Besides her carrying trade across the seas, Britain had the good fortune to find iron ore close to her coal in her North Midlands. Wherever those two were found together--the coal to heat the water into steam for the driving of the machines, and the iron as the chief material of the machines themselves and of a thousand things made by them--the conditions favoured {189} manufacturing. So, in such places, both in England and elsewhere, there grew up the large and ever-increasing towns, as the people gathered to work together in the factories. For though the machines might do the work of twenty men, many more than twenty times the former total of work was performed within the space that each of these big towns occupied. [Sidenote: Hand loom and power loom] [Illustration: OLD HAND LOOM AND MODERN POWER LOOM. (By kind permission of Northrop Loom Co., Blackburn.)] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- {188} [Illustration: AN OLD MAIL COACH.] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- But all this work done in the towns by the machines meant that less work was done in the villages, and the {190} country cottages. There was no longer any profitable sale for the cloth woven at home by the little machines which the women used to work with hand and foot, because the very same, or almost the same, could be made so much more cheaply by the big steam-driven machines. And while a machine attended by one man did the work formerly done by twenty, what about the other nineteen? Obviously, at first, they fell out of work. Therefore, when the steam-engines first came in they produced great hardship, great unemployment. The men rose up against them in organised gangs of machine-breakers. Very many machines were broken up. [Sidenote: Conditions of industry] But everywhere authority prevailed in the long run: the machine-breakers were put down. Men had to learn, sometimes at the cost of much suffering, to adapt themselves to a changed condition which had come to stay. The point of principal importance in the change is that it enabled the earth to support a larger population than had been possible before. We may notice this as a main result of each of the successive big changes. In the first known phase of human society we find man in the hunting stage; that passes into the pastoral stage, of keeping domestic animals, which supported more human beings than the hunting stage could. After the pastoral came the agricultural, with again an increase in the numbers that the earth could support, and lastly has come this industrial stage in which many more can be fed and clothed and kept in tolerable comfort than ever before.