the careful records
which have been kept of certain branches of this work, in particular
the Lancashire cotton industry, enable us to trace the operation of
the new industrial forces here with greater precision than is the case
with any other industry. As Schulze-Gaevernitz, in his masterly study,
says of the cotton industry--"The English cotton industry is not only
the oldest, but is in many respects that modern industry which
manifests most clearly the characteristics of modern industrial
methods, both in their economic and their social relations."[68]
The iron industry has been selected on the ground of its close
connection with the application of steam-driven machinery to the
several industries. It is in a sense the most fundamental industry of
modern times, inasmuch as it furnishes the material environment of the
great modern economic forces. Moreover, we have the advantage of
tracing the growth of the iron manufacture _ab ovo_, for, as we have
seen, before the industrial revolution it played a most insignificant
part in English commerce.
Lastly, a study of the relations between the growth of the iron and
the textile industries will be of special service in assisting us to
realise the character of the interaction of the several manufactures
under the growing integration of modern industry.[69]
Sec. 5. In observing the order of inventions applied to textile
industries, the first point of significance is that cotton, a small
industry confined to a part of Lancashire, and up to 1768 dependent
upon linen in order to furnish a complete cloth, should take the lead.
The woollen trades, in the first half of the eighteenth century, as
we saw, engaged the attention of a vastly larger number of persons,
and played a much more important part in our commerce. The silk trade
had received new life from the flow of intelligent French workers, and
the first modern factory with elaborate machinery was that set up for
silk throwing by Lombe. Yet by far the larger number of the important
textile inventions of the eighteenth century were either applied in
the first instance to the cotton manufacture and transferred,
sometimes after a lapse of many years, to the woollen, worsted, and
other textile trades, or being invented for woollen trades, proved
unsuccessful until applied to cotton.[70]
Although the origin and application of inventive genius is largely
independent of known laws, and may provisionally be relegated to the
domain of "accident," there are certain reasons which favoured the
cotton industry in the industrial race. Its concentration in South
Lancashire and Staffordshire, as compared with the wide diffusion of
the woollen industries, facilitated the rapid acceptance of new
methods and discoveries. Moreover, the cotton industry being of later
origin, and settling itself in unimportant villages and towns, had
escaped the influence of official regulations and customs which
prevailed in the woollen centres and proved serious obstacles to the
introduction of new industrial methods.[71] Even in Lancashire itself
official inspectors regulated the woollen trade at Manchester,
Rochdale, Blackburn, and Bury.[72]
The cotton industry had from the beginning been free from all these
fetters. The shrewd, practical business character which marks
Lancashire to-day is probably a cause as well as a result of the great
industrial development of the last hundred years.
Moreover, it was recognised, even before the birth of the great
inventions, that cotton goods, when brought into free competition with
woollen goods, could easily undersell them and supplant them in
popular consumption. This knowledge held out a prospect of untold
fortune to inventors who should, by the application of machinery,
break through the limitations imposed upon production by the
restricted number of efficient workers in some of the processes
through which the cotton yarn must pass.
But the stimulus which one invention afforded to another gave an
accumulative power to the application of new methods. This is
especially seen in the alternation of inventions in the two chief
processes of spinning and weaving.
Even before the invention of John Kay's Fly Shuttle, which doubled the
quantity of work a weaver could do in a day, we found that spinners
had great difficulties in supplying sufficient yarn to the weavers.
This seems to have applied both to the Lancashire cotton and to the
Yorkshire woollen manufactures. After the fly-shuttle had come into
common use this pressure of demand upon the spinners was obviously
increased, and the most skilful organisation of middleman-clothiers
was unable to supply sufficient quantities of yarn. This economic
consideration directed more and more attention to experiments in
spinning machinery, and so we find that, long before the invention of
the jenny and the water-frame, ingenious men like John Kay of Bury,
Wyatt, Paul, and others had tried many patents for improved spinning.
The great inventions of Hargreaves and Arkwright and Crompton enabled
spinning to overtake and outstrip weaving and when, about 1790, steam
began to be applied to considerable numbers of spinning mills, it was
no longer spinning but weaving that was the limiting process in the
manufacture of woollen and cotton cloths.
This strain upon weaving, which had been tightening through the period
of the great spinning improvements, acted as a special incentive to
Cartwright, Horrocks, and others to perfect the power-loom in its
application, first to woollen, then to cotton industries. Not until
well into the nineteenth century, when steam power had been fully
applied by many minor improvements, were the arts of spinning and
weaving brought fully into line. The complete factory, where the
several processes of carding, spinning, weaving (and even dyeing and
finishing), are conducted under the same roof and worked in
correspondence with one another, marks the full transition from the
earlier form of domestic industry, where the family performed with
simple tools their several processes under the domestic roof.[73]
Sec. 6. The history of these textile inventions does a good deal to
dispel the "heroic" theory of invention--that of an idea flashing
suddenly from the brain of a single genius and effecting a rapid
revolution in a trade. No one of the inventions which were greatest in
their effect, the jenny, the water-frame, the mule, the power-loom,
was in the main attributable to the effort or ability of a single man;
each represented in its successful shape the addition of many
successive increments of discovery; in most cases the successful
invention was the slightly superior survivor of many similar attempts.
"The present spinning machinery which we now use is supposed to be a
compound of about eight hundred inventions. The present carding
machinery is a compound of about sixty patents."[74] This is the
history of most inventions. The pressure of industrial circumstances
direct the intelligence of many minds towards the comprehension of
some single central point of difficulty, the common knowledge of the
age induces many to reach similar solutions: that solution which is
slightly better adapted to the facts or "grasps the skirts of happy
chance" comes out victorious, and the inventor, purveyor, or, in some
cases, the robber is crowned as a great inventive genius. It is the
neglect of these considerations which gives a false interpretation to
the annals of industrial invention by giving an irregular and
catastrophic appearance to the working of a force which is in its
inner pressure much more regular than in its outward expression. The
earlier increments of a great industrial invention make no figure in
the annals of history because they do not pay, and the final increment
which reaches the paying-point gets all the credit, though the
inherent importance and the inventive genius of the earlier attempts
may have been as great or greater.
There is nothing fortuitous or mysterious in inventive energy.
Necessity is its mother, which simply means that it moves along the
line of least resistance. Men like Kay, Hargreaves, Arkwright,
Cartwright, set their intelligence and industry to meet the several
difficulties as they arose. Nearly all the great textile inventors
were practical men, most of them operatives immersed in the details of
their craft, brought face to face continually with some definite
difficulty to be overcome, some particular economy desirable to make.
Brooding upon these concrete facts, trying first one thing then
another, learning from the attempts and failures made by other
practical men, and improving upon these attempts, they have at length
hit upon some contrivance that will get over the definite difficulty
and secure the particular economy. If we take any definite invention
and closely investigate it, we shall find in nearly every case it has
thus grown by small increments towards feasibility. Scientific men,
strictly so-called, have had very little to do with these great
discoveries. Among the great textile inventors, Cartwright alone was a
man leading a life of thought.[75] When the spinning machinery was
crippled in its efficiency by the crude methods of carding, Lees and
Arkwright set themselves to apply improvements suggested by
common-sense and experience; when Cartwright's power-loom had been
successfully applied to wool, Horrocks and his friends thought out
precisely those improvements which would render it remunerative in the
cotton trade.
Thus in a given trade where there are several important processes, an
improvement in one process which places it in front of the others
stimulates invention in the latter, and each in its turn draws such
inventive intelligence as is required to bring it into line with the
most highly-developed process. Since the later inventions, with new
knowledge and new power behind them, often overshoot the earlier ones,
we have a certain law of oscillation in the several processes which
maintains progress by means of the stimulus constantly applied by the
most advanced process which "makes the pace." There is nothing
mysterious in this. If one process remains behind in development each
increment of inventive effort successfully applied there brings a
higher remuneration than if applied to any of the more forward
processes. So the movement is amenable to the ordinary law of "Supply
and Demand" enforced by the usual economic motives. As the invention
of the fly-shuttle gave weaving the advantage, more and more attention
was concentrated upon the spinning processes and the jenny was
evolved; the deficiency of the jenny in spinning warp evolved the
water-frame, which for the first time liberated the cotton industry
from dependence upon linen warp: the demand for finer and more uniform
yarns stimulated the invention of the mule. These notable improvements
in spinning machinery, with their minor appendages, placed spinning
ahead of weaving, and stimulated the series of inventions embodied in
the power-loom. The power-loom was found to be of comparatively little
service until the earlier processes of dressing and sizing had been
placed on a level of machine development by the efforts of Horrocks
and others. Not until after 1841 was an equilibrium reached in the
development of the leading processes. So likewise each notable advance
in the machinery for the main processes has had the effect of bringing
an increase of inventive energy to bear upon the minor and the
subsidiary processes--bleaching, dyeing, printing, etc. Even now the
early process of "ginning" has not been brought fully into line in
spite of the prodigious efforts, made especially in the United States,
to overcome the difficulties involved in this preparatory stage of the
cotton industry.
The following schedule will serve to show the relation of the growth
of the cotton industry as measured by consumption of raw cotton to the
leading improvements of machinery.
Cotton Imported. Inventions &c.
lbs.
1730 1,545,472 1730 Wyatt's roller-spinning (patented
1738).
1738 Kay's fly-shuttle.
1741 1,645,031 1748 Paul's carding-machine (useless until
improved by Lees, Arkwright,
Wood, 1772-74).
1764 3,870,392 1764 Hargreave's spinning-jenny (patented
1770), for weft only.
1764 Calico-printing introduced into
Lancashire.
1768 Arkwright perfects Wyatt's
spinning-frame (patented 1769),
liberating cotton from dependence on
linen warp.
1771 }
to } 4,764,589 1771 Arkwright's mill built at Cromford.
1775 }
1775 Arkwright takes patents for carding,
drawing, roving, spinning.
1779 Crompton's mule completed (combining
jenny and water-frame, producing finer
and more even yarn).
1781 5,198,775
1785 18,400,384 1785 Cartwright's power-loom.
Watt and Boulton's first engine for
cotton-mills.
1792 34,907,497 1792 Whitney's saw-gin.
1813 51,000,000 1813 Horrocks' dressing-machine.
1830 261,200,000 1830 The "Throstle" (almost exclusively
used in England for spinning warp).
1832 287,800,000 1832 Roberts' self-acting mule perfected.
1841 489,900,000 1841 Bullough's improved power-loom.
Ring spinning (largely used in U.S.A.,
recently introduced into Lancashire).
From this schedule it is evident that the history of this trade may be
divided with tolerable accuracy into four periods.
(1) The preparatory period of experimental inventions of Wyatt, Paul,
etc., to the year 1770.
(2) 1770 to 1792 (_circa_), the age of the great mechanical
inventions.
(3) 1792 to 1830, the application of steam power to manufacture and
improvements of the great inventions.
(4) 1830 onward, the effect of steam locomotion upon the industry
(1830, the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway).
If we measure the operation of these several industrial forces within
these several periods, as they are reflected on the growing size of
the cotton industry, we shall realise the accumulative character of
the great industrial movement, and form some approximately accurate
conception of the relative importance of the development of mechanical
inventions and of the new motor-power.
Sec. 7. The history of the cotton industry is in its main outlines also
the history of other textile industries. We do not possess the same
means of measuring statistically the growth of the woollen industries
in the period of revolution; but since, on the one hand, many of the
spinning and weaving inventions were speedily adapted into the woollen
from the cotton industry, while the application of steam to
manufacture and the effects of steam locomotion were shared by the
older manufacture, the growth of the trade in the main conforms to the
same divisions of time. The figures of imported wool are not so
valuable a register as in the case of cotton, because no account is
taken of home-produce, but the following statistics of foreign and
colonial wool imported into England serve to throw light upon the
growth of our woollen manufactures.
STATISTICS OF WOOL IMPORTED INTO ENGLAND.
lbs. lbs.
1766 1,926,000 | 1830 32,305,000
1771 1,829,000 | 1840 49,436,000
1780 323,000 | 1850 74,326,000
1790 2,582,000 | 1860 151,218,000
1800 8,609,000 | 1870 263,250,000
1810 10,914,000 | 1880 463,309,000
1820 9,775,000 | 1892 743,046,104
In the silk industry the influence of machinery is complicated by
several considerations especially affecting this manufacture. Although
the ingenuity and enterprise of the Lombes had introduced complex
machinery into silk throwing many years before it was successfully
applied to any other branch of textile industry, the trade did not
grow as might have been expected, and the successive increments of
great mechanical invention were slowly and slightly applied to the
silk industry. There are special reasons for this, some of them
connected with the intrinsic value of the commodity, others with the
social regulation of the trade.
The inherent delicacy of many of the processes, the capricious
character of the market for the commodities, the expensive production
of which renders them a luxury and especially amenable to the shifts
of taste and fashion, have preserved for artistic handicraft the
production of many of the finer silk fabrics, or have permitted the
application of machinery in a far less degree than in the cotton and
woollen industries.
Moreover, the heavy duties imposed upon raw and thrown silk, which
accompanied the strict prohibition of the importation of manufactured
silk goods in 1765, by aggravating the expenses of production and
limiting the market at the very epoch of the great mechanical
inventions, prevented any notable expansion of consumption of silk
goods, and rendered them quite unable to resist the competition of the
younger and more enterprising cotton industry, which, after the
introduction of colour-printing early in the nineteenth century, was
enabled to out-compete silk in many markets.
Even in the coarser silk fabrics where weaving machinery was
successfully applied at an early date, the slow progress in "throwing"
greatly retarded the expansion of the trade, and after the repeal of
the duty on imported silk in 1826 the number of throwing mills was
still quite inadequate to keep pace with the demands of the
weavers.[76] Subsequent improvements in throwing mills, and the
application of the ingenious weaving machinery of Jacquard and later
improvers, have given a great expansion to many branches of the trade
in the last fifty years.
But the following statistics of the consumption of raw and thrown silk
from 1765 to 1844 indicate how slight and irregular was the expansion
of the trade in England during the era of the great inventions and the
application of the steam-motor, and how disastrously the duties upon
raw and thrown silks weighed upon this branch of manufacture.
AVERAGE IMPORTATION.[77]
lbs. lbs.
1765 } | 1823 2,468,121
1766 } 715,000 | 1824 4,011,048[78]
1767 } | 1825 3,604,058
1785 } | 1826 2,253,513
1786 } 881,000 | 1827 4,213,153
1787 } | 1828 4,547,812
1801 } | 1829 2,892,201
to } 1,110,000 | 1830 4,693,517
1812 } | 1831 4,312,330
1814 2,119,974 | 1832 4,373,247
1815 1,475,389 | 1833 4,761,543
1816 1,088,334 | 1834 4,522,451
1817 1,686,659 | 1835 5,788,458
1818 1,922,987 | 1836 6,058,423
1819 1,848,553 | 1837 4,598,859
1820 2,027,635 | 1838 4,790,256
1821 2,329,808 | 1839 4,665,944
1822 2,441,563 | 1840 4,819,262
In the linen industry the artificial encouragement given to the Irish
trade, which, bounty-fed and endowed with a monopoly of the British
markets, was naturally slow to adopt new methods of production, and
the uncertain condition of the English trade, owing to the strong
rivalry of cotton, prevented the early adoption of the new machine
methods. Although Adam Smith regarded linen as a promising industry,
it was still in a primitive condition. Not until the very end of the
eighteenth century were flax spinning mills established in England and
Scotland, and not until after 1830 was power-loom weaving introduced,
while the introduction of spinning machinery into Ireland upon a scale
adequate to supply the looms of that country took place a good deal
later.
We see that the early experimental period in the cotton industry
produced no very palpable effect upon the volume of the trade. Between
1700 and 1750 the manufacture was stagnant.[79] The woollen
manufacture, owing largely to the stimulus of the fly-shuttle, showed
considerable expansion. The great increase of cotton production in
1770-90 measures the force of the mechanical inventions without the
aid of the new motor. The full effects of the introduction of steam
power were retarded by the strain of the French war. Though 1800 marks
the beginning of a large continuous expansion in both cotton and
woollen manufactures, it was not until about 1817, when the new motor
had established itself generally in the large centres of industry and
the energy of the nation was called back to the arts of peace, that
the new forces began to fully manifest their power. The period 1840
onwards marks the effect of the revolution in commerce due to the
application of the new motor to transport purposes, the consequent
cheapening of raw material, especially of cotton, the opening up of
new markets for the purchase of raw material and for the sale of
manufactured goods. The effect of this diminished cost of production
and increased demand for manufactured goods upon the textile trades is
measured by the rapid pace of the expansion which followed the opening
of the early English railways and the first establishment of
steam-ship traffic.
Sec. 8. The development of the textile trades, and that of cotton in
particular, arose from the invention of new machinery. This machinery
was quickened and rendered effective by the new motor. The iron trade
in its development presents the reverse order. The discovery of a new
motor was the force which first gave it importance. The mechanical
inventions applied to producing iron were stimulated by the
requirements of the new motor.
In 1740 the difficulty of obtaining adequate supplies of timber, and
the failure of attempts to utilise pit-coal, had brought the iron
trade to a very low condition. According to Scrivener, at this time
"the iron trade seemed dwindling into insignificance and
contempt."[80]
The earlier steps in its rise from this degradation are measured by
the increased application of pit-coal and the diminished use of
charcoal.
The progress may be marked as follows:--
(1) The application of Watt's earlier improvements upon Newcomen's
engines, patented 1769, was followed by a rise in the average output
for furnaces worked with charcoal. The average output of 294 tons in
1750 was increased to 545 tons in 1788.
(2) The substitution of coke for charcoal proceeding _pari passu_ with
improved methods of smelting yielded an average output for coke-fed
furnaces of 903 tons in 1788. To this epoch belong also Cort's
inventions for puddling and rolling (patented 1783-84), which
revolutionised the production of bar-iron.
(3) The introduction of Watt's double-power engine in 1788-90. In 1796
the production of pig-iron was double that of 1788, and the average
output per furnace raised to 1048 tons.
(4) The substitution of hot for cold blast in 1829, effecting an
economy of coal to the extent of 2 tons 18 cwt. per ton of cast-iron.
(5) The adoption of raw coal instead of coke in 1833, effecting a
further reduction of expenditure of coal from 5 tons 3-1/2 cwt. to 2
tons 5-1/4 cwt. in producing a ton of cast-iron.
These were the leading events in the establishment of the iron
industry of this country. The following table indicates the growth of
the production of English iron from 1740 to 1840:--
Year. No. of Furnaces. Average Output. Total Produce.
Tons. Tons.
1740 59 294 17,350
1788 77 909 coke } 61,300
545 charcoal}
1796 121 1048 125,079
1806 133 1546 258,206
1825 364 2228 703,184
(261 in blast)
1828 365 2530
(277 in blast)
1839 378 3592 1,347,790
Here we see that economy of power rather than improved machinery is
the efficient cause of the development of industry, or more properly,
that economy of power precedes and stimulates the several steps in
improvement of machinery.
The substitution of coke for charcoal and the application of steam
power not merely increased enormously the volume of the trade, but
materially affected its localisation. Sussex and Gloucester, two of
the chief iron-producing counties when timber was the source of power,
had shrunk into insignificance by 1796, when facilities of obtaining
coal were a chief determinant. By 1796, it is noteworthy that the four
districts of Stafford, Yorkshire, South Wales, and Salop were to the
front.
The discovery of the hot blast and substitution of raw coal for coke
occurring contemporaneously with the opening of railway enterprise
mark the new interdependence of industries in the age of machinery.
Iron has become a foundation upon which every machine-industry alike
is built. The metal manufactures, so small in the eighteenth century,
attained an unprecedented growth and a paramount importance in the
nineteenth.
The application of machinery to the metal industries has led to an
output of inventive genius not less remarkable in this century than
the textile inventions of the eighteenth century.
"In textile manufacture it was improved machinery that first called
for a new motor; in metal manufacture it was the new motor which
rendered necessary improved machinery.... For all modern purposes the
old handicraft implements were clearly obsolete. The immediate result
of this requirement was the bringing to the front a number of
remarkable men, Brindley, Smeaton, Maudsley, Clements, Bramah,
Nasmyth, etc., to supply mechanism of a proportionate capacity and
nicety for the new motive-power to act upon and with, and the ultimate
result was the adoption of the modern factory system in the larger
tool-making and engineering workshops, as well as in metal
manufactories proper. Thus there gradually grew up," says Jevons, "a
system of machine-tool labour, the substitution of iron hands for
human hands, without which the execution of engines and machines in
their present perfection would be impossible."[81]
In the later era of machine development an accumulative importance is
attached to the improvements in the machine-making industries. The
great inventions associated with the names of Maudsley and Nasmyth,
the cheapening of steel by the Bessemer process, and the various steps
by which machines are substituted for hands in the making of
machinery, have indirect but rapid and important effects upon each and
every machine-industry engaged in producing commodities directly
adapted to human use. The economy of effort for industrial purposes
requires that a larger and larger proportion of inventive genius and
enterprise shall be directed to an interminable displacement of
handicraft by machinery in the construction of machinery, and a
smaller proportion to the relatively unimportant work of perfecting
manufacturing machinery in the detailed processes of each manufacture
engaged in the direct satisfaction of some human want.
A general survey of the growth of new industrial methods in the
textile and iron industries marks out three periods of abnormal
activity in the evolution of modern industry. The first is 1780 to
1795, when the fruits of early inventions are ripened by the effective
application of steam to the machine-industries. The second is 1830 to
1845, when industry, reviving after the European strife, utilised more
widely the new inventions, and expanded under the new stimulus of
steam locomotion. The third is 1856 to 1866 (_circa_), when the
construction of machinery by machinery became the settled rule of
industry.
Sec. 9. Bearing in mind how the invention of new specific forms of
machinery in the several processes of manufacture proceeds
simultaneously with the application of the new motor-power, we find
ourselves quite unable to measure the amount of industrial progress
due to each respectively. But seeing that the whole of modern industry
has thus been set upon a new foundation of coal and iron, it is
obvious that the bonds connecting such industries as the textile and
the iron must be continually growing closer and stronger. In earlier
times the interdependency of trades was slight and indirect, and the
progress in any given trade was almost wholly derived from
improvements in specific skill or in the application of specific
mechanical invention. The earlier eighteenth century did indeed
display an abnormal activity in these specific forms of invention. For
examples of these it is only necessary to allude to Lombe's silk mill
at Derby, the pin factory made famous by Adam Smith, Boulton's
hardware factory at Soho, and the renowned discoveries of Wedgwood.
But all increased productivity due to these specific improvements was
but slight compared with that which followed the discovery of steam as
a motor and the mechanical inventions rendering it generally
applicable, which marked the period 1790 to 1840. By this means the
several specific industries were drawn into closer unity, and found a
common basis or foundation in the arts of mining, iron-working, and
engineering which they lacked before.
From these considerations it will follow that the order in which the
several industries has fallen under the sway of modern industrial
methods will largely depend upon the facility they afford to the
application of steam-driven machinery. The following are some of the
principal characteristics of an industry which determine the order,
extent, and pace of its progress as a machine industry:--
(_a_) _Size and complexity of Structure._--The importance of the
several leading textile manufactures, the fact that some of them were
highly centralised and already falling under a factory system, the
control of wealthy and intelligent employers, were among the chief
causes which enabled the new machinery and the new motor to be more
quickly and successfully applied than in smaller, more scattered, and
less developed industries.
(_b_) _Fixity in quantity and character of demand._--Perfection of
routine-work is the special faculty of machine-production. Where there
is a steady demand for the same class of goods, machinery can be
profitably applied. Where fashion fluctuates, or the individual taste
of the consumer is a potent factor, machinery cannot so readily
undertake the work. In the textile industries there are many
departments which machinery has not successfully invaded. Much
lace-making, embroidery, certain finer weaving is still done by human
power, with or without the aid of complex machinery. In the more
skilled branches of tailoring, shoe-making, and other clothing trades,
the individual character of the demand--_i.e._, the element of
irregularity--has limited the use of machinery. A similar cause
retains human motor-power in certain cases to co-operate with and
control complex machinery, as in the use of the sewing-machine.
(_c_) _Uniformity of material and of the processes of
production._--Inherent irregularity in the material of labour is
adverse to machinery. For this reason the agricultural processes have
been slow to pass under steam-power, especially those directly
concerned with work on the soil, and even where steam-driven machines
are applied their economy, as compared with hand labour, is less
marked than in manufacturing processes. To the getting of coal and
other minerals steam and other extra-human power has been more slowly
and less effectively applied than in dealing with the matter when it
is detached from the earth.
(_d_) _Durability of valuable properties._--The production of quickly
perishable articles being of necessity local and immediate demands a
large amount of human service which cannot economically be replaced or
largely aided by machinery. The work of the butcher and the baker have
been slow to pass under machinery. Where butchering has become a
machine-industry to some extent, the direct cause has been the
discovery of preservative processes which have diminished the
perishability of meat. So with other food industries, the facility of
modern means of transport has alone enabled them gradually to pass
under the control of machinery. Until quite recently cakes and the
finer forms of bakery were a purely local and handicraft product.
(_e_) _Ease or simplicity of labour involved._--Where abundance of
cheap labour adequate to the work can be obtained, and particularly in
trades where women and children are largely engaged, the development of
machinery has been generally slower. This condition often unites with
(_b_) or (_c_) to retain an industry in the "domestic" class. A large
mass of essentially "irregular" work requiring a certain delicacy of
manipulation, which by reason of its narrowness of scope is yet easily
attained, and which makes but slight demands upon muscular force or
intelligence, has remained outside machine-production. Important
industries containing several processes of this nature have been slower
to fall into the complete form of the factory system. The slow progress
of the power-loom in cotton and wool until after 1830 is explained by
these considerations. The stocking-frame held out against machinery
still longer, and hand work still plays an important part in several
processes of silk manufacture. Even now, in the very centre of the
factory system, Bolton, the old hand-weaving is represented by a few
belated survivors.[82]
(_f_) _Skilled Workmanship._--High skill in manipulation or treatment
of material, the element of art infused into handicraft, gives the
latter an advantage over the most skilful machinery, or over such
machinery as can economically be brought into competition with it. In
some of the metal trades, in pottery and glass-making there are many
processes which have not been able to dispense with human skill. In
these manufactures, moreover, more progress is attributable to
specific inventions than to the adoption of the common machinery and
motor-power which are not largely available in the most important
processes.
From these considerations it will appear that where an industry is
large and regular in character, it falls more readily and completely
under the control of machinery, where it is small and irregular it
conforms more slowly and partially to the new methods. Most of the
extractive industries of agriculture, stock-raising, fishing, mining,
hunting, are irregular by reason of the nature of their material and
its subjection to influences, geological, chemical, climatic, and
others which are but slightly under calculation or human control. The
final processes by which commodities are adapted to the use of
individual consumers necessarily partake of the irregularity or
variety of human tastes and desires. We shall therefore find most
regularity in the intermediate processes where the raw materials,
having been extracted from nature, are being endowed with those
qualities of shape, position, etc., which are required to enable them
to satisfy human wants. The manufacturing stages where machinery finds
fullest application are in nearly all cases intermediate stages of
production. Even where machine-production seems directly to satisfy
some human want, there are commonly some final processes required
which involve individual skill. Almost all products which satisfy the
desires of man pass through a large number of productive processes
which may be classed as extractive, transport, manufacturing, and
distributive. These are, of course, not in all cases clearly
distinguishable. Mixed with the extractive processes of mining and
wheat-raising are several processes of transport and manufacture: the
various stages of manufacture may be broken by stages of transport: a
final process of manipulation or manufacture may precede the final act
of distribution, as in the sale of drugs to the consumer. But,
generally speaking, these four kinds of productive processes mark four
historic stages in the passage from raw material to finished
commodity.
The two middle stages of transport and manufacture have fallen far
more fully under the control of steam-driven machinery than the
others, and it is in the elaboration of older manufacturing and
transport processes and the addition of new processes that we trace
the largest effects of the evolution of modern industrial methods.
The following list of the divisions under which workers engaged in the
production of material wealth are classified for purposes of the
census may serve to bring out more clearly this proportionate
development of machinery. The figures appended give the numbers
engaged in the several occupations in 1891, and serve to approximately
indicate the relative importance of the several principal branches of
industry:--
Agriculture 1,311,720
Fishing 25,225
Mining 561,637
Stone, clay, road-making 209,972
Transport--
(_a_) Railways 186,774
(_b_) Roads 366,605
(_c_) Canals, rivers, seas 208,443
(_d_) Messages and porterage 194,044
Houses, furniture, and decorations 820,582
Food and lodgings 797,989
Iron and steel 380,193
Other metals 146,550
Ships and boats 170,517
Carriages and harness 108,780
Machines and implements 342,231
Textiles 1,128,589
Dress 1,099,833
Earthenware and glass 90,007
Chemicals and compounds 56,047
Books 135,616
Animal substances (manufacture) 76,566
Vegetable substances (paper, etc.) 196,889
General mechanics and labourers 805,105
Commercial--
(_a_) Merchants and agents 363,037
(_b_) Dealers in money 21,891
(_c_) Insurance 31,437
Engineers and surveyors 15,441
In glancing down this list of the chief industries engaged in the
production of commercial wealth, it will be recognised at once that
the manufacturing and transport industries are those to which
steam-power and the economies of large production have been especially
applied. Though, historically, the first industrial use of steam-power
was in coal-mining, it remains true that the extensive application of
modern machinery to agriculture and the other extractive industries is
of comparatively recent growth, while the work of retail distribution
has hitherto made but trifling use of machinery and steam-power. Only
within the last few years have a few gigantic retail distributive
businesses shown a tendency to apply steam and electricity to
mechanical contrivances for purposes of distribution.
Sec. 10. The new industrial forces first applied to the cotton spinning
of South Lancashire, and rapidly forcing their way into other branches
of the textile manufactures, then more gradually transforming the
industrial methods of the machinery, hardware, and other staple
English manufactures, passed into the Western Continent of Europe and
America, destroying the old domestic industry and establishing in
every civilised country the reign of steam-driven machinery. The
factors determining the order and pace of the new movement in the
several countries are numerous and complex. In considering the order
of machine-development, it must be remembered that the different
nations did not start from an equal footing at the opening of the age
of great inventions. By the beginning of the eighteenth century
England had established a certain supremacy in commerce. The growth of
her colonial possessions since the Revolution and the drastic and
successful character of her maritime policy had enabled her to
outstrip Holland. In 1729 by far the greater part of the Swedish iron
exported from Gothenburg went to England for shipbuilding
purposes.[83] At the close of the seventeenth century Gregory King
placed England, Holland, and France at the head of the industrial
nations with regard to the productivity of their labour.[84] Italy
and Germany were little behind in the exercise of manufacturing arts,
though the naval superiority and foreign possessions of the
above-named nations gave them the commercial superiority. By 1760
England had strengthened her position as regards foreign commerce, and
her woollen industry was the largest and most highly-developed
industry in the world. But so far as the arts of manufacture
themselves were concerned there was no such superiority in England as
to justify the expectation of the position she held at the opening of
the nineteenth century. In many branches of the textile arts,
especially in silk spinning and in dyeing, in pottery, printing, and
other manufactures, more inventive genius and more skill were shown on
the Continent, and there seemed _a priori_ no reason why England
should outstrip so signally her competitors.
The chief factors in determining the order of the development of
modern industrial methods in the several countries may be classified
as natural, political, economic.
NATURAL. (1) _The structure and position of the several
countries._--The insular character of Great Britain, her natural
facilities for procuring raw materials of manufacture and supplies of
foreign food to enable her population to specialise in manufacture,
the number and variety of easily accessible markets for her
manufactures, gave her an immense advantage. Add to this a temperate
climate, excellent internal communication by river (or canal), and an
absence of mountain barriers between the several districts. These
advantages were of greater relative importance before steam transport,
but they played a large part in facilitating the establishment of
effective steam transport in England. Extent of sea-board and good
harbourage have in no small measure directed the course of modern
industry, giving to England, Holland, France, Italy an advantage which
the levelling tendency of modern machinery has not yet been able to
counteract. The slow progress of Germany until recent years, and the
still slow progress of Russia, is attributable more to these physical
barriers of free communication, internal and external, than to any
other single cause that can be adduced. Inherent resources of the
soil, quality of land for agriculture, the proximity of large supplies
of coal and iron and other requisites of the production of machinery
and power rank as important determinants of progress. The machine
development of France in particular has been retarded by the slow
discovery of her natural areas of manufacture, the districts where
coal and iron lie near to one another in easily accessible supply. The
same remark applies to Germany and to the United States. At the close
of last century, when the iron trade of England was rapidly advancing,
the iron trade of France were quite insignificant, and during the
earlier years of the nineteenth century the progress was extremely
slight.[85]
(2) _Race and National Character._--Closely related to climate and
soil, these qualities of race are a powerful directing influence in
industry. Muscular strength and endurance, yielding in a temperate
climate an even continuity of vigorous effort; keen zest of material
comfort stimulating invention and enterprise; acquisitiveness, and the
love of external display; the moral capacities of industry, truth,
orderly co-operation; all these are leading factors determining the
ability and inclination of the several nations to adopt new industrial
methods. Moral qualities in English workmanship have indisputably
played a large part in securing her supremacy. "A British trade-mark
was accepted as a guarantee of excellence, while the products of other
countries were viewed with a suspicion justified by experience of
their comparative inferiority."[86] The more highly civilised nations
have thus gained by this civilisation, and have widened the distance
which separates them from the less civilised. England, France,
Germany, Holland, and the United States are in wealth and in
industrial methods far more widely removed from Spain and Russia than
was the case a hundred years ago.
(_b_) POLITICAL.--Statecraft has played an important part in
determining the order and pace of industrial progress. The possession
of numerous colonies and other political attachments in different
parts of the world, comprising a large variety of material resources,
gave to England, and in a less measure to France, Holland, Spain, a
great advantage. The tyrannical use these nations made of their
colonies for the purpose of building up home manufactures enabled
them to specialise more widely and safely in those industries to which
the new methods of production were first applied. Even after the North
American colonies broke loose, the policy of repression England had
applied to their budding manufactures enabled her to retain to a large
extent the markets thus created for her manufactured goods.
The large annexations England made during the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries gave her a monopoly of many of the finest markets
for the purchase of raw materials and for the sale of manufactured
goods. The large demand thus established for her textile and metal
wares served not only to stimulate fresh inventions, but enabled her
to utilise many improvements which could only be profitably applied in
the case of large industries with secure and expanding markets.
But the most important factor determining the priority of England was
the political condition of continental Europe at the very period when
the new machinery and motor-power were beginning to establish
confidence in the new industrial order. When Crompton's mule,
Cartwright's power-loom, Watt's engines were transforming the industry
of England, her continental rivals had all their energies absorbed in
wars and political revolutions. The United States and Sweden were the
only commercial nations of any significance who, being neutral,
obtained a large direct gain from the European strife. Yet England, in
spite of the immense drain of blood and money she sustained, under the
momentum of the new motor-power far outstripped the rivalry of such
states. Though she had to pay a heavy price for her immunity from
invasion, she thereby secured an immense start in the race of modern
machine-production. Until 1820 she had the game in her own hands. In
European trade she had a practical monopoly of the rapidly advancing
cotton industry. It was this monopoly which, ruthlessly applied to
maintain prices at a highly remunerative rate, and to keep down wages
to starvation point, built up, in an age of supreme and almost
universal misery for the masses, the rapid and colossal fortunes of
the cotton kings. Not until peace was established did the textile and
other factories begin to take shape upon the Continent, and many
years elapsed before they were able to compete effectively with
England. Switzerland was the first continental country to actively
adopt the new methods. The large supply of water-power stood her in
good stead, and the people took more willingly to the factory system
than in other countries.[87] France was slower in her development, in
spite of the strong protective system by which she strove, though not
very successfully, to exclude English cotton goods. The fall of
English prices and profits in the cotton trade between 1820 and 1830
marks clearly the breakdown of the English monopoly before the cheap
labour of Alsace and the cheap raw material of the United States, now
organised in the factory system with the new machinery.[88] In this,
the most advanced trade, the world-competition which now is operative
in a thousand different industries, measuring and levelling economic
advantages, first clearly shows itself, and in 1836 Ure finds the
continental nations and America competing successfully with England in
markets which had hitherto been entirely her own.
(_c_) ECONOMIC CONDITIONS.--The transformation of English agriculture,
the growth of large farms, drove great numbers of English peasants
into the towns, and furnished a large supply of cheap labour for the
new machinery.
This movement was accelerated by the vices of our land tenure. In
France and Germany, where the agricultural workers had a stronger
interest and property in their land, they were less easily detached
for factory purposes. But in England, where the labourer had no
property in the land, reformed methods of agriculture and the
operation of the Poor Law combined to incite the large proprietors and
farmers to rid themselves of all superfluous population in the rural
parts and accelerated the migration into the towns. Here the
population bred with a rapidity hitherto unknown. The increase of
population in England and Wales during the thirty years from 1770 to
1800 is placed at 1,959,590, or 27-1/10 per cent., while during the
next thirty years, 1800 to 1830, it amounted to 5,024,207, or 56-3/5
per cent.[89] This large supply of cheap labour in the towns enabled
the Lancashire and Yorkshire factories to grow with startling
rapidity. The exhaustion left by the Napoleonic wars, the political
disorder and insecurity which prevailed on the Continent, retarded
until much later the effective competition of other European nations
who were behind England in skill, knowledge, and the possession of
markets. The American manufactures which had sprung up after the
revolution had made considerable strides, but the conquest and
settlement of vast new areas of land, and the immense facilities
afforded for the production of raw material, retarded their rate of
growth until long after the opening of this century. It was, indeed,
not until about 1845 that the cotton manufacture made rapid strides in
the United States. During the twenty years previous the progress had
been very slight, but between 1845 and 1859 a very substantial and,
making allowance for fluctuations in the cotton crops, a very steady
growth took place.[90]
Another great economic advantage which assisted England was the fact
that she, more than any other European nation, had broken down the old
industrial order, with its guilds, its elaborate restrictions, and
conservative methods. Personal freedom, security of property, liberty
to work and live where and how one liked, existed in England to an
extent unknown on the Continent before the French Revolution. The
following account of the condition of the cotton manufacture in
Germany in the eighteenth century will serve to indicate the obstacles
to the reformed methods of industry:--"Everything was done by rule.
Spinning came under public inspection, and the yarn was collected by
officials. The privilege of weaving was confined to the confraternity
of the guild. Methods of production were strictly prescribed; public
inspectors exercised control. Defects in weaving were visited with
punishment. Moreover, the right of dealing in cotton goods was
confined to the confraternity of the merchant guild: to be a
master-weaver had almost the significance of a public office. Besides
other qualifications, there was the condition of a formal examination.
The sale also was under strict supervision; for a long time a fixed
price prevailed, and a maximum sale was officially prescribed for each
dealer. The dealer had to dispose of his wares to the weaver, because
the latter had guaranteed to him a monopoly of the export trade."[91]
Under such conditions the new machine-industry could make little
advance. Excepting in the case of the woollen industries, England had
for the most part already shaken off the old regulations before 1770.
In particular, the cotton trade, which was in the vanguard of the
movement, being of recent growth and settling outside the guild towns,
had never known such restrictions, and therefore lent itself to the
new order with a far greater facility than the older trades. Moreover,
England was free from the innumerable and vexatious local taxes and
restrictions prevalent in France and in the petty governments of
Germany. Although the major part of these foolish and pernicious
regulations has been long swept away from Germany and other
continental nations, the retarding influence they exercised, in common
with the wider national system of protection which still survives,
kept back the cotton industry, so that in Germany it still stands half
a century behind its place in England.[92]
The following figures show how substantial was the lead held by
England in the cotton manufacture a little before the middle of the
century.
NUMBER OF SPINDLES WORKING IN COTTON MILLS IN 1846.[93]
Spindles.
England and Wales 15,554,619
Scotland 1,727,871
Ireland 215,503
Austria and Italy 1,500,000
France 3,500,000
Belgium 420,000
Switzerland 650,000
Russia 7,585,000
United States 3,500,000
States of the Zollverein 815,000
----------
35,467,993
The development of the cotton industry in 1888 in the chief industrial
countries, as indicated by the consumption of raw cotton, is expressed
in the accompanying diagram.
Lastly, the national trade policy of England was of signal advantage
in her machine development. Her early protective system had, by the
enlargement of her carrying trade and the increase of her colonial
possessions, laid the foundation of a large complex trade with the
more distant parts of the world, though for a time it crippled our
European commerce. While we doubtless sacrificed other interests by
this course of policy, it must be generally admitted that "English
industries would not have advanced so rapidly without Protection."[94]
But as we built up our manufacturing industries by Protection, so we
undoubtedly conserved and strengthened them by Free Trade--first, by
the remission of tariffs upon the raw materials of manufacture and
machine-making, and later on by the free admission of food stuffs,
which were a prime essential to a nation destined to specialise in
manufacture. France, our chief national competitor, weakened her
position by a double protective policy, not merely refusing admittance
to foreign manufactures in her markets, but retaining heavy duties
upon the importation of foreign coal and iron, the foundational
constituents of machine-production. This protective policy, adopted by
nations whose skill, industry, and natural resources would have
rendered them formidable competitors to English manufacturers, has
hindered considerably the operation of those economic forces which
impel old and thickly-peopled countries to specialise in manufacture
and trade, and so has retarded the general development of modern
machine-production. But while protective tariffs indisputably operate
in this way, it is not possible to determine the extent of their
influence. In a large country of rich resources a high degree of
specialisation in manufacture is possible in spite of a protective
policy. The pressure of high wages is an economic force more
powerfully operative than any other in stimulating the adoption of
elaborate machinery.[95] Both in the textile and the iron industries
the United States present examples of factory development more
advanced even than those of England. Certain processes of warping and
winding are done by machinery in America which are still done by hand
labour in England.[96] The chain and nail-making trades, which employ
large numbers of women in South Staffordshire and Worcestershire, are
made more cheaply by machinery in America.[97] Moreover, the high
standard of living and the greater skill of the American operatives
enables them to tend more machines. In German factories a weaver tends
two, or rarely three looms; in Lancashire women weavers undertake
four, and in Massachusetts often six looms, and sometimes eight.[98]
[Illustration: CONSUMPTION OF RAW COTTON, 1887-88. (Millions
of lbs.)]
Thus we see how the new industrial forces were determined in the order
of their operation by the character and conditions of the several
countries, their geographical position and physical resources, the
elements of racial character, political and industrial institutions,
deliberate economic policies, and, above all, by the absorbing nature
of the military and political events contemporary with the outburst of
inventive ingenuity. The composition of these forces determined the
several lines of less resistance along which the new industry moved.
The exact measurement of so multiform a force is impossible. The
appended tables and diagrams may, however, serve to indicate the
progress of the several industrial nations as measured by (i.)
development of railway and merchant shipping; (ii.) consumption of
coal and iron; (iii.) application of steam-power; (iv.) estimated
annual value of manufactures:--
I. COMPARATIVE MILEAGE OF RAILWAYS, 1840 TO 1890.
1840. 1850. 1860. 1870. 1880. 1890.
United Kingdom 800 6,600 10,400 15,500 17,900 19,800
Continent of Europe 800 7,800 21,400 47,800 83,800 110,200
United States 2,800 9,000 30,600 53,400 93,600 156,000
India -- -- 800 4,800 9,300 16,000
Australia -- -- 200 1,200 5,400 10,100
Rest of the World -- -- 2,800 5,500 18,400 42,300
RAILWAY MILEAGE IN RELATION TO AREA AND POPULATION.
Density of Railway
Population per Mileage
Square Square Mile (1888).
Area. Miles. (1890).
United Kingdom 120,849 320 19,810
France 204,092 184 20,900
Germany 208,738 233 24,270
Russia 1,902,227 42 17,700
Austria 240,942 166 15,610
Italy 110,623 260 7,830
Spain 197,670 86 5,930
Portugal 34,038 136 1,190
Sweden 170,979 28 4,670
Norway 124,495 16 970
Denmark 15,289 133 1,220
Holland 12,648 350 1,700
Belgium 11,373 530 2,760
Switzerland 15,976 190 1,870
Greece 25,041 88 370
Turkey 65,909 73 900
U.S.A. (excluding
Alaska and Indian
territory) 1,175,550 21 156,080
Japan 145,655 274 910
India 964,992 229 15,250
Australia 3,030,771 1.20 10,140
Canada 3,315,647 1.45 12,700
Egypt (cultiv. area) 12,976 638 1,260
[Illustration: TONNAGE OF MERCHANT SHIPPING.]
[Illustration: COMPARATIVE TABLE OF CONSUMPTION OF COAL AND
IRON PER INHABITANT IN DIFFERENT COUNTRIES.]
[Illustration: STEAM POWER OF EUROPEAN COUNTRIES.]
[Illustration: STEAM AND OTHER POWER IN DIFFERENT COUNTRIES.]
[Illustration: ESTIMATED ANNUAL VALUE OF MANUFACTURES.]
FOOTNOTES:
[58] Karl Marx, _Capital_, p. 367.
[59] Marx points out how in many of the most highly evolved machines
the original tool survives, illustrating this from the original
power-loom. (_Capital_, p. 368.)
[60] Cooke Taylor, _History of the Factory System_, p. 422.
[61] Cf. Babbage, p. 15.
[62] Burnley, _Wool and Wool-combing_, p. 417.
[63] _Economy of Machinery_, p. 6.
[64] _Economy of Machinery_, p. 39.
[65] _Vide infra_, p. 249.
[66] Scrivener, _History of the Iron Trade_, pp. 296, 297.
[67] Sir Lyon Playfair, _North American Review_, Nov. 1892.
[68] _Der Grossbetrieb_, p. 85.
[69] The important part which the cotton and iron industries play in
the export trade of England entitles them to special consideration as
representatives of world-industry. Out of L263,530,585 value of
English exports in 1890, cotton comprised L74,430,749; iron and steel,
L31,565,337.
[70] Cunningham, chap. ii. p. 450.
[71] Schulze-Gaevernitz, _Der Grossbetrieb_, p. 34.
[72] Ure, _The Cotton Manufacture_, p. 187.
[73] Modern economy now favours the specialisation of a factory and
often of a business in a single group of processes--_e.g._, spinning
or weaving or dyeing, both in the cotton and woollen industries. This,
however, is applicable chiefly to the main branches of textile work.
In minor branches, such as cotton thread, the tendency is still
towards an aggregation of all the different processes under a single
roof, both in England and in the United States.
[74] P.R. Hodge, civil engineer--evidence before House of Lords
Committee in 1857.
In Germany a spinning-wheel had been long in use for flax-spinning,
which in effect was an anticipation of the throstle (cf. Karmarch,
_Technologie_, vol. ii. p. 844, quoted Schulze-Gaevernitz, p. 30), and
machine-weaving is said to have been discovered in Danzig as early as
1579.
[75] Cf. Brentano, _Uber die Ursachen der heutigen socialen Noth; Der
Grossbetrieb_, p. 30.
[76] Porter, _Progress of the Nation_, p. 219.
[77] Selected from Porter, p. 218.
[78] In 1824 Mr. Huskisson introduced the principle of free trade,
securing a reduction of the duties on raw and thrown silks, and in
1825, 1826, considerable further reductions were made. (Cf. Ure,
_Philosophy of Manufactures_, p. 454, etc.) But protection of English
silk manufactured goods was maintained until the French Treaty of
1860.
[79] Cf. Ure, _History of the Cotton Manufacture_, vol. i. p. 223.
[80] Scrivener, _History of the Iron Trade_, p. 56.
[81] Cooke Taylor, _Modern Factory System_, p. 164; cf. also Karl
Marx, _Capital_, p. 381.
[82] Schulze-Gaevernitz, p. 140.
[83] Yeats, _The Growth and Vicissitudes of Commerce_, p. 284.
[84] The average income for England in 1688 he puts at L7 18s; for
Holland, L8 1s. 4d.; France, L6--p. 47. Such an estimate, however, has
little value.
[85]
In 1810 the total produce was 140,000 tons.
" 1818 " " " 114,000 "
" 1824 " " " 164,000 "
(Scrivener, _History of the Iron Trade_, p. 153.)
[86] Yeats, _Growth and Vicissitudes of Commerce_, p. 285.
[87] Schulze-Gaevernitz, _Der Grossbetrieb_, p. 48.
[88] Ellison, _History of the Cotton Trade_, presents the following
interesting table (yarn, 40 hanks to the lb.):--
1779. 1784. 1799. 1812. 1830. 1882.
s. d. s. d. s. d. s. d. s. d. s. d.
Selling price 16 0 10 11 7 6 2 6 1 2-1/2 0 10-1/2
Cost of Cotton
(18 oz.) 2 0 2 0 3 4 1 6 0 7-3/4 0 7-1/8
----- ----- ---- ---- -------- ---------
Labour & Capital 14 0 8 11 4 2 1 0 0 6-3/4 0 3-3/8
[89] Porter, _Progress of the Nation_, p. 13. Eighteenth century
figures are, however, not trustworthy. The first census was in 1801.
[90] Ure, _Philosophy of Manufactures_, p. 531.
[91] Schulze-Gaevernitz, _Der Grossbetrieb_, p. 34.
[92] In 1882 42 per cent. of the German textile industry was still
conducted in the home or domestic workshop, while only 38 per cent.
was carried on in factories employing more than 50 persons. More
weavers were still engaged with hand-looms than with power-looms, and
the latter was so little developed that the hand-loom could still hold
its own in many articles. Knitting, lace-making, and other minor
textile industries are still in the main home industries.--(_Social
Peace_, p. 113.) "While in England in 1885 each spinning or weaving
mill had an average of 191 operatives, each spinning mill in Germany
in 1882 employed an average of 10 persons only."--(Brentano, _Hours,
Wages, and Production_, p. 64.)
[93] Ure, _Philosophy of Manufactures_, p. 515.
[94] Toynbee, _Industrial Revolution_, p. 79.
[95] The highly elaborate American machine industry of watch-making is
a striking example of this influence of high wages. Cf.
Schulze-Gaevernitz, _Social Peace_, p. 125.
[96] Schoenhof, _Economy of High Wages_, p. 279.
[97] _Ibid._, pp. 225, 226.
[98] Schulze-Gaevernitz, p. 66 (note). This six and eight-loom weaving
is, however, at a lower speed.
CHAPTER IV.
THE STRUCTURE OF MODERN INDUSTRY.
Sec. 1. _Growing Size of the Business-Unit._
Sec. 2. _Relative Increase of Capital and Labour in the Business._
Sec. 3. _Increased Complexity and Integration of Business
Structure._
Sec. 4. _Structure and Size of the Market for different
Commodities._
Sec. 5. _Machinery a direct Agent in expanding Market Areas._
Sec. 6. _Expanded Time-area of the Market._
Sec. 7. _Interdependency of Markets._
Sec. 8. _Sympathetic and Antagonistic Relations between Trades._
Sec. 9. _National and Local Specialisation in Industry._
Sec. 10. _Influences determining Localisation of Industry under
World-Competition._
Sec. 11. _Impossibility of Final Settlement of Industry._
Sec. 12. _Specialisation in Districts and Towns._
Sec. 13. _Specialisation within the Town._
Sec. 1. Turning once more to the unit of industry, the Business, and
thence to the Trade and the Market, or area of competition, it is
necessary to examine the structural and functional changes brought
about by the action of the new industrial forces.
In considering the effect of modern machine-production upon the
Business, the most obvious external change is a great increase in
size. The typical unit of production is no longer a single family or a
small group of persons working with a few cheap simple tools upon
small quantities of material, but a compact and closely organised mass
of labour composed of hundreds or thousands of individuals,
co-operating with large quantities of expensive and intricate
machinery, through which passes a continuous and mighty volume of raw
material on its journey to the hands of the consuming public.
The expansion in mass of labour and capital composing the industrial
unit does not, however, proceed at the same pace in the different
industries.
The largest growths are found in two classes of industry. First, those
which close dependence on monopoly of land, or other privilege
conferred by state or municipal government, has placed outside
competition. The size here is determined by that amount of capital
required to achieve the most profitable equation of supply and demand
prices under terms of monopoly.[99] In this class are placed such
large businesses as railways, gas, or water companies. Second, those
industries where the net advantages of large-scale production over
small scale in competitive industry are greatest. Generally speaking,
those industries where the most expensive machinery is employed come
under this head, or where, as in banking and financial business, a
large capital is managed more economically, and enjoys a monopoly of
certain profitable kinds of work.
In retail trade, where neither of these forces is so powerfully
operative, the increase in mass of capital and labour is not so great,
though here too the economies of large-scale production are giving
more and more prominence to the Universal Provider, and a large number
of local shops are falling into the hands of companies. Large
syndicates of capital at Smithfield are owning butchers' shops in most
large towns, the drapery, jewellery, shoe trade are more and more
passing into the hands of large companies, while an increased
proportion of tobacconists, publicans, grocers, and other retailers
are practically but agents of large capitalist firms. In such branches
of agriculture as have lent themselves most effectively to new
machinery the same movement is visible in the prevalence of large
farming. This is seen everywhere where land is placed on the same
property footing as other forms of capital. Though small farms are for
some purposes still capable of yielding a large net as well as gross
product, it is for the most part the legal, customary, and
sentimental restrictions on free transfer of land that impede the
tendency towards large farming.
It is, however, in the manufacturing and transport industries that we
trace the most general and rapid growth of the unit of production. And
here machinery is the chief external cause. Gigantic railways and
steamship companies are the successors of stage coach businesses and
small shippers. The size and value of the modern cotton factory, iron
works, sugar refinery, or brewery are incomparably greater than the
units of which these industries were composed a century and a half
ago. In certain highly-machined industries the size of the unit is so
enlarged that the number of businesses engaged in turning out the
ever-growing output is actually diminishing. Among textile industries
the spinning mills of England and Wales show a marked diminution in
numbers between 1870 and 1890, while a similar movement in weaving
mills is only retarded by the capacity of small sweating masters to
compete with the more developed factories in certain minor branches,
such as tape manufacture, and by the survival of the home worker
owning his loom and hiring his power in such trades as the ribbon
weaving of Coventry.[100]
The following statistics[101] of the cotton and woollen industries in
Great Britain serve to illustrate the growing size of the unit of
production in the representative branches of textile work:--
KEY:
A: Spinning.
B: Weaving.
C: Spinning and Weaving.
D: Others.
E: Total.
F: Spinning.
G: Doubling.
H: Power-Looms.
COTTON.
NO. OF MILLS. NO. OF SPINDLES.
A B C D E F G H
1870 1108 693 532 150 2483 33,995,221 3,723,537 440,676
1890 935 990 438 175 2538 40,511,934 3,992,885 615,714
WOOLLEN.
1870 648 109 860 212 1829 2,531,768 160,993 48,140
1890 494 124 895 280 1793 2,107,209 299,793 61,831
This increase of the number of spindles and looms in the average
textile mill is more significant when the "speeding up" of modern
machinery is taken into account. The increased size of the unit of
industry as measured by productivity is even greater than appears from
the statistics above quoted.
Schulze-Gaevernitz points out that in the thirty years between 1856
and 1885, while the factories in cotton spinning and weaving only
increased from 2210 to 2633, the number of spindles increased from
28,010,217 to 44,348,921, the number of looms from 298,847 to 560,955,
and that since both spindles and looms worked much faster in 1885 than
in 1856, the output has increased in still greater proportion.[102]
Turning to another highly-developed machine industry, that of milling,
we find a similar movement. Flour mills are diminishing in number both
in England and in the United States. The period 1884-86 showed a
diminution in the number of flour mills in the United States from
25,079 to 18,267, though the total productive power of the smaller
number was greatly increased. Mr. Wells finds a similar tendency in
the general manufacturing industry of the United States:--"Between
1850 and 1860 the number of manufacturing firms and corporations in
the United States increased from 123,025 to 140,433, and the value of
manufactured products increased from $1,019,106,616 to $1,885,861,876,
so that in that decade there was an increase of 17,408 establishments,
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