The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 | Page 9

the
last trace of independent activity, and so forcing them to think and
demand a position worthy of men. As in France politics, so in England
manufacture, and the movement of civil society in general drew into
the whirl of history the last classes which had remained sunk in
apathetic indifference to the universal interests of mankind.

The first invention which gave rise to a radical change in the state of
the English workers was the jenny, invented in the year 1764 by a
weaver, James Hargreaves, of Standhill, near Blackburn, in North
Lancashire. This machine was the rough beginning of the later invented
mule, and was moved by hand. Instead of one spindle like the ordinary
spinning-wheel, it carried sixteen or eighteen manipulated by a single
workman. This invention made it possible to deliver more yarn than
heretofore. Whereas, though one weaver had employed three spinners,
there had never been enough yarn, and the weaver had often been
obliged to wait for it, there was now more yarn to be had than could be
woven by the available workers. The demand for woven goods, already
increasing, rose yet more in consequence of the cheapness of these
goods, which cheapness, in turn, was the outcome of the diminished
cost of producing the yarn. More weavers were needed, and weavers'
wages rose. Now that the weaver could earn more at his loom, he
gradually abandoned his farming, and gave his whole time to weaving.
At that time a family of four grown persons and two children (who
were set to spooling) could earn, with eight hours' daily work, four
pounds sterling in a week, and often more if trade was good and work
pressed. It happened often enough that a single weaver earned two
pounds a week at his loom. By degrees the class of farming weavers
wholly disappeared, and was merged in the newly arising class of
weavers who lived wholly upon wages, had no property whatever, not
even the pretended property of a holding, and so became working-men,
proletarians. Moreover, the old relation between spinner and weaver
was destroyed. Hitherto, so far as this had been possible, yarn had been
spun and woven under one roof. Now that the jenny as well as the loom
required a strong hand, men began to spin, and whole families lived by
spinning, while others laid the antiquated, superseded spinning-wheel
aside; and, if they had not means of purchasing a jenny, were forced to
live upon the wages of the father alone. Thus began with spinning and
weaving that division of labour which has since been so infinitely
perfected.
While the industrial proletariat was thus developing with the first still
very imperfect machine, the same machine gave rise to the agricultural
proletariat. There had, hitherto, been a vast number of small

landowners, yeomen, who had vegetated in the same unthinking quiet
as their neighbours, the farming weavers. They cultivated their scraps
of land quite after the ancient and inefficient fashion of their ancestors,
and opposed every change with the obstinacy peculiar to such creatures
of habit, after remaining stationary from generation to generation.
Among them were many small holders also, not tenants in the present
sense of the word, but people who had their land handed down from
their fathers, either by hereditary lease, or by force of ancient custom,
and had hitherto held it as securely as if it had actually been their own
property. When the industrial workers withdrew from agriculture, a
great number of small holdings fell idle, and upon these the new class
of large tenants established themselves, tenants-at-will, holding fifty,
one hundred, two hundred or more acres, liable to be turned out at the
end of the year, but able by improved tillage and larger farming to
increase the yield of the land. They could sell their produce more
cheaply than the yeomen, for whom nothing remained when his farm
no longer supported him but to sell it, procure a jenny or a loom, or
take service as an agricultural labourer in the employ of a large farmer.
His inherited slowness and the inefficient methods of cultivation
bequeathed by his ancestors, and above which he could not rise, left
him no alternative when forced to compete with men who managed
their holdings on sounder principles and with all the advantages
bestowed by farming on a large scale and the investment of capital for
the improvement of the soil.
Meanwhile, the industrial movement did not stop here. Single
capitalists began to set up spinning jennies in great buildings and to use
water-power for driving them, so placing themselves in a position to
diminish the number of workers, and sell their yarn more cheaply than
single spinners could do who moved their own machines by hand.
There were constant improvements in the