steam power meets with mere technical difficulties, such as unsteadiness in the machines, difficulty in controlling their speed, rapid wear and tear of the lighter machines, &c., all of which are soon overcome by experience.[1] If, on the one hand, the concentration of many machines in large manufactories leads to the use of steam power, on the other hand, the competition of steam with human museles hastens on the concentration of workpeople and machines in large factories. Thus England is at present experiencing, not only in the colossal industry of making wearing apparel, but in most of the other trades mentioned above, the conversion of manufacture, of handicrafts, and of domestic work into the factory system, after each of those forms of production, totally changed and disorganized under the influence of modern industry, has long ago reproduced, and even overdone, all the horrors of the factory system, without participating in any of the elements of social progress it contains.[2]
This industrial revolution which takes place spontaneously, is artificially helped on by the extension of the Factory Acts to all industries in which women, young persons and children are employed. The compulsory regulation of the working day as regards its length, pauses, beginning and end, the system of relays of children, the exclusion of all children under a certain age, &., necessitates on the one hand more machinery[3] and the substitution of steam as a motive power in the place
- ↑ Instances: The Army Clothing Depot at Pimlico, London, the Shirt factory of Tillie and Henderson at Londonderry, and the clothes factory of Messrs. Tait at Limerick which employs about 1200 hands.
- ↑ “Tendency to factory system” (l. c., p. lxvil.), “The whole employment is at this time in a state of transition, and is undergoing the same change as that effected in the lace trade, weaving, &c.” (l. c., n. 405.) “A complete revolution” (l. c., p. xlvi. n. 318). At the date of the Child. Empl. Comm, of 1840, stocking making was still done by manual labour. Since 1846 various sorts of machines have been introduced, which are now driven by steam. The total number of persons of both sexes and of all ages from 3 years upwards, employed in stocking making in England, was in 1862 about 129,000. Of these only 4008 were, according to the Parliamentary Return of the 11th February, 1862, working under the Factory Acts.
- ↑ Thus, e.g., in the earthenware trade, Messrs. Cochrane, of the Britain Pottery, Glasgow, report: “To keep up our quantity we have gone extensively into machines wrought by unskilled labour, and every day convinces ys that we can produce a greater quantity than hy the old method.” (“Rep. of Insp. of Fact, 31st Oct., 1865," p. 12.) “The effect of the Fact. Acts is to force on the further introduction of machinery” (l. c., p. 13-14).
