III.

POLITICAL ECONOMY-OLD AND NEW.

SEVEN years before Adam Smith published the Wealth of Nations James Watt took out a patent for the steam-engine; a year later James Hargreaves patented the spinning-jenny; and a few years later still, in 1779, Samuel Crompton invented the 'mule,' a machine which combined the advantages of the jenny and Arkwright's water-frame,-thus getting its name, and which effected such an increase of productive power that by 1811 no fewer than 4 million spindles were worked by it in our factories. These inventions accelerated a Revolution which had been silently proceeding before they came out, which called into operation economical and industrial forces that have transformed the face of the country, and led to unparalleled developments of wealth. In consequence of these new forces, many of Smith's economical speculations were entirely nullified. He dwells on the disadvantages of distance for trading purposes, and prefers the home trade to the Continental, and the Continental trade to the American, on account of quicker returns; but steam has well-nigh annihilated distance both by sea and land, and has brought New York as near to Liverpool as Paris was to London a century ago. He consoled home farmers by assuring them that fat cattle could not be imported, even from Ireland, in any numbers, and that corn was too bulky an article to be brought into Great Britain in large quantities. Yet both are now freely imported, and two-thirds of our wheat

comes from abroad. He states that the population of our island had not been doubled in less than five hundred years, and yet it was trebled in the hundred years succeeding 1780. Such an increase did not seem to be possible at the time when he wrote. It was principally, however, in connection with the textile industries that the greatest changes of a social and economic kind took place. For centuries this island was a purely agricultural country, growing large quantities of wool, exporting it to Flanders as raw material, and importing manufactured goods and luxuries in exchange. Nine-tenths of English wool kept in activity the looms of Bruges and Ghent, and a stoppage of this export from our shores used to throw half the Flemish towns out of work. From the wool-tax alone, as far back as 1340, Edward III. drew a revenue of £138,000. A certain amount of this article was at an early period turned to account at home in the manufacture of coarse cloths, and fine cloths such as linen came from Liége and Flanders, velvet and silk goods from Venice and Genoa; but in the end of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through the immigration of Flemish and Huguenot refugees, home manufactures had developed so extensively that the whir of looms could be heard through the land, and the cloth trade took its place among our chief industries in such centres as Norfolk and Suffolk, Kent and Devonshire, and counties south of the Trent. About 1776, the year when Adam Smith published his Inquiry, we approach a new period in the development of textile industries—a period in which machinery begins to supersede manual labour. In Smith's time these industries were widely distributed over the country; the spinning-wheel was to be found in every cottage, and the wool was turned into yarn by wife and daughter, while the yarn was woven into cloth by father and son. Besides the products of the loom, the cottager had other ways and He had a plot of ground about his cottage, and could relieve the monotony of the loom by growing his own vegetables, or feeding his pigs and poultry; and, as the commons were still unenclosed, he had a right to turn his cow upon the adjoining

means.

pasture. It was an idyllic existence over which the historian loves to linger. Defoe pictures it in his Tour through Great Britain in 1724-26: 'The land was divided into small enclosures from two acres to six or seven each, seldom more, every three or four pieces of land having a house belonging to them; hardly a house standing out of speaking distance from another. We could see at every house a tenter, and on almost every tenter a piece of cloth or kersey or shalloon. At every considerable house there was a manufactory. Every clothier keeps one horse at least, to carry his manufactures to the market; and every one generally keeps a cow or two more for his family. By this means the small pieces of enclosed land about each house are occupied, for they scarce sow corn enough to feed their poultry. The houses are full of lusty fellows, some at the dye vat, some at the looms, others dressing the cloths; the women and children carding or spinning, being all employed from the youngest to the oldest.' Take another picture of that time in the rural capital of Lauderdale, whose burghal arrangements are of a very primitive kind. In 1772 the burgesses were restricted to the right of pasturing eighteen sheep, also a cow and a horse on the common, about 1700 acres in extent. Cows and horses were turned out to graze during the day, and were brought home at night. A cowherd went along the street blowing a horn, at the sound of which every cow was turned out to join the herd, which increased in numbers at every turn.1

All that life of 'contentment spinning at the cottage door' was destined to pass away in the next half century under the operations of steam power and the new inventions, when the furnace and the factory rose up to replace the domestic system of industry. Many small master manufacturers had already begun to produce on a large scale, and before the eighteenth century was out it was common to see mills placed by the side of streams for the sake of having water-power; but soon after the power of steam was applied to machinery, and Cartwright's power-loom came into use, the old form of industry was doomed, 1 Border Church Life, by James Tait.

and the cottager, seeing himself hopelessly beaten by the 'jenny' and the 'mule,' and unable to eke out a livelihood by keeping a cow, had to go himself, or send his sons and daughters, into the new steam-factories. The rise of these mammoth workshops caused a variety of social and industrial changes. As they became located in the North of England, a great shifting of population to Lancashire and Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland, was the result. The villages of these northern counties shot up into great towns. At the same time, an increase of population led to the enclosure of commons and waste lands. This encroachment of landlords on the common lands went on all through the eighteenth century, but the process, which helped to extinguish the yeomanry, was greatly accelerated from 1760 to 1843, during which period the number of acres enclosed rose to 7 millions.

To this industrial revolution we owe the development of the great middle class, of the powerful system of Capital, and of an unexampled accumulation of wealth. The trade of the country advanced by leaps and bounds, inasmuch as India and our American colonies opened to us unlimited markets, and our conquests by sea and land secured for us the universal empire of a sole market.' Owing to these advantages we had a clear start of half a century in the race of commercial enterprise over the other nations of Europe, while the powers of production obtained by the new inventions enabled us largely to supply the demands made upon our industry.

If we study the economic outcome of this Industrial Order, we shall come nearer to the subject before us. It led to an enormous aggregation of wealth, and generated a potent influence alike in the local and the political sphere. The millowner, the ironmaster, and the great merchant were the conspicuous figures of the system; into their hands came large accumulations of wealth, which made them magnates of such importance that they could control the markets of the world, appear in their several neighbourhoods as rivals of the proud landowners, and sit side by side with them in the senate of the

nation. In this new order Industry was placed on a capitalistic basis, and Capital was invested with a large and ever-increasing ascendency over Labour. In the old domestic system the workmen were economically independent, stood more on a level with the masters, and enjoyed a more equal participation in the profits of labour. Under the Capitalistic system these features are sufficiently reversed to strike the most common observer, and give point to the words of one of our younger economists: 'What we say is that since the old Political Economy was written, a new force has come into the world that has made much of the competition of business life not free as between man and man—that is, the enormous and accumulative power of large capitals. Poverty is the heavy handicap of the worker; but in any fair or free game, where competition benefits both sides as it should, it is never the weaker side that carries the handicap.'

Another outcome of the Industrial Period was the exploitation of Labour, with its concomitant evils. At the beginning the people spun and wove in their cottages, widely scattered over the country, and passed a healthy contented life, all redolent of the soil; fifty years after they were herded together round. mammoth workshops, inside of whose close atmosphere they were obliged to work for twelve or fourteen hours, and then to seek repose in ill-constructed, badly-drained, and overcrowded dwellings. The laws of sanitation were unknown, and wretched hovels were common in rapidly-growing centres of population; as a consequence, the toilers, young and old, died in terrible numbers, swept off by contagious fevers. Under the 'Apprentice System' the first and most awful horrors of the exploitation of Labour were enacted. Factory owners bargained with parish authorities for pauper children, as young as five years old, who were bound apprentices until twenty-one years of age; and to get rid of the idiots, one was taken by the mill-owner with twenty sane children. What became of the idiots remains a secret, but history tells a harrowing tale of the apprentices. They were taken to Lancashire in barges from London work