Less than a century and a half ago, Richard Arkwright built his first little mill at Nottingham which gave employment to a dozen operatives. To-day there are one hundred great cotton factories in the city of Fall River alone, operating three and one half million spindles, nearly one hundred thousand looms, and giving employment to twenty-seven thousand operatives. There are more than twenty-five million spindles in daily operation in the United States, and even a greater number on the continent of Europe, while Great Britain contains over fifty million; and when to these we add the spindles of India, Japan, and China, we have a total of one hundred and twenty million spindles giving employment to an army of workers as great as the entire population of England when Arkwright took out his patents for spinning by rollers. Nor is this all. The factory system first applied to the cotton industry has been applied to all manufactures as well as to agriculture and has become the central fact in modern industrial life. We are now to take up the question of how the establishment of the factory affected England’s laboring poor, and to study a little more in detail the social effects of the Industrial Revolution. In preparing the way for this discussion we should remember that the factory was not the sole cause of the Industrial Revolution, although it was a very important one. Other elements besides the introduction of machinery had gradually made possible production on a large scale. Chief among these was the decline of state regulation of industry, the development of rationalism quickening the scientific spirit, the growth of the empire and prestige of England which opened great export markets for the goods of British manufacture, the extension of banking facilities, and the construction of roads and canals. All these were elements in producing the Industrial Revolution. But what gave the movement force to revolutionize the social life of the common people was the factory, which gathered great masses of the population into industrial centres in which became possible the development of class consciousness. V THE FACTORY TOWNS The dictionary contains the history of the race, if you search deep into its mysteries; every word tells its own story and bears its present meaning because men, at different times, thought precisely as they did and not otherwise.