The Armies of Labor | Page 5

creating
artificial prosperity were granted to individuals and to corporations for
the manufacture, sale, or exploitation of certain articles, such as
matches, gunpowder, and playing-cards.
This highly artificial and paternalistic state was not content with
regulating all these internal matters but spread its protection over
foreign commerce. Navigation acts attempted to monopolize the trade
of the colonies and especially the trade in the products needed by the
mother country. England encouraged shipping and during this period
achieved that dominance of the sea which has been the mainstay of her
vast empire. She fostered plantations and colonies not for their own
sake but that they might be tributaries to the wealth of the nation. An
absurd importance was attached to the possession of gold and silver,
and the ingenuity of statesmen was exhausted in designing lures to
entice these metals to London. Banking and insurance began to assume

prime importance. By 1750 England had sent ships into every sea and
had planted colonies around the globe.
But while the mechanism of trade and of government made surprising
progress during the mercantile period, the mechanism of production
remained in the slow handicraft stage. This was now to change. In 1738
Kay invented the flying shuttle, multiplying the capacity of the loom.
In 1767 Hargreaves completed the spinning-jenny, and in 1771
Arkwright perfected his roller spinning machine. A few years later
Crompton combined the roller and the jenny, and after the application
of steam to spinning in 1785 the power loom replaced the hand loom.
The manufacture of woolen cloth being the principal industry of
England, it was natural that machinery should first be invented for the
spinning and weaving of wool. New processes in the manufacture of
iron and steel and the development of steam transportation soon
followed.
Within the course of a few decades the whole economic order was
changed. Whereas many centuries had been required for the slow
development of the medieval system of feudalism, the guild system,
and the handicrafts, now, like a series of earthquake shocks, came
changes so sudden and profound that even today society has not yet
learned to adjust itself to the myriads of needs and possibilities which
the union of man's mind with nature's forces has produced. The
industrial revolution took the workman from the land and crowded him
into the towns. It took the loom from his cottage and placed it in the
factory. It took the tool from his hand and harnessed it to a shaft. It
robbed him of his personal skill and joined his arm of flesh to an arm of
iron. It reduced him from a craftsman to a specialist, from a maker of
shoes to a mere stitcher of soles. It took from him, at a single blow, his
interest in the workmanship of his task, his ownership of the tools, his
garden, his wholesome environment, and even his family. All were
swallowed by the black maw of the ugly new mill town. The hardships
of the old days were soon forgotten in the horrors of the new. For the
transition was rapid enough to make the contrast striking. Indeed it was
so rapid that the new class of employers, the capitalists, found little
time to think of anything but increasing their profits, and the new class

of employees, now merely wage-earners, found that their long hours of
monotonous toil gave them little leisure and no interest.
The transition from the age of handicrafts to the era of machines
presents a picture of greed that tempts one to bitter invective. Its details
are dispassionately catalogued by the Royal Commissions that finally
towards the middle of the nineteenth century inquired into industrial
conditions. From these reports Karl Marx drew inspiration for his
social philosophy, and in them his friend Engles found the facts that he
retold so vividly, for the purpose of arousing his fellow workmen. And
Carlyle and Ruskin, reading this official record of selfishness, and
knowing its truth, drew their powerful indictments against a society
which would permit its eight-year-old daughters, its mothers, and its
grandmothers, to be locked up for fourteen hours a day in dirty,
ill-smelling factories, to release them at night only to find more misery
in the hovels they pitifully called home.
The introduction of machinery into manufacturing wrought vast
changes also in the organization of business. The unit of industry
greatly increased in size. The economies of organized wholesale
production were soon made apparent; and the tendency to increase the
size of the factory and to amalgamate the various branches of industry
under corporate control has continued to the present. The complexity of
business operations also increased with the development of
transportation and the expansion of the empire of trade. A world market
took the place of the old town market, and the world