Hargreaves, and this was at length brought to work as many as eighty
spindles. The ingenious Hargreaves had ample opportunity for practical
study of the “unemployed” question; for the spinners, some of whom were
forced into idleness by the new invention, broke into his house and
destroyed his machine. Shortly after, there was a general rising over
industrial Lancashire: the poor hand-workers, whose prophetic souls
were evidently dreaming on things to come, scouring the country and
breaking in pieces every carding and spinning machine they could find.
Progress by differentiation, however, heeded not the second sight of
Lancashire workers. In 1769, Arkwright contrived the spinning frame,
and obtained his patent for spinning with rollers. In 1775, Crompton,
of Bolton, invented the mule-jenny, enabling warps of the finest
quality to be spun. In 1792, further improvements in this machine
were made by Pollard, of Manchester, and Kelly, of Glasgow. In 1785,
steam was first applied to the spinning of cotton in Nottinghamshire.
In 1784 the Rev. E. Cartwright, of Kent, invented power-loom weaving,
and completed and patented his invention in August, 1787. Here, then,
within a period of about forty years, was a series of mechanical
inventions which had the effect of absolutely changing the method of
production, and enormously increasing the output; of dividing the
labor of producing, which had formerly been effected by a single
family within the walls of a single room, between scores and hundreds
of people, each of whom only undertook a single process in a complex
operation; of massing together hundreds of thousands of people under
new conditions; of bringing a heretofore isolated district into
intimate relations with distant foreign lands: and of separating the
work of spinning or weaving from the ownership of the instruments by
whose aid the work was done. The independent weaver was gone; or rather
he was subjected, like an amœba, to a process of fission, but with
this difference: that whereas the amœba produces by fission other
similar amœbæ, the weaver was differentiated into a person called an
employer and another called an employé or “hand.” Multiply this “hand”
by thousands, and we get the mill or factory, divided into departments,
each with its special detail of work, each detail fitting into all the
rest, each machine taking up the work where the last machine left it,
and each contributing its share to the joint product. Multiply the
employer; add enormously to the aggregate of his capital; remove the
barrier of national frontiers from his operations; relieve him of the
duty of personal supervision; and we get the joint-stock capitalist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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