case, to those students who would content themselves with a statement of details. In order to simplify the problem if possible, we may approach the subject from the point of view of the people of the time, and see how they explained the remarkable changes going on in their midst. This inquiry, aside from being worth while in itself, ought to put us on a vantage ground for an independent view.

There is apparently no carefully thought out, rational explanation of the mechanical revolution that is contemporaneous with the event in its earlier stages, but as might naturally be expected, the nearest approach to such an explanation is to be found in the Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith in one of his most noted passages tells us that “the invention of all those machines by which labor is so much facilitated and abridged seems to have been originally owing to the division of labor.” This, he explains, is a result of the whole attention of each worker being directed("towards some one very simple object. It is naturally to be expected, therefore, that some one or other of those who are employed in each particular branch of labor should soon find out easier and readier methods of performing their own particular work.” The same principle of division of labor is made to account for those machines invented by others than the workmen who use the machines, for the making of machines becomes in time, by division of labor, a business in which; specialization leads to ingenuity. Furthermore, in the progress of society there arise "philosophers, or men of speculation, whose trade is not to do anything, but to observe everything"; and at length this trade, like others, "is subdivided into a great number of different branches, each of which affords occupation to a peculiar tribe or class of philosophers; and this subdivision of employment in philosophy, as well as in every other business, improves dexterity," and often leads to a rational

inventiveness in contrast with the empirical and spontaneous ingenuity of the workman.

Adam Smith's interesting interpretation leaves many questions unanswered. Is it a fact of history, the critic may inquire, that the division of labor had increased so greatly and so suddenly as to be the source of the veritable deluge of inventions during and soon after the writing of the Wealth of Nations? And if so, how may one account for the increased division of labor ?

What was in the minds of Smith's contemporaries an explanation of the era of invention? One of the favorite methods of accounting for the invention of particular devices was by resort to chance, as the flying shuttle attributed to Kay's lame back; the automatic valve, to the string tied by a boy to a valve handle; and the spinning jenny, to the accidental overturning of a spinning wheel by Jenny Hargreaves. But even when chance was believed to have been the immediate cause, an underlying human motive was recognized, as when the Society of Arts offered premiums in 1760 for a spinning machine because it had been informed that "manufacturers of woollen, linen, and cotton find it extremely difficult, in the summer season, when the spinners are at harvest work, to procure a sufficient number of hands.” 55

A more comprehensive explanation is found in the curious suggestion that "the spirit of invention" was an outgrowth of the maritime experiences of Englishmen. “Mariners are, in general, not only the boldest and most enterprising, but also the most inventive of men: the frequent difficulties to which they are reduced in the course of the many adventures they go through, sharpen their wits; . . . hence they are fertile in contrivances.” 56

.. 6 Bailey, Advancement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, 194, 195. See also Annals of Agriculture, XIX, 189; Annual Register, 1781, 97-99 (2d part); Historical and Political Remarks upon the Tariff of the Commercial Treaty (1786), 160, 161,

European Magazine, VI, 19.

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Others offered an explanation connected with maritime activities but in another way: inventive activity was attributed to commercial competition. “In manufacturing and commercial countries, when demands from abroad slacken, and foreign competitors working cheaper endanger the loss of a manufactory, then necessity sharpens the human intellect; men's geniuses awake and are animated; and discoveries are made that astonish the world." 57

It is probable, as will be observed later, that invention resulted from expansion rather than from contraction of foreign markets. And yet the earlier steps in England's mechanical progress were taken in imitation of foreigners, during periods when English manufacturers and merchants were at the mercy of superior Continental craftsmanship. There were Englishmen who were not deterred by national pride from some acknowledgment of the debt owed to foreigners, as when Arkwright's inventions were attributed to his study of the silk mills at Derby, which in turn had been erected from models introduced from Italy.58

Although imitation of foreigners can hardly account for the surpassing of foreigners so apparent in the latter part of the eighteenth century, yet the indebtedness of Englishmen to the peoples of the Continent for technical skill is greater than Englishmen of that period realized or perhaps cared to admit. The skill and ingenuity of

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67 T., Letters on Employing Machines to Shorten Labor, 9. See also Chambers' Encyclopædia, IV (1783), Art. "Spinning.”

Gentleman's Magazine, LXII, Pt. II, 863; Memoirs, Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, I, 78; Worsted Small-ware Weavers' Apology, 3, 4; [Ogden], Description of Manchester, 82. Those who may wish to pursue the interesting subject of the foreign origin of English crafts and industries will find suggestions in Salzmann's English Industries of the Middle Ages, Cunningham's Alien Immigrants to England, Hulme's articles on the patent system in Law Quarterly Review, XII, XIII, XVI, and XVIII, and Price's English Patents of Monopoly.

foreigners was utilized by England in two ways: by means of the direct importation of machines and new industries, and by means of foreign immigration into England. This immigration was in large part the result of age-long disturbances on the Continent. The Protestant Reformation, religious persecution, and the long-continued wars, strangely mixed and varied in their motives but uniform in their dismal, devastating results,-from all these disturbances England was relatively free, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, innumerable peace• loving and enterprising craftsmen had brought to England the long-accumulated skill and ingenuity of the Continent.

These immigrants naturally found greater freedom and opportunity for plying their trades in the unincorporated towns than in those where corporate and gild restrictions tended to maintain monopoly and prevent change; and enterprising but unprivileged natives also naturally sought out the towns relatively free from the network of regulations and monopolies connected with corporations and gilds. The government of the towns of England had in earlier times been regulated largely by charters which were precious instruments of municipal liberty. They checked the aggressions of feudal barons and of despotic kings. But by degrees the charters of liberty were themselves transformed in many cases into instruments of oppression. The powers of government came to be exercised by small, self-perpetuating groups; and the forms of government came to be increasingly out of harmony with the needs engendered by the growth of towns and the changing conditions of town life. Similar in some respects to the history of the chartered and incorporated town governments was that of the industrial gilds and the commercial companies. These organizations, especially the gilds, maintained in earlier times what was in many respects an admirable economic system. Their members enjoyed monopolies of the local markets as against both “foreigners” and non-member townsmen. At the same time, the abuses of monopoly were largely avoided by public regulation of prices and wages; by public control of standards of workmanship; by the cultivation of pride of workmanship; and by the ideal of an income sufficient simply for comfort as opposed to the unrestrained accumulation of riches. Producers were protected from the ruthless forces of competition, and they were at the same time restrained from the unscrupulous gratification of the acquisitive instinct. In comparison with modern society's riotous and disastrous orgy of competition and wealth-accumulation, the earlier organization of urban economic life undoubtedly possessed many excellencies. But it had also a serious defect. It was too static. It lacked adaptability. It developed elaborate regulations which, while affording protection, fettered initiative and barred the way of progress.

Town life and industrial activities in the north of England developed when the vogue of charters and gilds was declining. Urban growth in the north was in fact .stimulated by the shifting to that region of elements of • the population which were hostile to the restrictive and monopolistic regulations of corporations and gilds. The relative freedom of northern counties in these respects was early recognized and confirmed by national statutes.59 “Towns where manufactures are most flourishing," wrote Thomas Walker, one of Manchester's great early manufacturers, “are seldom bodies corporate, commerce requiring universal encouragement instead of exclusive privileges to the natives and freemen of a particular district. Those who first introduced the cotton manufacture