The last quarter of the eighteenth century was a great turning-point in Manchester’s history. One invention rapidly succeeded another; most of them by local men, for among the sprack-witted Lancashire folk there has ever been plenty of mechanical genius. At the time when Hargreaves was planning his spinning jenny, another was perfecting a similar machine. This was Richard Arkwright, of Preston, the youngest of a poor family of thirteen children, who was born in 1732, and began life as a barber and dealer in hair at Bolton. In 1768 his cotton-spinning machine, which performed the work of sixteen or twenty men, was set up at Preston, and in 1707 was patented. His first spinning-mill was erected at Cromford, Derbyshire, in 1771, and was entirely successful. In 1786 he was knighted, and in 1792 he died, leaving a fortune of close upon half a million sterling. The fickleness and waywardness of fortune are proverbial, but nowhere else so marked as in the struggles of inventors. In 1779, eleven years after Arkwright had set up his spinning-jenny, Samuel Crompton, of Hall-i’-th’-Wood, near Bolton, invented the hybrid “Spinning Mule,” combining the useful features of Hargreaves’ and Arkwright’s machines. He was an exceptionally poor man, and partly earned his living by playing the violin at the Bolton theatre. [Sidenote: _THE FACTORY SYSTEM_] A great step forward was Cartwright’s power-loom, invented in 1785, and the Government in 1809 granted him £10,000, in recognition of his usefulness to the advancement of commerce. With the same year that witnessed Cartwright’s invention, steam was first employed in weaving, by Boulton and Watt, and the history of the cotton industry has been, since that day, a long record of improvements, until nowadays factories are equipped with the most beautiful and complicated contrivances—the outcome of a hundred and seventy years of invention—that seem themselves almost sentient and understanding. IV This long succession of mechanical improvements brought immense wealth to the manufacturers and helped to tide England’s credit over the exhausting years of the American Rebellion and continual Continental wars; but it brought the original foul blight of the factory system, which replaced the spinning once done in cottage homes. Industry was stived up in overcrowded workshops, the slums came into existence, and under-paid, over-worked, and cruelly treated child-labour characterised the days before the passing of the Factory Acts.