The further advantages may be most briefly stated in the familiar words of Adam Smith: “The great increase in the quantity of work, which, in consequence of the division of labor, the same number of people are capable of performing, is owing to three different circumstances: first, to the increase of dexterity in every particular workingman; secondly, to the saving of time, which is commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another, and, lastly, to the invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labor and enable one man to do the work of many.” It should be noted that the factory was, in the beginning, not the creation of capital, but of labor. The early master manufacturers were risen workingmen. Sir Richard Arkwright, the creator of the factory, the man who dominated industrial activities in the first great period of expansion, was a penny barber; but he died a Knight Bachelor with an income greater than that of many a prince. The process of social elevation by means of trade began back in the fifteenth century with the first extension of manufactures. By the beginning of the eighteenth century it was possible to name five hundred great estates within a hundred miles of London, which, at no remote time, had been possessions of the ancient English gentry, but had later been bought up by tradesmen and manufacturers. The ancestors of these new landed proprietors had been, less than three hundred years before, not soldiers, but serfs. Moreover, generations before the establishment of the factory, important towns had been raised by manufactures—towns of which Manchester and Birmingham were examples, in which there were few or no families of the gentry, yet which were full of families richer by far than many a noble house. And side by side with this process of tradesmen rising to the gentry had gone the other process of declining gentry placing their sons in trade. So, as Defoe pithily said, “Tradesmen became gentlemen by gentlemen becoming tradesmen.” The successful artisan under the domestic system became in time master clothier, and when the factory became the means of further increase to their fortunes the capital which this class had already amassed was utilized in building mills and machinery. To this class belonged the grandfather of Sir Robert Peel, a resident of Blackburn, who supported himself from the profits of a farm in the neighborhood and devoted his spare time to mechanical experiments. From this he came to operate a print-works, and later commenced the manufacture of cloth.