a new mortgage the following year.” But more dependable sources of prosperity are described. If one calls to mind “the immense riches daily flowing in since . [the Seven Years' War] from our commerce extended over every quarter of the globe, from the new channels of trade opened with America, and the amazing sums imported from the East Indies, it will not be difficult to account for the opulence of the present time.” 71

The increase of wealth, diffusion of prosperity, and widening of contacts led to an expansion of wants and to the introduction of new tastes. In consequence, the increase in purchasing power was accompanied by an even greater increase in demand for goods.

To the pressure of increasing demand in the home markets was added the unparalleled expansion of English control over foreign markets. France, the great imperial rival of England, was defeated and crippled. Her territories and commercial monopolies in America and the Far East were taken over by Englishmen. Shipping facilities had been enlarged and made more efficient.72 There had been rapid progress in the making of the great imperial network of fortifications in strategic locations controlling the maritime trade routes. England's advantages were the greater because of her relative freedom from invasion and internal disturbance while her Continental rivals were exhausting themselves by wars. England, to be sure, had just emerged from the Seven Years' War, but her direct participation was relatively so slight as to give color of justification to the statement that the imperial French dominions were won from France in Germany, by means of English subsidies to the

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Prussian enemies of France. There were Englishmen, indeed, who were dubious of war as an instrument of commercial expansion, and who deplored “the amazing and unnatural height to which the commerce of this country was carried by the war-being literally erected on the ruins of that of half our neighbors.

So large was the demand at home, and so extensive were the overseas markets controlled by Englishmen, that without new methods of production, “no exertions of the manufacturers could have answered the demands of

trade.” Therefore, “the animating influence of large demand," bringing liberal rewards to the producers of goods, is observable "in a variety of inventions . . . and in works of ingenuity and taste.” 74

The mechanical revolution, set in its proper historical background, is seen to assume the form of a natural, inevitable result of gradually developing forces; it becomes an integral, rationally explicable part of the age. Men had long been stirred by a strong, yet rational, sense of change and readjustment, which at length penetrated to the material foundations of society. This was the first phase of the mechanical revolution—the desire to bring about a more effective utilization of the material environment. To that end, as the second phase, new instruments and processes were devised. The final phase was the application of these inventions to productive processes.

In none of its aspects was this revolution the work of a few unappreciated individuals. It was rather the creation of social forces finding expression, to be sure, in the

* Young, Political Arithmetic, 87. See also his article in Annals of Agriculture, III, 170, 171; similar views of Samuel Eaton in Ibid., X, 45; and Dean Josiah Tucker's denunciation of England's “strange phrenzy which has infected the whole English nation" for making England "sole mistress and sovereign of the seas” (in Reflections on the Present Matters in Dispute between Great Britain and Ireland, 2, 3).

[Ogden], Description of Manchester, 87; Historical and Political Remarks upon the Tariff of the Commercial Treaty (1786), 164.

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.work of individuals, but far more significantly in govern• mental patronage and in organized, cooperative activities intended primarily to promote not the fortunes of individuals but the welfare of the nation. The men who seized upon the new machines and by means of them attained wealth and power in a newly rising industrial society—the great industrialists—appropriated instruments which in their origins were distinctly social.

CHAPTER II

THE TRIUMPH OF THE MACHINE

1. Contemporaneous views The machines brought into being during the era of invention were applied to economic processes with revolutionary effects because of their productive and competitive power. A statement so obvious may seem to need no elaboration. To the people of the time the fact, however obvious, was by no means commonplace, nor was it deemed unworthy of comment in superlative terms.

It has been asserted that the writers of the time were unconscious of the great economic transformation, and that the revolutionary power of the new machinery was practically without contemporaneous recognition. It is true that writers of the conventional forms of literature of that period, perhaps more generally than in more recent times, were inclined to look with disdain upon economic processes either new or old as common or vulgar. Doctor Johnson attributed the lack of attention paid to Dyer's poetic description of the woollen industry, The Fleece, to "the meanness naturally adhering, and the irreverence habitually annexed, to trade and manufactures.”i The subjective judgment of the learned doctor was not inapplicable to the general state of literary opinion. The catholic spirit of recent writers comprehends all manner of men and their commonest pursuits. But in the literary world of the eighteenth century, a book like Arnold Bennett's Clayhanger would have been

* Johnson's Lives of the Poets, cited by Wood, Industrial England in the Middle of the Eighteenth Century, 44, n. 1.

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as much an innovation as was the invention of the spinning jenny in the world of industry.

And yet there was a large and rapidly increasing number of writers outside the field of pure literature who were frankly and keenly interested in the forces and phenomena of economic society. By putting oneself in the place of a contemporary observer, and by remembering, too, that the eighteenth-century mind was exceptionally rational and restrained, we may the more readily perceive the significance of the superlatives applied to the new inventions. They are described as "great and extraordinary"; "most wonderful"; "astonishing"; "amazing"; "almost miraculous"; "unexampled"; "unparalleled in the annals of the world." Their effect is beyond description, but is likened to a sudden explosion, and is called by many writers a "revolution." They have reached an "incredible" perfection, with productive value "beyond the powers of calculation." They give a facility to labor "scarcely conceivable." They have laid "the foundations of a very extended commerce," and their effect on industry has been progress "rapid beyond example." They have enabled industry to make "a gigantic stride," to attain an "enormous height," and to achieve a "progressive and astonishing increase." They have caused Manchester goods in particular "to spread in ten thousand forms and colors, not only in these kingdoms, but over all Europe, and even into distant continents." They are expected to produce "great changes. . . in the appearance of the civilized world," and the magnitude of their benefits "can scarcely be estimated." The "discoveries and improvements" of the age "diffuse a glory over this country unattainable by conquest or dominion," and promise to "stamp a luster" on his Majesty's reign "to the latest generations." 2

'Annals of Agriculture, IX, 286, 502, X, 253, 281, 579, XII, 513; European Magazine, XI, 364, 367, XX, 216; Gentleman's Magazine,