gowns, the net collars and silk kerchiefs, the
white stockings and tidy shirts, would not (as
now) have been attainable by the families of
working men. If social evils have accompanied
these changes (and such is doubtless
the case), let us not ignore them; we can
talk of the great changes themselves, and still
do justice to those—whoever and wherever
they be—who yearn to pluck out the tares
from among the wheat.

What a mighty contrast exists between the
manufacturing systems of the last century
and the present! If, for example, we take
the production of woollens and worsted, we
find that Norfolk carried on this branch
of industry long before the West Riding of
Yorkshire; that serge, and camlets, and other
coarse goods were the chief products; and that
much of this work migrated to Yorkshire
about sixty or seventy years ago, on account of
the water power and the cheap coal which
that county possesses. But, whether in Norfolk
or Yorkshire, in Kendal or in the West of
England, the cloth manufacture, before the
introduction of machinery, presented an aspect
which to us now would seem most strange.
No factories: scarcely even workshops. The
cloth-maker, the monied man who had to
bear the commercial responsibility of supplying
the markets, picked up or gathered up
his wares in an extraordinary way. In the
first place he had to travel about on horseback,
to buy the wool, on which the labour of the
handicraftsman had afterwards to be bestowed;
he visited the sheep-farmers, and also those
privileged towns which had the "staple," or
market for wool, and purchased his material
in bits and scraps. He next availed himself
of the aid of sorters who slowly separated
the wool into parcels, cutting up with a
hatchet or with scissors those fibres which
were too long. When the sorters had finished,
the combers took away the wool to their own
homes, combed it into "laps," and brought it
back again to the manufacturer. The wool
was then carefully packed, strapped to
the backs of mules, and carried out to the
country districts, in the cottages of which
it had to be spun; and not only was this
done in the neighbourhood of the large
towns, but to very great distances from those
towns. In order to save his horse's legs
and his own time, he conveyed the wool to
one agent in each village, and left him to
distribute it among the villagers. The wife
and daughters of the cottager, with the old
one-thread wheel, spun the wool into yarn,
which the agent called for, and sent back to
the manufacturer. Another running about
ensued: the yarn had to be sent to the
weavers. These weavers lived here, and
there, and everywhere; they had to be sought
out, and the yarn placed in their keeping.
When returned in the shape of cloth, the
material had yet to be scoured and fulled, dyed
and shorn, and had to go out on its travels
again before this could be accomplished.

Nor were the cotton districts less marked
by the rambling nature of the manufacturing
arrangements; although, from the comparative
recency of the cotton trade in England, the
circumstances were not quite parallel. The
cotton yarn was mostly spun in the houses of
the peasants near and around Manchester
and Bolton, and other Lancashire towns;
the wives and daughters spun it in the
intervals of farm labour; and travelling
chapmen went with their pack-horses
from door to door, to purchase the yarn.
The supply was very uncertain, and the
weavers were thus frequently brought to a
stand-still for want of material; the prices
paid for yarn were often high—so high, indeed,
as to encourage much of that children's
labour which has since become a feature in
manufacturing districts. Very frequently
the father was a weaver, and the mother a
spinner, both working on different sides of
the same humble room. Sometimes the
manufacturer gave out warp yarn, with raw
cotton for weft yarn, to a cottager, and left
him, with his family, to perform all the
operations necessary for converting the material
into cotton cloth. Travelling pedlars took
advantage of this system to tempt the housewives
into dishonesty; they offered trinkets
for purloined bits of cotton, which it was hoped
would not be missed by the manufacturer.

The system pursued among the manufacturers
themselves contrasted no less strangely
with that which is so familiar to us. The
roads of Lancashire were so bad, that cotton
could be conveyed from town to town only by
pack-horses. Dr. Aikin, who lived at
Manchester when the manufacturing system was
about developing its gigantic proportions, says
that previous to 1690 there were no capitalists
among the Lancashire cotton manufacturers:
every man worked hard for a livelihood,
whether he employed others or not. During
the next period of thirty or forty years the
manufacturer worked hard and lived plainly,
but he accumulated a little capital; he sold
his goods to wholesale dealers who came to
him. "An eminent manufacturer of that age
used to be in his warehouse before six in the
morning, accompanied by his children and
apprentices. At seven they all came in to
breakfast, which consisted of one large dish
of water-pottage, made of oatmeal, water,
and a little salt, boiled thick, and poured into
a dish; at the side was a pan or basin of
milk, and the master and apprentices, each
with a wooden spoon in his hand, without
loss of time dipped into the same dish, and
thence into the milk-pan; and as soon as it
was finished they all returned to their work."
About the middle of the last century, and
down to the time of Arkwright's epoch, the
manufacturer gradually established a larger
system of dealings. Instead of sending chapmen
with laden pack-horses to the small
dealers in the small towns, the chapmen
merely carried patterns and received orders;