[Footnote 443: Some information regarding the state of trade is given in two papers by the present writer on “The Cotton Trade during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars” (_Transactions of the Manchester Statistical Society_, 1916, 1917). The mule-spinners were combined in the early nineties of the eighteenth century, and although they claimed, in answer to the assertion that their combination was illegal, that it existed only to relieve their fellow-labourers in distress, they managed to conduct wages disputes in an efficient manner. The combination continued to exist after the Combination Acts were passed. In 1803 the master spinners in the town and neighbourhood of Manchester resolved to form themselves into an Association and raise a fund of £20,000 by each member contributing in proportion to the number of spindles he employed in order to defeat “this dangerous and unjust combination” (Circular dated 7th October 1803).] The transition in the cotton industry is, of course, only part of that general transition in industry and agriculture in England which is now concisely known as the Industrial Revolution, and sometimes the last decades of the eighteenth and the early decades of the nineteenth centuries are taken to cover the period of the transition. That the movement was proceeding apace in these years there can be no doubt, but it would be erroneous to regard what happened then as more than an acceleration of what had been taking place before. At any rate, so far as the cotton industry is concerned, from the moment that we can take hold of anything that may be called a cotton industry a continuous development can be traced in all directions. Even the inventions of the jenny and the water-frame, when viewed in their right relations, are seen as the outcome of efforts extending over more than thirty years preceding their appearance, and come as something expected, rather than as something sudden and unique.