736 Growth of the factory system [1789-1845

cottages. Steam-mills began with the new century, almost as early as the water-mills, and slowly absorbed first the carding processes, preparatory to spinning, then the spinning itself. In the case of flax — which proved specially intractable to the machine — the introduction of power-spinning was later, its progress eveii slower.

Wool and flax and cotton spinning on the wheel died as the machine gained ground. Cotton, an exotic, had never been spun extensively outside the actual manufacturing districts. As a result of this, the work passed swiftly into the hands of the weavers' families and into the mills. In wool and flax spinning the change was far slower. Yet by 1820 wool spinning as a by-employment was only to be found in out of the way corners of Britain. Those slow-moving districts which retained their weaving trade soon learnt to import yarn from the factory towns, as East Anglia began to do from Bradford very shortly after 1800. There was soon no place for the non-professional spinner.

The story of factory-weaving presents a sharp contrast to that of factory-spinning. The power-loom had only been used for the plainest cotton weaving before 1815, and that not on an extensive scale. It did not appear in the worsted trade until after 1820 ; it had made no great progress in the woollen trade, even in Yorkshire, in 1840. The desperate plight of the hand-loom cotton and worsted weavers in the early years of Queen Victoria's reign was not shared by the woollen-weavers. They and the small master-clothiers for whom, and with whom, they often worked were threatened by the mills but not destroyed; and, although the clothiers were, to a certain extent, dependent on the capitalist merchants, as indeed they had always been, it was still possible, in 1845, for a French visitor to describe the woollen manufacture of the West Riding as an " altogether democratic exception to the devouring progress of the factory system."

Few trades in England remained untouched by the general advance in technique and the movement towards a more capitalistic organisation during the years between 1789 and 1840. To the steady improvement of manufacturing processes, which had marked the eighteenth century, were added the new and expensive motive power, better and more complex machines, and the new knowledge of the natural sciences, in the nineteenth. The production of chemicals in extensive works employing many hands and much capital began. Another new industry was called into existence by the general adoption of gas-lighting between 1815 and 1840, an industry that was of necessity organised on a large scale from the first. Trades ancillary to those of spinning and weaving, such as calico-printing, bleaching, and dyeing, were refashioned. Machinery and chemistry began to influence the ancient and conservative crafts of tanning and leather-working. Pottery-making, refounded in the eighteenth century by Wedgwood, was concentrated. In printing, in milling, in brewing, in glass-making, and in a score of other industries,

1792-1845] Survival of domestic industries 737

methods were revised and the scale of operations for the individual firm extended. The power-driven machine took hold even of simple crafts like carpentry and shoemaking. In coal-mining the combined effects of the new power, the new needs, and the new knowledge, were conspicuous. It was in the mines that steam had first been used for pumping; its use was extended to winding and other operations. Geology came to the aid of the mining engineer; chemistry supplied the analysis of coals and of pit gases. The annual output of coal in Great Britain was more than tripled between 1800 and 1815 ; while the size of the average mining undertaking greatly increased.

Yet all these things were but beginnings, even small beginnings as compared with the developments of the later nineteenth century. England in the early forties had still numerous and extensive domestic industries, although in almost all of them an employer or merchant — not to mention retail-dealers — came between the workman and the consumer. Silk-weaving, ribbon-weaving, and hosiery-knitting were in the hands of domestic workers or of very small masters. So, though to a less extent, were linen and woollen, and, to a still less extent, worsted and cotton weaving. A few of the old " customer " weavers, who worked up the farmer's homespun, were to be found in certain agricultural counties of England; while in Scotland they were by no means rare. Wool-combing had not as yet become a machine trade, though the inventions that have transformed it were on foot. The Birmingham metal trades seem at this particular time to have been tending away from production on a large scale rather than towards it. It was said that the town contained in 18-43 four thousand small masters, who each employed a handful of journeymen and hired power when they wanted it, besides the garret men who worked with two or three apprentices. Lock and key and chain making and the other innumerable branches of the hardware trade in the Black Country were in a still more primitive condition. In all these trades capital was generally to be found in the hands of middlemen rather than of the manufacturers. These are but samples, taken from leading industries. Even where large scale production had made most progress, much that was small and rude survived, as the condition of coal-mining shows. Deep workings were uncommon. A great part of the coal used was still raised near the outcrop from many small pits. One of these is figured in the appendix to the Report on children's work in the mines, issued in 1842. It represents a type; and the picture shows an old woman who is hoisting two children from the shaft by turning a winch.

When the Revolutionary wars began, the system of internal communications that preceded the railways was very far from complete. Turnpike-roads were numerous, but they were often ill-laid and ill-graded. The new canals in many districts were unfinished. Quick road-traffic

c. M. H. x. 47

738 Roads-Canals.-Harbours.-Steam transport [1793-1850

was a thing of recent growth, even near London. In the remoter parts of England and in most parts of Scotland and Wales it was unknown. Hut the wars hardly checked the work of improvement. The rapidity and success with which it was carried through by a nation burdened with taxes and debt is perhaps the most striking witness to the economic vitality of Great Britain. Year by year the road-makers gained experience, and the methods of construction were improved. The revolution in the iron industry allowed of the partial substitution of iron for stone in bridge-building— a change which may be said to have come with the new century, although a few iron bridges were built before 1800. Canal engineering became bolder, and waterways were completed across the backbone of England. The lamentable years of political unrest and economic distress from 1815 to 1825 saw the completion of Telford's Highland roads and of his great Holyhead highway, the construction of the Waterloo and Menai Bridges, and the adoption on many main routes of the method of road-building which is named, perhaps wrongly, after Macadam. No great country could equal England, so far as the quantity and average quality of her roads and canals were concerned; though it is probable that the best of the French highways were still superior to anything that the English engineers had built.

Work on harbours and estuaries and docks was undertaken concurrently with that on the roads and the canals. Here war acted as a direct stimulus, so that this development of the accessories of sea-power is far less remarkable than the inland works. For the trade of all the world was being shepherded into British ports; and they must needs be fitted to receive it. There were but few docks in the country when England went to war in 1793. During the next thirteen years, on the Thames alone, the East India Docks, the West India Docks, and the London Docks, were begun and finished. The Mersey, the Humber, and the Clyde, kept pace with the Thames; and the work begun during the war was carried on, though intermittently, during the peace.

The wars witnessed the beginnings, the peace the utilisation, of steam transport both on sea and land. It was in the year of Waterloo that a steamer first made the passage from London to Glasgow. Six years later steam was tried on the Calais packets. Shortly after 1830 the building of steamers and of marine engines became distinct trades. By that time iron was being used, though not yet freely, as a structural material both for steam vessels and sailing ships. Before 1840 the Atlantic had been crossed by steamers of a few hundred horse-power, and the screw was coming into use. Yet in that year, out of a total British tonnage of two and three-quarter millions, the steamers claimed less than ninety thousand tons; and the steam tonnage had not risen to a hundred and fifty thousand in 1850. In short, the second quarter of the century was not really an age of steam navigation. The steamers

1811-43] Raihvays. — Agriculture 739

that existed were essentially packet-boats. They carried only passengers and the most valuable and least bulky cargoes; for in the then existing state of marine engineering they had trouble enough to find room for their own bunker-coal.

On land a more real and rapid revolution had occurred; but it remained incomplete in the early forties. The railways found the reform of the old means of transport still unfinished. Telford was at work on the Birmingham and Liverpool Junction Canal, and was just completing his plans for a new and better Great North Road; the English mail-coach — the wonder and envy of foreign travellers — had barely reached perfection, when the railway age began. Telford's plans were laid aside; and only retrospective and literary persons admired the mailcoach. Together with Telford's schemes, the series of experiments with locomotive steam-driven road-carriages, that had lasted for almost two generations, was suspended. The Stockton and Darlington Railway was completed in 1825, the year after the surveys for the new North Road began; and in that same year twenty bubble railway companies were set afloat. The success of the Manchester and Liverpool line in 1830 gave the call to serious work. Short lengths of railway were rapidly constructed. By 1837 work was in progress on the London and Birmingham, the North Midland, the Manchester and Leeds, and the Great Western. Endless schemes and surveys were on foot elsewhere; and the sketch plan of the modern railway system was being filled in. There was a slackening of projection and construction in the early forties; but by 1843 the country possessed over eighteen hundred miles of finished line ; and unbroken travel from London to Lancaster in the north-west, to Darlington in the north-east, and almost to Exeter in the west, was already possible. The full economic significance of the new system was, however, not as yet apparent. Goods traffic was to a great extent subordinated to passenger traffic at the outset. The electric telegraph, which has joined with the railway to create the modern market, had hardly passed its experimental stage; and the short-sighted critics who could treat the railway as a mere nuisance or a novel luxury had but recently been silenced.

In spite of the success with which agricultural reform had been pursued in England throughout the eighteenth century, very much remained to be done when the new century began. New-modelled waggons and ploughs, novel implements, and fresh crops, had been introduced; they had yet to be generally adopted. So late as 1811 turnips were almost unknown in Wiltshire. Not many years earlier, crops were still regularly led in Devon on horses' backs; a three-horse team was reckoned necessary to draw a wretched shallow waggon, seven feet long and three and a half broad, in parts of Yorkshire; and in Scotland there was not uncommonly found the ancient cart " of a size not larger than a good

740 Enclosure Acts. Large farming [1760-1835

wheelbarrow," with its solid, wooden, unshod wheels. The enclosure of the open arable fields was very far from complete; while the amount of waste land — even in the near neighbourhood of London — was an offence to the rural reformer. In the remoter shires it was even more abundant. Scores of thousands of acres in the fens were undrained or ill-drained. Lincoln Heath was still a vast sandy waste, many miles in extent. In all the northern counties immense tracts of moorland and not a little of the lower country were most imperfectly used. There was almost everywhere a superfluity of heath and boggy lowland. In Wales agricultural reform had made little way; while in Scotland as in England there was still work enough to do, although the Scots had made astonishingly rapid and much-needed progress between 1760 and 1800.

Every external circumstance, in the years round about the turn of the century, contributed to accelerate change. England had recently ceased to have a surplus of corn after her own needs had been met; her population was growing abnormally fast; and she was engaged in the wars. The Board of Agriculture and the Smithfield Club had just been founded; the country was covered with landowners' and farmers' societies; and agricultural surveys of all the counties were being carried out. The progress of enclosure gauges the acceleration. From 1790 to 1800 Parliament passed on an average fifty private enclosure Bills a year; between 1800 and 1810 the average was over eighty, and over eighty it remained until 1820. For the most part the enclosed land was required for corn-growing, not for the creation of new permanent pasture. Indeed old pasture land, including some of the finest natural pasture of the northern counties, was not uncommonly broken up for wheat. Corngrowing ruled; and the number of enclosure Bills varied roughly with the price of wheat. The land enclosed was often old open field, more often still old common pasture or waste, sandy heath, moorland, or fen reclaimed with the aid of the engineer and the steam-pump. Enclosure was usually accompanied or followed by a decline in the number of yeomen, small farmers, and more or less independent cottagers, together with an increase in the size of farms, and in the numbers and importance of the class of large farmers, who could secure the control of considerable capital and of bodies of landless labourers.

The history of British agriculture in the earlier half of the nineteenth century was chequered by the extraordinary fluctuations in prices, profits, and rents, that war, peace, changing corn-laws, currency troubles, and the cycles of the seasons, brought with them. After the eager search for corn lands during the wars, and the extensive cultivation that went with it, came some twenty years during which, on the heavier soils at any rate, there was little progress and some retrogression in the methods of agriculture. Landlords had sunk much capital in the new