Questions on industrial revolution

Week 4 The Industrial Revolution

Questions on industrial revolution
Just from $10/Page
Order Essay
To the Merchants, Clothiers and all such as wish well to the Staple Manufactory of this
Nation. (1786)
The Humble ADDRESS and PETITION of Thousands, who labour in the Cloth Manufactory.
SHEWETH, That the Scribbling-Machines have thrown thousands of your petitioners out of
employ, whereby they are brought into great distress, and are not able to procure a maintenance
for their families, and deprived them of the opportunity of bringing up their children to labour:
We have therefore to request, that prejudice and self-interest may be laid aside, and that you may
pay that attention to the following facts, which the nature of the case requires.
The number of Scribbling-Machines extending about seventeen miles south-west of LEEDS,
exceed all belief, being no less than one hundred and seventy! and as each machine will do as
much work in twelve hours, as ten men can in that time do by hand, (speaking within bounds)
and they working night-and day, one machine will do as much work in one day as would
otherwise employ twenty men.
As we do not mean to assert any thing but what we can prove to be true, we allow four men to be
employed at each machine twelve hours, working night and day, will take eight men in twenty-
four hours; so ~ that, upon a moderate computation twelve men are thrown out of employ for
every single machine used in scribbling; and as it may be sup’, posed the number of machines in
all the other quarters together, t nearly equal those in the South-West, full four thousand men are
left l-; to shift for a living how they can, and must of course fall to the Parish, if not timely
relieved. Allowing one boy to be bound apprentice from each family out of work, eight thousand
hands are deprived of the opportunity of getting a livelihood.
We therefore hope, that the feelings of humanity will lead those who l, have it in their power to
prevent the use of those machines, to give every discouragement they can to what has a tendency
so prejudicial to their fellow-creatures.
This is not all; the injury to the Cloth is great, in so much that in Frizing, instead of leaving a nap
upon the cloth, the wool is drawn out and the Cloth is left thread-bare.
Many more evils we could enumerate, but we would hope, that the sensible part of mankind,
who are not biassed by interest, must see the dreadful tendancy of their continuance; a
depopulation must be the consequence; trade being then lost, the landed interest will have no
other satisfaction but that of being last devoured.
We wish to propose a few queries to those who would plead for the further continuance of these
machines:
Men of common sense must know, that so many machines in use, take the work from the hands
employed in Scribbling, – and who did that business before machines were invented.
How are those men, thus thrown out of employ to provide for their families; – and what are they
to put their children apprentice to, that the rising generation may have something to keep them at
2
work, in order that they may not be like vagabonds strolling about in idleness? Some say, Begin
and learn some other business. – Suppose we do; who will maintain our families, whilst we
undertake the arduous task; and when we have learned it, how do we know we shall be any better
for all our pains; for by the time we have served our second apprenticeship, another machine
may arise, which may take away that business also; so that our families, being half pined whilst
we are learning how to provide them with bread, will be wholly so during the period of our third
apprenticeship.
But what are our children to do; are they to be brought up in idleness? Indeed as things are, it is
no wonder to hear of so many executions; for our parts, though we may be thought illiterate men,
our conceptions are, that bringing children up to industry, and keeping them employed, is the
way to keep them from falling into those crimes, which an idle habit naturally leads to.
These things impartially considered will we hope, be strong advocates in our favour; and we
conceive that men of sense, religion and humanity, will be satisfied of the reasonableness, as
well as necessity of this address, and that their own feelings will urge them to espouse the cause
of us and our families –
Signed, in behalf of THOUSANDS, by
Joseph Hepworth Thomas Lobley
Robert Wood Thos. Blackburn
From J. F. C. Harrison, Society and Politics in England, 1780-1960 (New York: Harper & Row,
1965), pp. 71-72.
Letters of the merchants of Leeds (1791)
At a time when the People, engaged in every other Manufacture in the Kingdom, are exerting
themselves to bring their Work to Market at reduced Prices, which can alone be effected by the
Aid of Machinery, it certainly is not necessary that the Cloth Merchants of Leeds, who depend
chiefly on a Foreign Demand, where they have for Competitors the Manufacturers of other
Nations, whose Taxes are few, and whose manual Labour is only Half the Price it bears here,
should have Occasion to defend a Conduct, which has for its Aim the Advantage of the Kingdom
in general, and of the Cloth Trade in particular; yet anxious to prevent Misrepresentations, which
have usually attended the Introduction of the most useful Machines, they wish to remind the
Inhabitants of this Town, of the Advantages derived to every flourishing Manufacture from the
Application of Machinery; they instance that of Cotton in particular, which in its internal and
foreign Demand is nearly alike to our own, and has in a few Years by the Means of Machinery
advanced to its present Importance, and is still increasing.
If then by the Use of Machines, the Manufacture of Cotton, an Article which we import, and are
supplied with from other Countries, and which can every where be procured on equal Terms, has
met with such amazing Success, may not greater Advantages be reasonably expected from
cultivating to the utmost the Manufacture of Wool, the Produce of our own Island, an Article in
Demand in all Countries, almost the universal Clothing of Mankind?
3
In the Manufacture of Woollens, the Scribbling Mill, the Spinning Frame, and the Fly Shuttle,
have reduced manual Labour nearly One third, and each of them at its-first Introduction carried
an Alarm to the Work People, yet each has contributed to advance the Wages and to increase the
Trade, so that if an Attempt was now made to deprive us of the Use of them, there is no Doubt,
but every Person engaged in the Business, would exert himself to defend them.
From these Premises, we the undersigned Merchants, think it a Duty we owe to ourselves, to the
Town of Leeds, and to the Nation at large, to declare that we will protect and support the free
Use of the proposed Improvements in Cloth-Dressing, by every legal Means in our Power; and if
after all, contrary to our Expectations, the Introduction of Machinery should for a Time occasion
a Scarcity of Work in the Cloth Dressing Trade, we have unanimously agreed to give a
Preference to such Workmen as are now settled Inhabitants of this Parish, and who give no
Opposition to the present Scheme.
Appleby & Sawyer
Bernard Bischoff & Sons
[and 59 other names]
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844
Manchester proper lies on the left bank of the Irwell, between that stream and the two smaller
ones, the Irk and the Medlock, which here empty into the Irwell. . . . The whole assemblage of
buildings is commonly called Manchester, and contains about four hundred thousand inhabitants,
rather more than less. The town itself is peculiarly built, so that a person may live in it for years,
and go in and out daily without coming into contact with a working-people’s quarter or even with
workers, that is, so long as he confines himself to his business or to pleasure walks. This arises
chiefly from the fact, that by unconscious tacit agreement, as well as with outspoken conscious
determination, the working people’s quarters are sharply separated from the sections of the city
reserved for the middle-class; . . .
I may mention just here that the mills [factories] almost all adjoin the rivers or the different
canals that ramify throughout the city, before I proceed at once to describe the labouring
quarters. First of all, there is the old town of Manchester, which lies between the northern
boundary of the commercial district and the Irk. Here the streets, even the better ones, are narrow
and winding, as Todd Street, Long Millgate, Withy Grove, and Shude Hill, the houses dirty, old,
and tumble-down, and the construction of the side streets utterly horrible. Going from the Old
Church to Long Millgate, the stroller has at once a row of old-fashioned houses at the right, of
which not one has kept its original level; these are remnants of the old pre-manufacturing
Manchester, whose former inhabitants have removed with their descendants into better built
districts, and have left the houses, which were not good enough for them, to a population
strongly mixed with Irish blood. Here one is in an almost undisguised working-men’s quarter, for
even the shops and beer houses hardly take the trouble to exhibit a trifling degree of cleanliness.
But all this is nothing in comparison with the courts and lanes which lie behind, to which access
can be gained only through covered passages, in which no two human beings can pass at the
same time. Of the irregular cramming together of dwellings in ways which defy all rational plan,
4
of the tangle in which they are crowded literally one upon the other, it is impossible to convey an
idea. And it is not the buildings surviving from the old times of Manchester which are to blame
for this; the confusion has only recently reached its height when every scrap of space left by the
old way of building has been filled up and patched over until not a foot of land is left to be
further occupied.
Right and left a multitude of covered passages lead from the main street into numerous courts,
and he who turns in thither gets into a filth and disgusting grime, the equal of which is not to be
found – especially in the courts which lead down to the Irk, and which contain unqualifiedly the
most horrible dwellings which I have yet beheld. In one of these courts there stands directly at
the entrance, at the end of the covered passage, a privy without a door, so dirty that the
inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant
urine and excrement. Below it on the river there are several tanneries which fill the whole
neighbourhood with the stench of animal putrefaction. Below Ducie Bridge the only entrance to
most of the houses is by means of narrow, dirty stairs and over heaps of refuse and filth. The first
court below Ducie Bridge, known as Allen’s Court, was in such a state at the time of the cholera
that the sanitary police ordered it evacuated, swept, and disinfected with chloride of lime. . . . At
the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of
debris and refuse, which it deposits on the shallower right bank.
In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green, slime pools are left standing
on this bank, from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a
stench unendurable even on the bridge forty or fifty feet above the surface of the stream. But
besides this, the stream itself is checked every few paces by high weirs, behind which slime and
refuse accumulate and rot in thick masses. Above the bridge are tanneries, bone mills, and
gasworks, from which all drains and refuse find their way into the Irk, which receives further the
contents of all the neighbouring sewers and privies. It may be easily imagined, therefore, what
sort of residue the stream deposits. Below the bridge you look upon the piles of debris, the
refuse, filth, and offal from the courts on the steep left bank; here each house is packed close
behind its neighbour and a piece of each is visible, all black, smoky, crumbling, ancient, with
broken panes and window frames. The background is furnished by old barrack-like factory
buildings. On the lower right bank stands a long row of houses and mills; the second house being
a ruin without a roof, piled with debris; the third stands so low that the lowest floor is
uninhabitable, and therefore without windows or doors. Here the background embraces the
pauper burial-ground, the station of the Liverpool and Leeds railway, and, in the rear of this, the
Workhouse, the “Poor-Law Bastille” of Manchester, which, like a citadel, looks threateningly
down from behind its high walls and parapets on the hilltop, upon the working-people’s quarter
below.
Everywhere heaps of debris, refuse, and offal; standing pools for gutters, and a stench which
alone would make it impossible for a human being in any degree civilised to live in such a
district. . . . Passing along a rough bank, among stakes and washing-lines, one penetrates into this
chaos of small one-storied, one-roomed huts, in most of which there is no artificial floor; kitchen,
living and sleeping-room all in one. In such a hole, scarcely five feet long by six broad, I found
two beds – and such bedsteads and beds! – which, with a staircase and chimney-place, exactly
filled the room. In several others I found absolutely nothing, while the door stood open, and the
inhabitants leaned against it. Everywhere before the doors refuse and offal; that any sort of
pavement lay underneath could not be seen but only felt, here and there, with the feet. This
5
whole collection of cattle-sheds for human beings was surrounded on two sides by houses and a
factory, and on the third by the river, and besides the narrow stair up the bank, a narrow doorway
alone led out into another almost equally ill-built, ill-kept labyrinth of dwellings….
Such is the Old Town of Manchester, and on re-reading my description, I am forced to admit that
instead of being exaggerated, it is far from black enough to convey a true impression of the filth,
ruin, and uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and
health which characterise the construction of this single district, containing at least twenty to
thirty thousand inhabitants. And such a district exists in the heart of the second city of England,
the first manufacturing city of the world. If any one wishes to see in how little space a human
being can move, how little air – and such air! – he can breathe, how little of civilisation he may
share and yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither. True, this is the Old Town, and the people
of Manchester emphasise the fact whenever any one mentions to them the frightful condition of
this Hell upon Earth; but what does that prove? Everything which here arouses horror and
indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch.
From Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (London: Swan
Sonnenschein & Co., 1892), pp. 45, 48-53.
From David Ricardo. On Wages
Money, from its being a commodity obtained from a foreign country, from its being the general
medium of exchange between all civilized countries, and from its being also distributed among
those countries in proportions which are ever changing with every improvement in commerce
and machinery, and with every increasing difficulty of obtaining food and necessaries for an
increasing population, is subject to incessant variations. In stating the principles which regulate
exchangeable value and price, we should carefully distinguish between those variations which
belong to the commodity itself, and those which are occasioned by a variation in the medium in
which value is estimated, or price expressed.
A rise in wages, from an alteration in the value of money, produces a general effect on price, and
for that reason it produces no real effect whatever on profits. On the contrary, a rise of wages,
from the circumstance of the labourer being more liberally rewarded, or from a difficulty of
procuring the necessaries on which wages are expended, does not, except in some instances,
produce the effect of raising price, but has a great effect in lowering profits. In the one case, no
greater proportion of the annual labour of the country is devoted to the support of the labourers;
in the other case, a larger portion is so devoted.
Labour, like all other things which are purchased and sold, and which may be increased or
diminished in quantity, has its natural and its market price. The natural price of labour is that
price which is necessary to enable the labourers, one with another, to subsist and to perpetuate
their race, without either increase or diminution.
6
The power of the labourer to support himself, and the family which may be necessary to keep up
the number of labourers, does not depend on the quantity of money which he may receive for
wages, but on the quantity of food, necessaries, and conveniences become essential to him from
habit, which that money will purchase. The natural price of labour, therefore, depends on the
price of the food, necessaries, and conveniences required for the support of the labourer and his
family. With a rise in the price of food and necessaries, the natural price of labour will rise; with
the fall in their price. the natural price of labour will fall.
With the progress of society the natural price of labour has always a tendency to rise, because
one of the principal commodities by which its natural price is regulated, has a tendency to
become dearer, from the greater difficulty of producing it. As, however, the improvements in
agriculture, the discovery of new markets, whence provisions may be imported, may for a time
counteract the tendency to a rise in the price of necessaries, and may even occasion their natural
price to fall, so will the same causes produce the correspondent effects on the natural price of
labour.
The natural price of all commodities, excepting raw produce and labour, has a tendency to fall, in
the progress of wealth and population; for though, on one hand, they are enhanced in real value,
from the rise in the natural price of the raw material of which they are made, this is more than
counterbalanced by the improvements in machinery, by the better division and distribution of
labour, and by the increasing skill, both in science and art, of the producers.
The market price of labour is the price which is really paid for it, from the natural operation of
the proportion of the supply to the demand; labour is dear when it is scarce, and cheap when it is
plentiful. However much the market price of labour may deviate from its natural price, it has,
like commodities, a tendency to conform to it.
It is when the market price of labour exceeds its natural price, that the condition of the labourer
is flourishing and happy, that he has it in his power to command a greater proportion of the
necessaries and enjoyments of life, and therefore to rear a healthy and numerous family. When,
however, by the encouragement which high wages give to the increase of population, the number
of labourers is increased, wages again fall to their natural price, and indeed from a reaction
sometimes fall below it.
When the market price of labour is below its natural price, the condition of the labourers is most
wretched: then poverty deprives them of those comforts which custom renders absolute
necessaries. It is only after their privations have reduced their number, or the demand for labour
has increased, that the market price of labour will rise to its natural price, and that the labourer
will have the moderate comforts which the natural rate of wages will afford.
Notwithstanding the tendency of wages to conform to their natural rate, their market rate may, in
an improving society, for an indefinite period, be constantly above it; for no sooner may the
impulse, which an increased capital gives to a new demand for labour, be obeyed, than another
increase of capital may produce the same effect; and thus, if the increase of capital be gradual
and constant, the demand for labour may give a continued stimulus to an increase of people….
Thus, then, with every improvement of society, with every increase in its capital, the market
wages of labour will rise; but the permanence of their rise will depend on the question, whether
7
the natural price of labour has also risen; and this again will depend on the rise in the natural
price of those necessaries on which the wages of labour are expended….
As population increases, these necessaries will be constantly rising in price, because more labour
will be necessary to produce them. If, then, the money wages of labour should fall, whilst every
commodity on which the wages of labour were expended rose, the labourer would be doubly
affected, and would be soon totally deprived of subsistence. Instead, therefore, of the money
wages of labour falling, they would rise; but they would not rise sufficiently to enable the
labourer to purchase as many comforts and necessaries as he did before the rise in the price of
those commodities….
These, then, are the laws by which wages are regulated, and by which the happiness of far the
greatest part of every community is governed. Like all other contracts, wages should be left to
the fair and free competition of the market, and should never be controlled by the interference of
the legislature.
The clear and direct tendency of the poor laws is in direct opposition to these obvious principles:
it is not, as the legislature benevolently intended, to amend the condition of the poor, but to
deteriorate the condition of both poor and rich; instead of making the poor rich, they are
calculated to make the rich poor; and whilst the present laws are in force, it is quite in the natural
order of things that the fund for the maintenance of the poor should progressively increase till it
has absorbed all the net revenue of the country, or at least so much of it as the state shall leave to
us, after satisfying its own never-failing demands for the public expenditure.
This pernicious tendency of these laws is no longer a mystery, since it has been fully developed
by the able hand of Mr. Malthus; and every friend to the poor must ardently wish for their
abolition.
From The Works of David Ricardo, J. R. McCulloch, ed. (London: John Murray, 1881), pp. 31,
50-58.
8
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2015).
9
10
11
12
13
14
15