Andrew Ure (1778-1857), a professor at the University of Glasgow,
was an enthusiast for the new manufacturing system. Here he represents
the views of a new class: the manufacturers whose wealth derived
from ownership of factories.
Questions for Discussion:
This island is pre-eminent among civilized nations for the prodigious development of its factory wealth, and has been therefore lon viewed with a jealous admiration by foreign powers. This very pre-eminence, however, has been contemplated in a very different light by many influential members of our own community, and has been even denounced by them as the certain origin of innumerable evils to the people, and of revolutionary convulsions to the state. If the affairs of the kingdom be wisely administered, I believe such allegations and fears will prove to be groundless, and to proceed more from the envy of one ancient and powerful order of the commonwealth, towards another suddenly grown into political importance, than from the nature of things....
The blessings which physio-mechanical science has bestowed on society, and the means it has still in store for ameliorating the lot of mankind, have been too little dwelt upon; while, on the other hand, it has been accused of lending itself to the rich capitalists as an instrument for harassing the poor, and of exacting from the operative an accelerated rate of work. It has been said, for example, that the steam-engine now drives the power-looms with such velocity as to urge on their attendant weavers at the same rapid pace; but that the hand-weaver, not being subjected to this restless agent, can throw his shuttle and move his treddles at his convenience. There is, however, this difference in the two cases, that in the factory, every member of the loom is so adjusted, that the driving force leaves the attendant nearly nothing at all to do, certainly no muscular fatigue to sustain, while it procures for him good, unfailing wages, besides a healthy workshop gratis: whereas the non-factory weaver, having everything to execute by muscular exertion, finds the labour irksome, makes in consequence innumerable short pauses, separately of little account, but great when added together; earns therefore proportionally low wages, while he loses his health by poor diet and the dampness of his hovel....
The constant aim and effect of scientific improvement in manufactures are philanthropic, as they tend to relieve the workmen either from niceties of adjustment which exhaust his mind and fatigue his eyes, or from painful repetition of efforts which distort or wear out his frame. At every step of each manufacturing process described in this volume the humanity of science will be manifest....
In its precise acceptation, the Factory system is of recent origin, and may claim England for its birthplace. The mills for throwing silk, or making organzine, which were mounted centuries ago in several of the Italian states, and furtively transferred to this country by Sir Thomas Lombe in 1718, contained indeed certain elements of a factory, and probably suggested some hints of those grander and more complex combinations of self-acting machines, which were first embodied half a century later in our cotton manufacture by Richard Arkwright, assisted by gentlemen of Derby, well acquainted with its celebrated silk establishment. But the spinning of an entangled flock of fibres into a smooth thread, which constitutes the main operation with cotton, is in silk superfluous; being already performed by the unerring instinct of a worm, which leaves to human art the simple task of doubling and twisting its regular filaments. The apparatus requisite for this purpose is more elementary, and calls for few of those gradations of machinery which are needed in the carding, drawing, roving, and spinning processes of a cotton-mill.
When the first water-frames for spinning cotton were erected at Cromford, in the romantic valley of the Derwent, about sixty years ago, mankind were little aware of the mighty revolution which the new system of labour was destined by Providence to achieve, not only in the structure of British society, but in the fortunes of the world at large. Arkwright alone had the sagacity to discern, and the boldness to predict in glowing language, how vastly productive human industry would become, when no longer proportioned in its results to muscular effort, which is by its nature fitful and capricious, but when made to consist in the task of guiding the work of mechanical fingers and arms, regularly impelled with great velocity by some indefatigable physical power. What his judgment so clearly led him to perceive, his energy of will enabled him to realize with such rapidity and success, as would have done honour to the most influential individuals, but were truly wonderful in that obscure and indigent artisan....
The principle of the factory system then is, to substitute mechanical science for hand skill, and the partition of a process into its essential constituents, for the division or graduation of labour among artisans. On the handicraft plan, labour more or less skilled was usually the most expensive element of production.... but on the automatic plan, skilled labour gets progressively superseded, and will, eventually, be replaced by mere overlookers of machines.
By the infirmity of human nature it happens, that the more skilful the workman, the more self-willed and intractable he is apt to become, and, of course, the less fit a component of a mechanical system, in which, by occasional irregularities, he may do great damage to the whole. The grand object therefore of the modern manufacturer is, through the union of capital and science, to reduce the task of his work-people to the exercise of vigilance and dexterity, - faculties, when concentred to one process, speedily brought to perfection in the young. In the infancy of mechanical engineering, a machine-factory displayed the division of labour in manifold gradations - the file, the drill, the lathe, having each its different workmen in the order of skill: but the dextrous hands of the filer and driller are now superseded by the planing, the key groove cutting, and the drilling-machines; and those of the iron and brass turners, by the self-acting slide-lathe....
It is, in fact, the constant aim and tendency of every improvement in machinery to supersede human labour altogether, or to diminish its cost, by substituting the industry of women and children for that of men; or that of ordinary labourers for trained artisans. In most of the water-twist, or throstle cotton-mills, the spinning is entirely managed by females of sixteen years and upwards. The effect of substituting the self-acting mule for the common mule, is to discharge the greater part of the men spinners, and to retain adolescents and children. The proprietor of a factory near Stockport states, in evidence to the commissioners, that, by such substitution, he would save 501. a week in wages in consequence of dispensing with nearly forty male spinners, at about 25s. of wages each....
Steam-engines furnish the means not only of their support but of their multiplication. They create a vast demand for fuel; and, while they lend their powerful arms to drain the pits and to raise the coals, they call into employment multitudes of miners, engineers, shipbuilders, and sailors, and cause the construction of canals and railways. Thus therefore, in enabling these rich fields of industry to be cultivated to the utmost, they leave thousands of fine arable fields free for the production of food to man, which must have been otherwise allotted to the food of horses. Steam-engines moreover, by the cheapness and steadiness of their action, fabricate cheap goods, and procure in their exchange a liberal supply of the necessaries and comforts of life produced in foreign lands.
Improvements in the machinery have a three-fold bearing: -
lst. They make it possible to fabricate some articles which, but for them, could not be fabricated at all.
2nd. They enable an operative to turn out a greater quantity of work than he could before, -- time, labour, and quality of work remaining constant.
3rd. They effect a substitution of labour comparatively unskilled,
for that which is more skilled....
Of all the modem prejudices that exist with regard to factory labor, there is none more unfounded than that which ascribes to it excessive tedium and irksomeness above other occupations, owing to its being carried on in conjunction with the "unceasing motion of the steam-engine." In an establishment for spinning or weaving cotton, all the hard work is performed by the steam-engine, which leaves for the attendant no hard labor at all, and literally nothing to do in general; but at intervals to perform some delicate operation, such as joining the threads that break, taking the cops off the spindles, etc. And it is so far from being true that the work in a factory is incessant, because the motion of the steamengine is incessant, that the labor is not incessant on that very account, because it is performed in conjunction with the steamengine. Of all manufacturing employments, those are by far the most irksome and incessant in which steam-engines are not employed, as in lace-running and stockingweaving; and the way to prevent an employment from being incessant is to introduce a steam-engine into it....
Occupations which are assisted by steamengines require for the most part a higher, or at least a steadier, species of labor than those which are not; the exercise of the mind being then partially substituted for that of the muscles, constituting skilled labor, which is always paid more highly than unskilled. On this principle we can readily account for the comparatively high wages which the inmates of a cotton factory, whether children or adults, obtain. Batting cotton by hand for fine spinning seems by far the hardest work in a factory; it is performed wholly by women, without any assistance from the steam-engine, and is somewhat similar in effort to threshing corn; yet it does not bring those who are engaged in it more than 6s. 6d. weekly, while close by it the stretching-frame, which remunerates its renters or superintendents, women, and even children fourteen years old, with double wages for far lighter labor. In power-loom weaving also, the wages are good, and the muscular effort is trifling, as those who tend it frequently exercise themselves by following the movements of the lay, and leaning on it with their an-ns. It is reckoned a very healthy occupation, as is shown by the appearance of the females engaged in it, in every well-regulated establishment in England and Scotland....
Under what pretext, or with what face of pretension, operatives, whose labor is assisted by steam or water power, can lay claim to a peculiar privilege of exemption from more than ten hours' daily labor it is hard to conjecture. They compare their toil with that of the small class, comparatively, of artisans, such as carpenters, bricklayers, stone-masons, etc., who, they say, work only from six to six, with two one-hour intervals for meals: a class, however, in this material respect distinguished from most factory operatives, that their work is done entirely by muscular effort, and after serving a long apprenticeship with no little outlay. But what do the factory operatives think of the numerous class of domestic operatives, the stocking or frame-work knitters, the hand-loom weavers, the wool- combers, the lace-manufacturers, and a variety of others, who work, and very hardly too, from twelve to sixteen hours a day, to earn a bare subsistence; and this frequently from a very early age, and in a state of confinement irksome to the mind and injurious to the body? ...
The factory system, then, instead of being detrimental to the comfort of the laboring population, is its grand Palladium; for the more complicated and extensive the machinery required for any manufacture, the less risk is there of its agents being injured by the competition of foreign manu- factures, and the greater inducement and ability has the mill-owner to keep up the wages of his work-people. The main reason why they are so high is, that they form a small part of the value of the manufactured article, so that if reduced too low by a sordid master, they would render his opera- tives less careful, and thereby injure the quality of their work more than could be compensated by his saving in wages....
It deserves to be remembered, moreover, that hand-working is more or less discontinuous from the caprice of the operative, and never gives an average weekly or annual product at all comparable to that of a like machine equally driven by power....
In hand-weaving ... the depreciation of wages has been extraordinary. Annexed are the prices paid at different periods in Manchester for weaving a sixty reed 6/4 cambric, as taken in the month of March each year; the weaver paying threepence out of each shilling, for winding his warp, for brushes, paste, etc. In 1795 39s. 6d. 1800 25s. 1810 15s. 1820 8s. 1830 5s.
The [admittedly] painful statements made to the factory commissioners will show in how abject a condition are our socalled independent handicraft laborers, compared with that of those much-la- mented laborers who tend the power-driven machines of the factories. The former class needs all the sympathy which Mr. Sadler's faction 2 so perniciously expended upon the latter....
Mr. T Ashton's cotton-works are agreeably grouped together on a gentle declivity, which is traversed by a little tributary stream of the Mersey. This supplies the condensing power to his steam-engines, while their expansive force is fumished from rich coal-measures immediately under the factory lands. This is the motive-element which pervades and animates the region all around. The houses occupied by his work-people lie in streets, all built of stone, and are commodious; consisting each of at least four apartments ii.e., rooms] in two stories, with a small back-yard and a mews lane. The rent for a good lodging, containing an improved kitchen-grate, with boiler and oven, is only f:8 per annum, and good fuel may be had for 9s. a ton. I looked into several of the houses, and found them more richly fumished than any common workpeople's dwellings which I had ever seen before. In one I saw a couple of sofas, with good chairs, an eight-day clock in a handsome mahogany case, several pictures in oil on the walls, freshly painted for the family, ... In another house I observed a neat wheel barometer, with its attached thermometer, suspended against the snowwhite wall. In a third there was a piano, with a little girl leaming to play upon it.
My notice was particularly attracted to a handsome house and shop, in one of the streets where Mr. Ashton's operatives dwell. On asking who occupied it, I learned it was a spinner, who having saved from his earnings E200, had embarked this capital in a retail business, now managed by his wife, a tidy-looking person, while the husband continued to pursue his profitable avocations in the mill.
From Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures (London:
Chas. Knight 1835).
The bulk of this text is borrowed from the Internet Modern History Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted texts for introductory level classes in modern European and World history.