spun in their own homes the wool with which they were clothed, and supplied the rest of their wants by the sale of yarn in the neighboring market town, was not so inapplicable to other parts of England as we might at first imagine. If the inland trade was thus circumscribed, we shall not be surprised to find that our foreign trade was, compared with its present dimensions, on a tiny scale.

Though there were periods of keen distress, there was no such thing as long-continued wide-spread depression of trade. Over-production was impossible when the producer lived next door to the consumer, and knew his wants as well as the country shoemaker of today knows the number of pairs of boots that are wanted in his village. And when foreign trade was so insignificant, wars and rumours of wars could exercise but little influence over the general circle of commerce.

The expense of carriage was enormous-it cost forty shillings to send a ton of coal from Manchester to Liverpool—and it was as slow as it was expensive. Adam Smith tells us that it took a broadwheeled wagon, drawn by eight horses, and attended by two men, three weeks to carry four tons of goods from London to Edinburgh. The roads--even the main roads-were often impassable. A famous traveller describes how the high road between Preston and Wigan had, even in summer, ruts four feet deep, floating with mud; and in many parts of the country the principal means of communication were tracks used by pack-horses. Was it not natural that, shut up within such narrow confines, unstimulated by wide markets and varied intercourse, manufactures advanced but slowly and inventions were rare? Man's life moved on from generation to generation in a quiet course which would seem to us a dull, unvarying ,routine.

The majority of employers were small masters-manufacturers like those already described, who, in ideas and habits of life, were little removed from the workmen, out of whose ranks they had risen, and to whose ranks they might return once more. There were, of course, even then capitalist employers, but on a small scale; nor was their attitude to their workmen very different from that of the little masters in the same trade. Few of the small masters of whom I have spoken did not work with their own hands; and it was the common thing for them to teach their apprentices the trade. Both the apprentices, for whose moral education he was responsible, and the journeymen were lodged and boarded in the master's house. Between men living in such close and continuous relations the bonds were naturally very intimate. Nor were these bonds loosened when the journeyman married and lived in his own house. The master

knew all his affairs, his particular wants, his peculiarities, his resources, the number of his children, as well as he did before. If the weaver was sick, the master lent him money; if trade was slack he kept him on at a loss. "Masters and men," said an employer, "were in general so joined together in sentiment, and, if I may be permitted to use the term, in love to each other, that they did not wish to be separated if they could help it." And the workmen corroborated the assertion. "It seldom happens," said a weaver, "that the small clothiers change their men except in case of sickness and death." It was not uncommon for a workman to be employed by the same master for forty years; and the migration of labourers in search of work was small compared with what goes on in the present day. A workman would live and die on the spot where he was born, and the same family would remain for generations working for the same employers in the same village. Under such conditions the master busies himself with the welfare of the workman, and the education of his children; the workman eagerly promotes the interests of the master, and watches over the fortunes of the house. They are not two families but one.

There is yet one other characteristic of industry in those days which remains for us to scrutinize. This is the network of restrictions and regulations in which it was entangled and which exercised an important influence over both its inner and its outer life. Most conspicuous were the combination laws,-laws which made it illegal for labourers to combine to raise wages, or to strike. "We have no Acts of Parliament," says Adam Smith, "against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it." And in another passage he describes a strike as generally ending, "in nothing but the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders." And not only was combination to raise wages illegal, but emigration from parish to parish in search of work was rendered almost impossible by the law. These laws, which cruelly hindered the workman in his efforts to secure a livelihood, were bad; but there were other laws directly affecting the position of the workman as a citizen which were worse. I select one example. The law of Master and Servant made breach of contract on the part of an employer a civil offence, on the part of the labourer a crime.

Except as a member of a mob, the labourer had not a shred of political influence. The power of making laws was concentrated in the hands of the landowners, the great merchant princes, and a small knot of capitalist-manufacturers who wielded that power in the interests of their class, rather than for the good of the people. Nor is the famous assertion of the great economist that, whenever

Parliament attempted to regulate differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors were always the masters, unsupported by facts. It receives lively illustration from the pen of a pamphleteer of the period, who remarks with an air of great naturalness and simplicity that "the gentlemen and magistrates ought to aid and encourage the clothier in the reduction of the price of labour, as far as is consistent, with the laws of humanity, and necessary for the preservation of foreign trade." The position of the workman was a transitional one. He halted half-way between the position of the serf and the position of the citizen; he was treated with kindness by those who injured him; he was protected, oppressed, dependent.

22. Geographical Discovery and the Revolution3

BY WILLIAM CUNNINGHAM

In the latter part of the eighteenth century there was a burst of inventive genius in Great Britain. Many improvements were rapidly introduced, and the useful arts, as practised from time immemorial, were revolutionised in a few years. This was no mere accident, but was at least partly due to the fact that the conditions of economic life had become more favourable to such change than they had ever been before. The age of geographical discovery had paved the way for the age of invention; England had succeeded in surpassing each of the rivals who during a century and a half had striven with her for the commercial supremacy of the world; her predominance afforded the English inventors of the eighteenth century unexampled opportunities for turning their talents to account.

Holland was no longer the carrier of the world; her manufactures had declined in importance. In France over-centralization destroyed the initiative of the people and injured all branches of industry and agriculture. English shipping had increased, and distant markets for national wares had been opened. The East Indies were willing to accept unlimited supplies of cotton cloth; and the continent of Europe and the colonies of America were largely dependent on Great Britain for woolen goods; manufacturing could be conducted on a larger and larger scale without immediate risk of glutting the widespread demand by overproduction. So long as commerce had been organised as an intercivic affair, or on the old regulated lines of exclusive privileges in limited markets, there

Adapted from An Essay on Western Civilization in Its Economic Aspects. II, 225-228 (1900).

could not have been any such stimulus to the invention and introduction of machinery as the world-wide markets naturally afforded.

But more than this: the mines of the New World and the successful commerce with the East had given England the material means for the formation of large amounts of capital, which were now available for employment. There had been much admirable ingenuity among seventeenth century engineers and mechanics, but they were hampered by want of capital; their projects could not be carried out. In the eighteenth century London had become the monetary centre of the world, and it was no longer impossible to venture on the long and costly experiments that were often needed. to render some mechanical improvement a financial success. We are not detracting from the genius of Watt or Arkwright if we say that they seized and made the most of opportunities, such as no other men had ever had before. Had they lived under the conditions which were in vogue in preceding centuries, both as to demand for goods and the supply of capital, these great inventors could only have enjoyed the meagre distinction which future generations accord to men who were in advance of their times.

The great geographical discoveries were the result of long-continued and conscious effort, directed to a clearly understood aim; great expeditions had to be organised to sail on unknown seas and establish friendly relations with distant potentates. Explorers were forced to wait on courtly patronage and royal initiative; but mechanical invention has run a different course. The coincidence of the two phenomena, a world-wide demand and a large supply of capital, enabled humble and unknown men to push on step by step; political prestige and elaborate organisation were not so essentia! as in schemes for colonization; mechanical skill and personal ingenuity had at last obtained their chance. The new industrial era, which the age of invention brought in its train, has offered a free field and given the greatest rewards to individual enterprise. It is commonly said that the physical advantage of England in the possession of enormous supplies of coal and iron side by side, have enabled her to out-distance her rivals, not only in commerce but in industry; still, the proximity and quantity of coal and iron do not in themselves account for her success completely; in the case of such inventions as Arkwright's they do not account for it at all. The favorable conditions which English manufacturers enjoyed, in the eighteenth century, and the reliance on individual enterprise which had been traditional in Great Britain, were not unimportant factors in rendering this island the workshop of the world.

B. THE NATURE AND SCOPE OF THE REVOLUTION

23. Technology and the Revolution1

The Industrial Revolution was no sudden transformation of the structure of industry and the organization of social life. It is an unfortunate emphasis upon the "great inventions" and their immediate consequences which has caused us to lose sight of the broad scope and the varied content of the movement. This emphasis has too frequently conveyed the impression that the sudden appearance upon the scene of industrial action of several very wonderful machines, born of the inventive genius of the great men of old, wrought a great change, substituting an entirely new and more efficient system for the archaic one which had done service before. This view commits the double error of regarding the movement as industrial and as a revolution.

It was not industrial; for its antecedents cannot, any more than its consequences, be pent up in any narrow causal formula to which the term industrial can be properly applied. An attempt to find its beginning forces one into excursions into fields as complex as human life itself. Certainly the common-sense scheme of social values, the estimates placed by peoples upon their institutions, their aspirations, and their instruments cannot be excluded from the catalogue of antecedents. The change in such a scheme was one of the most potent of the factors leading to this great movement. Clearly the mediæval scheme of values would have inhibited the invention of the steamengine. It would not even have permitted the consideration of the problem the partial answer to which the steam-engine became. For such a society the high values were in things of the "other world.” To it nature was not a thing worth conquering; if it had been, man was impotent to effect the conquest. Improvement in industrial technique demanded placing a higher value upon life in this world, upon the material means toward its fulness, and upon man's dependence upon nature's bounty and laws. It demanded, too, that the individual develop confidence in the soundness of his worldly desires and in his capacity to do things worth while. When an adequate account of this great movement is written, one of its most important chapters will trace the development of this new scheme of values.

But, passing over the larger social aspects of the subject, even industrially the movement was hardly a revolution. This is evidenced by a study of the transition from the craft to the machine régime. Under the former, population had been adjusted to the

Adapted from an unpublished article entitled "The Place of Technique in the Industrial Revolution."