actually assumed by industrial society were decisively molded by machinery.

Robert Owen in his autobiography (a priceless document of early industrialism as well as a record of a remarkable personality) gives an account of the beginning of his career as a cotton manufacturer. While employed as a common workman at Manchester in 1787, when only sixteen years old, he met a mechanic, a maker of wire frames for women's hats. Through him Owen became interested in the new spinning machinery. This mechanic, he relates, “began to tell me about great and extraordinary discoveries that were beginning to be introduced into Manchester for spinning cotton by new and curious machinery. He said he was endeavoring to see and get a knowledge of them, and that if he could succeed, he could make a very good business of it.” The desired knowledge was secured, and a partnership was formed. As his share of the joint capital, Owen managed at length to get together the sum of £100. This humble beginning of the career of one of Great Britain's richest and most noted early “cotton lords” is a valid illustration of the close causal connection between the invention of machines and the rise of the new industrial capitalists. The most important, most characteristic source of this new group, ultimately the most powerful in England and indeed in the world, was in the wealth created by the "great and extraordinary discoveries” and the "new and curious machinery” by means of which Owen made his fortune. 1

Equally noteworthy was the influence of the new industrial technique on the rise of that other distinctive group of recent times, the employees of the great industrialists. To the toiling masses of the time, as well as to the few who rose into the ranks of the great, the mechanical improvements brought economic oppor

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tunity which vastly increased their numbers. The fears of many of the workers that labor-saving machines would take bread out of their children's mouths by robbing them of work was opposed by argument and allayed by fact. “Population,” it was contended, “must go on in proportion to subsistence and in proportion to industry: now the machine eats nothing, so does not diminish subsistence," but rather, in fact, increases it, and therefore potentially creates population. Such arguments, though frequently advanced, naturally made little impression on the workers. But the logic of facts prevailed, as more than one writer made haste to point out. Thus the demand for labor at Bolton was so great, as a result of the spinning factories, that the population more than doubled in a decade, and in consequence “the opposition of the populace to the use of machines for shortening labor has been quelled.” 3 Similar conditions furnished convincing arguments throughout the region. Machines, "so far from tending to diminish unemployment, ... must, when judiciously applied, be the means of multiplying it. . . . It is this which, almost in our own days, has expanded the villages of Lancashire into towns next to the metropolis in size.” 4

The era of invention brought to the workers new conditions of work as well as new opportunities for work -conditions which made possible a rapid process of molding the inert mass of industrial labor into mobile shape and of animating it with group life and consciousness. The new opportunities were proclaimed by many champions of mechanical methods; but the ultimate effects of the new conditions were discerned by few.5

While machinery has produced economic commodities *Steuart, Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy, I, 123. * Aikin, Description of the Country Round Manchester, 261, 262. * Annals of Agriculture, IX, 534, 535.

* There were some, however, who early observed the significance of the conditions resulting from mechanical technique in bringing

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infinite in variety and in extent beyond the power of calculation or conception, it has at the same time been the decisive factor in the formation of what is far more important,-namely, the two outstanding economic groups of the modern industrialized regions. Among those who seek an understanding of present-day social forces, the age of invention is justly a subject of perennial interest.

2. The prevailing spirit of invention In the study of the progress of invention, it would be a pleasant task to recount the lives of individual inventors, and to try to give due credit to men whose devices have as vitally influenced the lives of their fellow men as has the work of Pitt or Washington or Napoleon. But the task, however pleasant to contemplate, is impossible to perform. Most of them were humble and obscure, and the boldest and most patient of historical architects who have adventured on the task of reconstructing their careers have been rewarded with the merest fragments of materials.

A most careful search of available records rewards the student with little that is important in the personal history of most of the great inventors, but the search is extremely fruitful in showing that the individual inventors were after all merely the focal points in a well-nigh universal interest in mechanical progress. Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, Cartwright, Cort, Brindley, Watt, Wedgwood,—these are the names that are commonly associated with the inventions and technical improvements that transformed the country; but while these men were engaged at their particular tasks, literally thousands of others were working with equal ardor to solve the same or similar problems. At the same time, national about a community of interest and action on the part of industrial workers. See below, pp. 284, ff., 298.

and local societies were organized for stimulating and rewarding inventive activity; and the government paid large sums in recognition of the work of inventors, and passed laws to prevent foreigners from using English inventions. So varied and extensive was the interest in technical progress, so unprecedented was the prevailing spirit of improvement in methods of doing things, that one may properly characterize the latter part of the eighteenth century as the age of invention.

In order to appreciate the significance of this aspect of the period, it is necessary to contrast it not with the progress of more recent times but with the earlier lack of progress and absence of interest in technical improvement. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been kaleidoscopic in their rapidity of change. Inventions and discoveries such as would have startled the minds and revolutionized the lives of former generations are multiplied, great factories are put up and straightway rebuilt to make way for improved machinery, gigantic warships are constructed and declared obsolete well-nigh before they are manned for the trial cruise, imagined miracles of yesterday are the commonplace realities of today. The conscious aim alike of a multitude of empirical workers and of thousands of scientific investigators is to effect improvements in machinery and technique.

It was not so in the middle of the eighteenth century, when (to cite a sufficient illustration and symbol of the prevalence of primitive methods) even "Manchester goods” were transported to Bristol, to the metropolis, and to the nearby port of Liverpool by means of the ancient packhorse. Interest in technical improvement was not unknown, to be sure, but the prevailing spirit was one of conformity to methods approved by age and precedent. Workingmen with a turn for invention feared that labor-saving devices would reduce employment, as when one Lawrence Earnshaw, a north-of-England tailor's apprentice, turning mechanic, invented, about 1753, a machine to combine the operations of spinning and reeling cotton, but destroyed it, saying that “he would not be the means of taking bread out of the mouths of the poor.” 6 Men of science and learning, as the faculties of the universities and the gentlemen of the Royal Society, were interested in improvements in the technique of pure science, but any idea of the application of their knowledge in the devising of inventions useful in the ordinary affairs of life was rarely entertained. Agriculture, to be sure, being the pursuit of the aristocracy, was viewed in a somewhat different light, and no less a person than Viscount Townshend was a pioneer, as early as 1730, in the introduction of technical improvements in farming by such means as seed drilling, marling, and horse hoeing. Serious efforts had also been made to improve the technique of navigation, ?—which was directly connected not so much with "useful” economic life as with naval and imperial affairs. In general, the relation of the government to inventions was confined to the formality of issuing letters patent. Individual inventors with genius superior to that of Watt, Arkwright and Wedgwood had arisen in earlier times (asserted a popular writer), but their genius shone, “amid an igno- . rant and idle people, like a flambeau in a fog.” The relatively inferior abilities of Watt and his contemporaries were effecting unique results because of the enlightened and active interest of the people of their time.8

• Gentleman's Magazine, LVII, Pt. II, 664-666, 1200. 'For example, see below, p. 32.

• Chalmers, Estimate, ed. 1794, Dedication, xxiv, xxv. In further reference to the contrast suggested by Chalmers, there are interesting comments and useful bibliographical notes in Dircks' Life, Times and Scientific Labors of the Second Marquis of Worcester. The book contains an annotated reprint of Worcester's Century of Inventions, as well as other documents, and lists of early works on mechanical subjects. The genius of Worcester (d. 1667) is unduly extolled; but the crude technical knowledge and the meager mechanical interests of