On the Economy of Machinery and ManufacturesBabbage, Charles
ReligionComparative
On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures
Babbage, Charles
Machinery; Manufactures
speculation, invent shorter or better modes of performing old
processes, may introduce new articles, and improve and perfect
old ones, thus giving the range to his taste and fancy, and,
thereby alone enabling our manufacturers to stand the competition
with their commercial rivals in other countries. Meanwhile, as is
well worthy of remark (and experience abundantly warrants the
assertion), many of these new fabrics and inventions, when their
success is once established, become general amongst the whole
body of manufacturers: the domestic manufacturers themselves thus
benefiting, in the end, from those very factories which had been
at first the objects of their jealousy. The history of almost all
our other manufactures, in which great improvements have been
made of late years in some cases at an immense expense, and after
numbers of unsuccessful experiments, strikingly illustrates and
enforces the above remarks. It is besides an acknowledged fact,
that the owners of factories are often amongst the most extensive
purchasers at the halls, where they buy from the domestic
clothier the established articles of manufacture, or are able at
once to answer a great and sudden order; whilst, at home, and
under their own superintendence, they make their fancy goods, and
any articles of a newer, more costly, or more delicate quality,
to which they are enabled by the domestic system to apply a much
larger proportion of their capital. Thus, the two systems,
instead of rivalling, are mutual aids to each other: each
supplying the other's defects, and promoting the other's
prosperity.
Notes:
1. Lander's Journal of an Expedition to the Mouth of the Niger,
vol. ii., p. 42.
Chapter 23
On the Position of Large Factories
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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