The rapid growth of the manufacturing towns, especially in the north, drawing the scattered population of other parts of the country into their narrow limits, caused a general breakdown in the old arrangements for providing water, drainage, and fresh air; and made rents high, and consequently living in crowded rooms necessary. The factory towns in the early part of the century were filthy, crowded, and demoralizing, compared alike with their earlier and their present condition. [Illustration: Cotton Factories in Manchester. (Baines: _History of Cotton Manufacture_.)] In the higher grades of economic society the advantages of the recent changes were more distinct, the disadvantages less so. The rise of capital and business enterprise into greater importance, and the extension of the field of competition, gave greater opportunity to employing farmers, merchants, and manufacturers, as well as to the capitalists pure and simple. But even for them the keenness of competition and the exigencies of providing for the varying conditions of distant markets made the struggle for success a harder one, and many failed in it. In many ways therefore it might seem that the great material advances which had been made, the removal of artificial restrictions, the increase of liberty of action, the extension of the field of competition, the more enlightened opinions on economic and social relations, had failed to increase human happiness appreciably; indeed, for a time had made the condition of the mass of the people worse instead of better. It will not, therefore, be unexpected if some other lines of economic and social development, especially those which have become more and more prominent during the later progress of the nineteenth century, prove to be quite different in direction from those that have been studied in this chapter. *65. BIBLIOGRAPHY* Toynbee, Arnold: _The Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century in England_. Lecky, W. E. H.: _History of England in the Eighteenth Century_, Vol. VI, Chap. 23. Baines, E.: _History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain_. Cooke-Taylor, R. W.: _The Modern Factory System_. Levi, L.: _History of British Commerce and of the Economic Progress of the British Nation_. Prothero, R. E.: _The Pioneers and Progress of English Farming_. Rogers, J. E. T.: _Industrial and Commercial History_. Smith, Adam: _An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_. CHAPTER IX THE EXTENSION OF GOVERNMENT CONTROL Factory Laws, The Modification Of Land Ownership, Sanitary Regulations, And New Public Services