§ 10. THE CLOSE OF THE PERIOD OF MANUAL INDUSTRIES--We have now reached a turning-point in English industrial history, and are about to study a period that is in every way a violent contrast to the centuries which preceded it. We have come to the time when machinery begins to displace unaided manual labour. Hitherto all our manufactures, our mining, and of course our agriculture, had been performed by the literal labour of men’s hands, only slightly helped by a few simple inventions. Industry, too, was not organized upon a vast capitalistic basis, though of course capitalists existed; but it would be more correct to say that hitherto industry had been chiefly carried on by numbers of smaller capitalists who were also manual workmen, even when they employed other workmen under them. Only in agriculture had the capitalist class become very far removed from the labourers. There was certainly no such violent contrast {143} as now exists between a mill-owner and a mill-hand in the realm of manufacturing industry, though of course this contrast existed between the rich land-owner who received rents, and the poor agricultural labourer whose labour helped to pay them. But, speaking of industry generally, it may be said that the absence of machinery kept employers and workmen more upon a common level, and as large factories of course did not exist, industry was carried on chiefly in the workmen’s homes, and the workman was not merely a unit among hundreds of unknown “hands” in a mill, but a person not hopelessly removed in social rank from his employer, who was well acquainted with him, and like him worked with his own hands. But now this old order of things passes away, and a new order appears, ushered in by the whir and rattle of machinery and the mighty hiss of steam. A complete transformation takes place, and the life of England stirs anew in the great Industrial Revolution. {144} PERIOD V THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND MODERN ENGLAND CHAPTER I THE EVE OF THE REVOLUTION