wool on the face of cloths. They used a large pair of shears, which
were so set that one blade went under the cloth while the other
worked on its upper face, mowing the fibers and ends of the wool to
a smooth, even surface. The work was hard and required considerable
skill, and the men earned about twenty-four shillings a week, a
sum which, with bread and all other necessities of life at famine
prices, barely sufficed for the support of their families. The
introduction of power looms threatened to abolish their calling.
It was true that although these machines wove the cloth more evenly
and smoothly than the hand looms, croppers were still required to
give the necessary smoothness of face; still the tendency had been
to lower wages.

The weavers were affected even more than the croppers, for strength
and skill were not so needed to tend the power looms as to work the
hand looms. Women and boys could do the work previously performed
by men, and the tendency of wages was everywhere to fall.

For years a deep spirit of discontent had been seething among the
operatives in the cotton and woolen manufactures, and there had been
riots more or less serious in Derbyshire, Nottingham, Lancashire
and Yorkshire, which in those days were the headquarters of these
trades. Factories had been burned, employers threatened and attacked,
and the obnoxious machines smashed. It was the vain struggle of
the ignorant and badly paid people to keep down production and to
keep up wages, to maintain manual labor against the power of the
steam engine.

Hitherto factories had been rare, men working the frames in their
own homes, and utilizing the labor of their wives and families,