In the writings of modern socialists we find the domestic system held up for admiration as the ideal method of production. The dreamers look back regretfully to the days when manufactures were combined with farming, and they quote from Goldsmith’s _Deserted Village_. Let us, however, turn to a more prosaic but more trustworthy account, which is to be found in Daniel Defoe’s _Plan of the English Commerce_. The author is writing enthusiastically in praise of English manufactures, and, having pointed out how in the unemployed counties women and children are seen idle and out of business, the women sitting at their doors, the children playing in the street, he continues: “Whereas, in the manufacturing counties, you see the wheel going almost at every door, the wool and yarn hanging up at every window; the looms, the winders, the combers, the carders, the dyers, the dressers all busy; and the very children as well as the women constantly employed ... indeed there is not a poor child in the town above the age of four but can earn his own bread.” When we come to study the brutalizing social conditions which obtained in the manufacturing towns following the establishment of the factory, we shall do well to keep in mind these words written by an eighteenth century student in praise of the domestic system; when we hear the socialists declare that the factory created wage slavery, let us remember this earlier and more monstrous slavery. Richard Arkwright, the inventor of the spinning-frame, was a man of great genius. Endowed with the inventive faculty, and even more with the ability to perfect the inventions of others, he possessed as well extraordinary executive ability, and having brought his spinning machinery to the point of practical efficiency, he organized the modern factory system as the means of obtaining the highest results from the new mechanisms. The spinning frame was too cumbersome to be operated in the cottage, and, moreover, it required a greater power to operate it than that of the human hand, so Arkwright built his first factory which was run by horse power, and from this beginning was evolved the factory as we know it to-day. But important as were the inventions in cotton manufacture, the factory would never have become the mighty power that it is, except for the steam engine; and it is interesting to note that in the same year in which Arkwright took out his patent for spinning by rollers, Watt invented his device for lessening the consumption of fuel in fire engines, that epoch-making invention by means of which the factory system as perfected by Arkwright was to become the material basis of modern life.