hose, and this in the opening of the eighteenth century; and the State
still retains it as a household industry. The percentage for the United
States of women engaged in it by the last census is 61,100.

The early stages of the industry employed very few women, the processes
involving too heavy labor; and out of 159 workers in the first mills,
only eight were women, these being employed in carding and fulling.
According to our last census, 10,743 are employed in New England mills
alone; but the proportion remains far below that of the cotton-mills,
and at many points in the South and remote territories it is still a
household industry in which all share.

Until well on in the nineteenth century the factory and the domestic
system were still interwoven, nor had there been intelligent definition
of the actual meaning of this system until Ure formulated one:--

"The factory system in technology is simply the combined operation
of many orders of work-people in tending with assiduous skill a
series of productive machines, continuously impelled by a central
power."[15]

A central power controlling an army of workers had been the dream of all
mechanicians; and Ure formulated this also:--

"It is the idea of a vast automaton, composed of various mechanical
and intellectual organs, acting in uninterrupted concert for the
production of a common object,--all of them being subordinate to a
self-regulated moving force."

This was the result brought about by the gradual extension of the