Like the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution was a movement destined to change the very course of human thought. Mechanical invention contributed to the force of the earlier movement—the invention of printing and of the mariner’s compass—so that side by side with the scholars restoring to the world its lost heritage of learning, craftsmen and sailors played their parts in printing the books by which the learning was disseminated, and in manning the ships that discovered new continents. The Renaissance, however, was essentially an intellectual movement to which mechanical invention was merely an aid, while the Industrial Revolution was due in an important measure to machinery. The movement began in the cotton industry, but soon a similar expansion occurred in all other manufactures. Machinery made possible a vast production; and the steam engine, first applied to manufacture, later became the means of distributing the commodities. The Industrial Revolution, thus springing from the sudden growth in the use of machinery, occasioned not only economic but political and social results. On the economic side, the effect was to extend old industries and to create new ones, as well as to revolutionize the methods of the production and distribution of wealth. On the social side it created new classes of men, breaking down the barriers of ancient feudalism, and on the political side it led to the enfranchisement of the working classes. The Industrial Revolution accomplished for England what the political revolution did for France, but by more peaceful means. Yet not alone in France was the event achieved in blood—for the Factory as well as the Terror had its victims. The history of the factory is no dry summary of patent rights and inventions, inventories of cotton and cotton goods, abstracts of ledgers, journals, cash-books, and pay-rolls,—it is a human story,—_laissez-faire_, over-production, enlightened selfishness, were no abstract terms, but vital human problems.