The operatives had higher wages, but suffered under the friction of an industrial revolution, which has done more than any political convulsion for human happiness. The factory had been enabled by the invention of the steam-engine and other machines, shortly before 1800, to take the place of the cottages in making cloth. British goods were in great demand abroad during the war, and had to be carried in British ships. Improved roads and canals led merchants and manufacturers to opulence. The rich grew richer, as has usually been the case; but there were some exceptional years during which the poor really grew poorer. One man could make as much cotton cloth in a day as two hundred could have done before; but what was to become of the one hundred and ninety-nine? Demand for factory labour kept increasing until 1815; but population grew faster still. Wages were already falling; the return of peace lessened the demand abroad; and hundreds of thousands of discharged soldiers and sailors were added to the multitude of unemployed. Labourers were forbidden either to emigrate or to combine in order to keep up wages; and their earnings were lowest at the time when bread was the highest. Meat, sugar, foreign fruit, and many other articles now in common use were almost unattainable by the poor until late in the century. There was much more intelligence in the towns than in the country; but there were no opportunities of education in 1818 in England for one-half of the children. Boys and girls entered the factory at the age of six, and often from the poor-house, where they had been sold into slavery. The regular time was fourteen hours a day; sitting down was seldom permitted; food was scanty and bad; punishment was constant and cruel; deformity and disease were frequent; and the death-rate was unusually high. Terrible cases occurred of pauper children, kept sixteen hours at a stretch without rest or food, driven by hunger to rob the troughs in the pig-sty, tortured merely for amusement by the overseer, and even advertised for sale with the mill.