While it is admitted that the inventions and discoveries of Sir Joseph Arkwright (partner of David Dale at Lanark), Hargreaves, Crompton, and Cartwright revolutionised industry, and in the long run brought a higher standard of living to the people, yet the first results of their application were not wholly good. For centuries spinning and weaving had been carried on in the homes of the people, but with the invention of the spinning jenny, the carding frame, and the power-loom the weaving industry was removed to larger buildings. At first these were merely makeshifts. A disused stable or cowshed, any building, in fact, which would house a number of looms was good enough for the new industry. The hand-loom weavers soon found that they were unable to compete with the new methods. To make matters worse, where they did not themselves give up and take service under the new regime, their wives and their children did, and became competitors in driving the husbands and fathers out of the industry. Soon the millowners discovered that in the new methods with the new cheap labour there was a mine of wealth and, their greed growing by what it fed on, they sought for even cheaper labour than that of the poorly paid wage-slave women and children. This cheaper labour they found in the thousands of pauper children under the care of the supervisors of the poor. The story of the cruel treatment of these poor little mites, who were often chained to the frames of the looms and whipped to keep them awake, is one of the blackest pages in the whole history of the growth of the capitalist system in Great Britain. In the weaving trades the entry of women and children changed the whole economy of the weavers’ homes. Formerly the work had been done by the male members of the families, assisted to some extent by the women, but under the new system the factory owner found that he could get as much work done by the mother at a considerable reduction on the wages paid to her husband, and so the husband found himself workless. Then it was found that the children soon became as expert as their elders, and so a further reduction in wages took place. The net result was that it became a case of equal pay for equal work, but the standard of pay was that of the women and not of the men, and soon the whole family had to work to provide the necessaries of life for the home which should have been provided by the wages of the husband alone. Even to-day, while the women of the cotton mills who are members of their unions are probably the best paid female workers in the country, the standard for men is much below that for male workers in other trades; so that, in the case of the factory workers, “equal pay for equal work” has meant a general lowering of the standard of pay. CHAPTER II. THE DAWN OF CO-OPERATION.