incentives for progress—the example set by the neighboring cotton manufacturers and the stimulus of competition with machine-made fabrics. Various men of influence advocated the general extension of mechanical methods to the woollen industry as a “subject of the first magnitude.” 26

Lancashire woollen manufacturers, as might naturally be expected, early turned their attention to the new methods; and it was soon reported that "a great number of factories are erected . . . for carding and spinning both cotton and sheep's wool.” One of these was "a large factory six stories high and a steam engine, with dye houses, and other extensive buildings, for the woollen business.” 27 An opponent of innovation in Leicestershire complained as early as 1788 that "spinning mills are now setting up all around us” for spinning wool "after the model of the cotton mills." It was stated that mills put up for spinning cotton were being turned into woollen mills, and “new ones are daily erecting” for the woollen business.28 Within five miles of Darlington in the county of Durham there were in 1789 three water mills for spinning hemp and flax as well as wool, and several similar mills were said to be in operation in that region.29 In 1792 a factory near Mansfield in Nottinghamshire was destroyed by fire with a loss of £18,000. During the early years of the last decade of the century, several woollen mills were in operation in that county. Indeed, as early as 1788, Arthur Young described a Nottinghamshire “mill for spinning wool, . . . not jennies, but a machinery in the nature of the cotton mills,"

* See for instance Wedgwood's reference to conference between Arkwright and Sir Joseph Banks in 1785: Corresp. of Josiah Wedgwood, 35.

* Aikin, Description of the Country Round Manchester, 267, 299, 300. See also Taylor, Modern Factory System, 72.

% Humble Petition of the Poor Spinners. (See below, bibliography,

p. 322.)

20

Anderson, Historical Origin of Commerce, IV, 709 (ed. 1789).

and added that "a revolution is making” in the woollen industry.30

While Yorkshire and some of the neighboring counties were introducing power machinery and going through the early stages of the factory system in the woollen industry, many other regions were adopting the spinning jenny. The contemporaneous accounts that have come down to us fail in some cases to distinguish the jenny from the mule and even from the water frame.31 In some places, as we have seen, the spinning wheel maintained undisputed sway. But in the principal woollen centers outside of the Yorkshire region, the early years of the last decade of the century were marked by the rapid introduction of the hand jenny. The situation is described by a rimester in 1791, who put his views into the mouth of a "spinster”— a girl who had been accustomed to augment the family income by wheel spinning, and who was made to complain that “now the jennies take all work away.” 82 The old system of domestic industry by which the wife and the children of farm workers were expected to supplement the wages derived from farm labor was supported by landlords and farmers as a means of reducing their labor costs. The new methods of manufacturing vitally affected, therefore, the prevailing rural economy. It is because of this fact that much valuable information concerning the transition is to be found in the Annals of Agriculture,33 and in the reports from the various counties to the Board of Agriculture, immediately after its organization in 1793.

We are not entirely without evidence of the beginnings of factory organization due to machinery in some of the more conservative centers. One Richard March testified in 1785 before a committee of the House of Lords that he and his partners had spent £26,000 on an establishment for spinning wool near Barnstaple in Devonshire. A clothier "opened a spinning house" in 1788 at Pucklechurch in Gloucestershire. In Wiltshire in 1794 the landlords were said to be suffering from the loss of spinning to supplement the wages of their employees because of the use of "machines to supply the place of manual labor whereby all those parts of the manufactory that have hitherto been done in the country villages will be done at the immediate residence of the manufacturers." A mill for carding and spinning was put up in North Wales in 1794, and in the same year a similar establishment was erected by means of local subscriptions in northwestern Scotland. 34

In woollen manufacturing, household industry was exceptionally important. It is necessary to keep clearly in mind the difference between manufacturing carried on in the home for family needs and for exchange among neighbors on the one hand, and so-called "public" manufacturing to supply general market demands on the other hand. The former is described by a Scottish correspondent of the Annals of Agriculture in 1788: “There is no public manufacture in this part of the country for wool, but a considerable domestic one, as all over Scotland; every housewife and family spins; has the yarn wove, dyed, etc., at her own expense; having clothed her fam

* Min. of the Evidence, Com. of H. of L., 1785 (on Irish Resolutions), 85; Annals of Agriculture, IX, 298, 299, XV, 497; Davis, General View of the Agriculture of Wilts, 158, 159; Kay, General View of the Agriculture of North Wales (Montgomeryshire), 22; Robson, General View of the Agriculture of Argyll, 23.

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ily, she sells the overplus.” 35 In many places this sys'tem, involving the use of the wheel, long outlived the century. It is true, also, that wheel spinning continued beyond the turn of the century to furnish a small portion of the supply of yarn used by the professional clothiers in the regular markets. But the available information, though inadequate, indicates that even as early as 1793, when war-time conditions inaugurated a new period, the principal supplies of woollen goods on the market were .being made by the use of power-spun and jenny-spun 'yarns, the former mainly in the Yorkshire region, the latter more largely in the older centers.

There had been only a slight application of steam r power to the textile industries by 1793, but the characteristic aspects of modern industrial organization resulted from the use of water power no less than of steam power. The utility of the steam engine, it is true, was rapidly being demonstrated, and the development of industrial plants away from water-power sites was already under way. Steam engines were in such common use at Manchester as early as 1786 as to cause Dr. Percival, a prom* inent physician of Manchester, to correspond with James • Watt concerning methods of abating the smoke nuisance.36 Its adaptability to an "almost incredible” variety of uses was soon recognized, and prophecy was made as early as 1787 that it would change “the appearance of the civilized world." 37 But during the epochal eighteenthcentury transformation of the textile industries, its effect on industrial reorganization was slight.

During the transition in the textile industries there was

37

35 Vol. X, p. 559.

30 Boulton and Watt MSS., Letter Book (Office), 1786-1788, 109, 110.

European Magazine, XI, 364, 367; Companion to the Leasowes, to Which is Prefixed the Present State of Birmingham, 14, 15; Aikin, Description of the Country Round Manchester, 176, 177; Memoirs, Manchester Lit. and Phil. Soc., I, 79.

а

going on in coal mining and metal manufacturing a series of changes analogous to those in the making of cloth. Textile manufacturing, especially the carding, spinning and printing of cotton, assumed the essential features of the nineteenth-century factory system long before the revolution in coal and iron had brought about the general use of steam power and the more extensive use of metals in the manufacture of machinery. The transformation in coal mining and iron manufacturing brought about a vast expansion of these industries in the eighteenth century, but their significance in relation to other branches of economic life was not so vital as in the nineteenth century, when not only the textile industries but practically all other manufactures, and transportation as well, became vitally dependent upon steam power and upon new methods of smelting and molding iron and making machinery. In considering the eighteenth-century changes in the iron industry, one should remember, too, that the accompanying reorganization of economic groups was slighter than in the textile industries, for the relatively large iron works had for a long time more nearly resembled the factory system than had the smallshop and household organization of textile manufacturing. And yet, in comparison with earlier changes, the transformation even in the iron industry was rapid, even revolutionary, in its social effects as well as in its technique. The adoption of the new methods and devices .(coke-burning furnaces, power blast, Huntsman's steelcasting process, rolling and puddling) enabled the British · iron industry, which had long been declining, to revive and rise rapidly to a position of independence and superiority. These changes, together with the devising of machine tools such as the lathe, made possible the rapid nineteenth-century advances in mechanical methods throughout the machine-using world of industry and transportation; and they contributed significantly, dur