Let not the reader imagine that the hard
struggle under which this captain of industry
was thus for the moment beaten down, had
been a fight fought with ignorance alone. No
doubt there were many poor mistaken men
then living who believed that machinery
would grind them yet closer to the earth;
but this class was only made use of at the
time by another far above them, who dreaded
machinery because of its very tendency to
strengthen those whom, for their own
purposes, they thus turned suicidally against
themselves. These were men, neither needy nor
uneducated, who regarded every fresh
machine for diffusing the conveniences of life
more widely, as but another revolutionary
instrument for the levelling of distinctions
which the due subordination of society
required. It was not by the poor that Hargrave
was driven from place to place, till the
workhouse at Nottingham received him; for though
mobs pelted him, and poor men broke his
machines, they were but the tools of a more
secret combination which had all the wealth
and influence of Lancashire to second it.
Under the same evil influence Arkwright
must also have fallen, and closed perhaps
for ever might have been those new and
boundless fields of employment forced open
by his genius, if he had not been a man picked
out of ten thousand for indomitable
perseverance and invincible hardihood. Against
Cartwright's crowning improvement this foul
combination of course revived again, and
what it had lost of its power of agitation
by Arkwright's success it easily recovered
against the new inventor by practising on
the sufferings of the hand-loom weavers, the
power-loom having suddenly proclaimed a
sentence of not distant extinction on those most
helpless of all living workmen. For who
should be called helpless among labourers if
not that ever toiling ever ill-paid race, whose
superlatively easy labour reduces necessarily
to the very lowest point the strength and skill
required to be displayed in it? A child's
work can never in any circumstances be paid
higher than by a child's wages, and it was
not the least of the blessings conferred by
the power-loom that it turned to worthier
and more productive labour so many
thousands upon thousands of wasted hands. It
is a mistake to imagine, either, that the
misery of the change was any great or new
addition to the ordinary misery of the calling.
When evidence was taken on the subject half
a century ago, it was shown beyond question
that for more than a year before Cartwright's
invention the earnings of the great mass
of these wretched men, when working even
eighteen hours a day, had sunk very nearly
to starvation point; so terrible had been
the competition of numbers, principally
Irish and their children, content with wages
on which an English labourer could not
live.

The testimony also supplied by that evidence
to the inexpressible value of this
discovery of the power-loom is most remarkable,
As we read concerning it, we perceive that in
the series of inventions which has made
immortal the names of Hargrave, Arkwright,
Crompton, and Cartwright, it may really
stand as the crowning contrivance; and our
wonder is unceasing that a mechanical power
so original and beautiful should have been,
accomplished by one who started simply from
the thought that it was to be accomplished,
and, with a knowledge of mechanical
principles only slight at first, was led in so short
a time to so extensive a mastery over their
application, by dint mainly of an honest and
most single-minded zeal. Judge of the want
it supplied by the effect it has produced. A
quarter of a century ago (and the proportion
of increase since then has been great beyond
belief), there were nearly fifty thousand power-
looms at work in England, weaving cotton
alone. Take Manchester for example, the
head-quarters of the violence and clamour
which first assailed the discovery, and observe,
within the brief but most interesting space
of the last six years that Cartwright himself
lived to see, its incredibly gigantic advances.
In 1817 there were something less than two
thousand power-looms at work in Manchester;
in 1820 they had mounted to upwards of five
thousand; and in 1823, the year of
Cartwright's death, they were little short of
twenty thousand. As many as ten years ago,
in the island of Great Britain alone, more
than a hundred thousand power-looms were
in full employ! One wonders if any vision
of such a result as this crossed the mind of
the ruined projector, as he came journeying
up to London in 1796, composing the
pleasing sonnet to which I have referred,
and prepared with a manly cheerfulness
to begin life anew in the not very leisurely
interval between his fiftieth and sixtieth
year.

Begin life again as he might, however, he
was in the grasp of a master passion which
he could never again put aside. From the
pursuit of scientific discovery, whatever
hazard or danger it involved, he could not
again draw back. The mere hope of gain had
not inspired him to it, nor was he daunted by
the presence of discouragement and loss.
"It was now too late," says his daughter, "to
return to that peaceful mode of life, and those
literary pursuits, in which he had passed the
best and happiest of his years." He rented
a small house in Marylebone Fields, and
lived the life of an inventor. Morning, noon,
and night he was inventing. His little house
became a very college of the sciences and
arts. He improved his wool-combing machine
in spite of the threats and abuse of the more
than fifty thousand wool-combers whom it
had fiercely arrayed against him. He made
bread in his own kitchen by machinery. He
had a plan for rendering houses fire-proof,
and he invented geometrical bricks. He struck