century. It was calculated from the beginning for mechanical motive
power, and was based upon wholly new principles. By the combination of
the peculiarities of the jenny and throstle, Samuel Crompton, of Firwood,
Lancashire, contrived the mule in 1785, and as Arkwright invented the
carding engine, and preparatory ("slubbing and roving") frames about the
same time, the factory system became the prevailing one for the spinning
of cotton. By means of trifling modifications these machines were
gradually adapted to the spinning of flax, and so to the superseding of
hand-work here, too. But even then, the end was not yet. In the closing
years of the last century, Dr. Cartwright, a country parson, had invented
the power-loom, and about 1804 had so far perfected it, that it could
successfully compete with the hand-weaver; and all this machinery was
made doubly important by James Watt's steam-engine, invented in 1764, and
used for supplying motive power for spinning since 1785.

With these inventions, since improved from year to year, the victory of
machine-work over hand-work in the chief branches of English industry was
won; and the history of the latter from that time forward simply relates
how the hand-workers have been driven by machinery from one position
after another. The consequences of this were, on the one hand, a rapid
fall in price of all manufactured commodities, prosperity of commerce and
manufacture, the conquest of nearly all the unprotected foreign markets,
the sudden multiplication of capital and national wealth; on the other
hand, a still more rapid multiplication of the proletariat, the
destruction of all property-holding and of all security of employment for
the working-class, demoralisation, political excitement, and all those
facts so highly repugnant to Englishmen in comfortable circumstances,
which we shall have to consider in the following pages. Having already
seen what a transformation in the social condition of the lower classes a
single such clumsy machine as the jenny had wrought, there is no cause