_The Factory._--The great inventions were not, as we so often are apt to imagine them, the effort of a single brain, of "a great man" in the Carlylean sense. Mechanical progress, in its early stages at all events, is often the result of the intelligence of innumerable workers, brought to bear on all kinds of practical difficulties, and mechanical problems. Thus one of the many attempts at a spinning machine was set up in a warehouse in Birmingham in 1741; the machine was set in motion by two asses walking round an axis, and ten or a dozen girls were employed in superintending and assisting the operation! This highly picturesque arrangement proved unworkable and was given up as a failure. Again, at a later date, the first spinning machines that came into general use by the country people of Lancashire were small affairs, and the awkward position required to work them was, as Aikin tells us, "discouraging to grown-up people, who saw with surprise children from nine to twelve years of age manage them with dexterity." In these cases and others like them, we still call the work spinning, because the result is the same as from hand-spinning, viz. yarn; but in reality the process is new, the work is a rearrangement of human activity, rather than a transfer. We may very well admit, in the light of present day knowledge, that the transfer of the occupation from the home to the outside factory or workshop was by no means an unqualified loss, was indeed a social advance. The discomfort of using a small and restricted home as a work place, the litter and confusion that are almost inevitable, not to mention the depression of being always in the midst of one's working environment, are such as can hardly be realised by those who have not given attention to industrial matters. But this was not the aspect that the poor weavers themselves could see, or could possibly be expected to see. The break-up of the customary home life endeared to them by long habit and association was only a less misfortune than their increasing destitution. The family ceased to be an industrial unit. The factory demanded "hands." The machines caused a complete shifting of processes of work, a shifting which, I need hardly say, is going on even up to the present time. Much work that had previously been regarded as skilled and difficult, demanding technical training and apprenticeship, became light and easy, within the powers of a child, a young girl, or a woman. On the other hand, work that had been done in every cottage, now was handed over to a skilled male operative, working with all the help capital and elaborate machinery could give him.