_The Survival of Previous Standards and Conditions._--The development of the great industry, the use of machinery and the concentration of capital, came at a time when the working class was peculiarly helpless to help itself, and the governing class was unable or unwilling to initiate any adequate social reform. The Enclosure Acts had weakened the spirit and independence of the agricultural working-class and increased destitution and pauperism, while wages were kept down through the operation of the allowance system under the Old Poor Law. Local depopulation in rural districts sent numbers of needy labourers, strong, industrious, and inured to small earnings, to swell the industrial population of towns.[43] But the crowning cruelty, the extremest folly, was the prohibition to combine. The special characteristic of the industrial revolution was the association of operatives under one roof, performing co-ordinated tasks under one control to produce a given result. Now this new method of associated labour was not only immensely more productive, but it also potentially held advantages for the workers. It brought them together, it gave them a common interest, it brought all sorts of social and civic possibilities within their reach. But to realise these possibilities it was essential that they should be able to join together, to take stock of the bewildering new situation which confronted them, to achieve some kind of corporate consciousness. This was denied them under various pains and penalties. Yet the State did not for a long time itself take action to give the factory class the protection they were forbidden to seek for themselves. The effect was that while the workers were bound, the employers were free or were restricted only to the very slight extent of the regulations of the early factory acts, and could impose very much such conditions of work as they pleased. What those conditions were has been reiterated often enough. Work far into the night, or even both night and day; sanitation of the rudest and most defective kind where it was not absent altogether; industrial disease from dust, fluff and dirt, or from damp floors and steaming atmosphere; workrooms overheated or dismally cold; wages low, and subject to oppressive fines and fraudulent deductions,--such, and worse, is the dreary recital of the treatment meted out to the workers. The introduction of power machines was not _per se_ the cause of these evils. Women had been accustomed to do the work that no one else wanted to do. The servile position of the woman-worker, the absence of combination among the operative class, and the lack of State or Municipal control over the conditions of industry and housing, all combined to provide "cheap and docile workers" for the factory system. And no doubt the factory system took full advantage of the opportunity. Capital inevitably seeks cheap labour. The governing class had carefully and deliberately provided that labour should be cheap.