[Footnote 417: Defoe, _A Tour Through Great Britain_ (1769 edition), iii., pp. 144-145. The passage by Radcliffe runs as follows:--“In the year 1770, the land in our township (Mellor) was occupied by between fifty and sixty farmers; rents, to the best of my recollection, did not exceed 10s per statute acre, and out of these fifty or sixty farmers, there were only six or seven who raised their rents directly from the produce of their farms; all the rest got their rent partly in some branch of trade, such as spinning and weaving woollen, linen, or cotton. The cottagers were employed entirely in this manner, except for a few weeks in the harvest. Being one of those cottagers, and intimately acquainted with all the rest, as well as with every farmer, I am the better able to relate particularly how the change from the old system of hand-labour to the new one of machinery operated in raising the price of land in the subdivision I am speaking of. Cottage rents at that time, with convenient loom-shop and a small garden attached, were from one and a half to two guineas per annum. The father of a family would earn from eight shillings to half-a-guinea at his loom, and his sons, if he had one, two, or three, alongside of him, six or eight shillings each per week; but the great sheet-anchor of all cottages and small farms was the labour attached to the hand-wheel, and when it is considered that it required six to eight hands to prepare and spin yarn, of any of the three materials I have mentioned, sufficient for the consumption of one weaver--this shows clearly the inexhaustible source there was for labour for every person from the age of seven to eighty years (who retained their sight and could move their hands) to earn their bread, say one to three shillings per week, without going to the parish” (pp. 59-60).]