The factory produced cloth more cheaply and in far greater quantity than was possible under the domestic system. Hand workers sought employment in the factories. Vast numbers of purely agricultural laborers left the rural districts for the manufacturing towns. And, augmenting this great supply of labor, came thousands of children—for an eight-year-old child was capable of operating a spinning-frame, in which, for this very reason, the spindles were set near to the floor. With an unlimited supply of labor, the cotton masters had only the cost of production to consider, and so it came about that they thought only of their profits and forgot the human hands which operated the machinery. England had fallen under the sway of a book—Adam Smith’s _Wealth of Nations_, which, as Southey said, “considers man as a manufacturing animal, estimating his importance not by the goodness and knowledge he possesses, not by his virtues and charities, not by the happiness of which he may be the source and centre, not by the duties to which he is called, not by the immortal destinies for which he is created, but by the gain that may be extracted from him or of which he may be made the instrument.” The crowding of this vast laboring population into great industrial centres, however, gave rise to a class-consciousness which demanded that attention should be paid to the human element which distinguished labor from all other commodities, demanded that the cotton masters should no longer regard the workingman as a slave, or as merely a part of the machine, but as a free man, and which demanded further that this free man should be recognized as a citizen and given the right of suffrage. It would be interesting for us to follow the history of the factory where we now leave it, firmly established as the cornerstone of Great Britain’s wealth, down to the present time, and trace its development not only in England and America but throughout the civilized world. It is a surprising story of industrial progress, an important chapter in the social progress of mankind. But enough has already been said to prepare us for the consideration of the way in which the establishment of the factory affected England’s laboring poor. The actual development of the cotton industry surpasses any dream that even the barber of Preston could have imagined when he exclaimed that he, unaided, would pay the national debt.