Industrial evolution

“ The earlier inventions in the textile industries, and the general application of steam to manufacture and to the [172] transport services, have played the most dramatic part in the industrial revolution of the last hundred years. But it should be borne in mind that it is far from being true that the great forces of invention have spent themselves, and that we have come to an era of small increments in the growth of productive power. ”

“ Knowledge of every kind must be collected and they applied themselves to the task with the greatest enthusiasm. Gathering and garnering from every possible source, they built up the noble sciences. Chemistry, engineering, invention, processes, machinery—the iron slave with steel fingers took his place in the factory with a human slave as his groom. ”

“ Modern industrial societies have hitherto secured to a very inadequate extent the services which modern machinery and methods of production are capable of rendering. The actual growth of material wealth, however great, has been by no means commensurate with the enormously increased powers of producing material commodities afforded by the discoveries of modern science, and the partial utilisation of these discoveries has been attended by a very unequal distribution of the advantages of this increase in the stock of common knowledge and control of nature. ”

“ It appears that in the earlier eighteenth century, while there existed examples of various types of industrial structure, the domestic system in its several phases may be regarded as the representative industrial form. The object of this chapter is to examine the nature of those changes in the mechanical arts which brought about the substitution of machine-industry conducted in factories or large workshops for the handicrafts conducted within the home or in small workshops, with the view of discovering the economic bearing of these changes. ”

“ The economy of effort for industrial purposes requires that a larger and larger proportion of inventive genius and enterprise shall be directed to an interminable displacement of handicraft by machinery in the construction of machinery, and a smaller proportion to the relatively unimportant work of perfecting manufacturing machinery in the detailed processes of each manufacture engaged in the direct satisfaction of some human want. ”

“ In the last few chapters we have examined some of the influences of modern machine-production upon men and women in the capacity of producers, in relation to character, duration, intensity, regularity of employment, the remuneration of labour, and the economic relations which subsist between workers and employers. It remains to give special consideration to one factor in the environment of modern industrial life, which is of paramount importance upon the public, both in its working and living capacity. ”

“ The two middle stages of transport and manufacture have fallen far more fully under the control of steam-driven machinery than the others, and it is in the elaboration of older manufacturing and transport processes and the addition of new processes that we trace the largest effects of the evolution of modern industrial methods. ”

“ Largely determined by the two groups of influences named above are the forces which represent the national character at any given time, the outcome of primitive race characteristics, food supply, speed and direction of industrial [110] development, density of population, and the various other causes which enter in to determine efficiency of labour. The play of these natural and human forces in world-competition leads to such a settlement of different industries in different localities as yields the greatest net productiveness of labour in each part. ”

“ If we measure the operation of these several industrial forces within these several periods, as they are reflected on the growing size of the cotton industry, we shall realise the accumulative character of the great industrial movement, and form some approximately accurate conception of the relative importance of the development of mechanical inventions and of the new motor-power. ”

“ From this primitive form which required no commerce and no industrial organisation we may trace the growth of various forms of higher industrial development, many of which co-existed in eighteenth century England. ”

“ If this is true of England, which, having the start in the development of the factory system, has to a larger extent than any other country specialised in the arts of manufacture, it is probable that the net effect of machinery upon the demand for labour throughout the industrial world has been to throw a larger proportion of the population into industries where machinery does not directly enter. ”

“ To understand the evolution of the system of modern industry we must apply to the heaps of bare unordered facts those principles of order which are now recognised as the widest generalisations or the most valid assumptions derivable from other sciences, and endeavour without slavish conformity to the formulæ of these other sciences to trace in the growth of industrial organisms those general laws of development which seem common to all bodies of closely-related phenomena. ”

“ The question how industry would be located, assuming the whole surface of the globe was brought into a single market or area of competition, with an equal development of transport facilities in all its parts; or in other words, "What is the ideal disposition of industry in a world-society making its chief end the attainment of industrial wealth estimated at present values?" ”

“ As modern industrial societies develop they disclose certain material wants which are common to all or most members, and are less subject to fluctuations in quantity or quality of demand than others. These routine wants, representing that part of consumption which is common, can be supplied most economically by highly organised machinery and highly concentrated methods of production. ”

“ In proportion as this happens, hand-work or art must play a more important part in these industries, and may be able to repel the further encroachments of machinery, or even to drive it out of some of the industrial territory it has annexed. ”

“ A larger and larger proportion of the energy given out in trade competition is consumed in [363] violent warfare between trade rivals, and is not represented either in advancement of industrial arts or in increase of material wealth.
(2) History does not show greed of gain as the motive of the great steps in industrial progress. The love of science, the pure delight of mechanical invention, the attainment of some slight personal convenience in labour, and mere chance, play the largest part in the history of industrial improvements. ”

“ In considering the influence of Machinery upon the quality of labour—i.e., skill, duration, intensity, intellectuality, etc., we have first to face two questions—What are the qualities in which machinery surpasses human labour? What are the kinds of work in which machinery displaces man? Now, since the whole of industrial work consists in moving matter, the advantage of machinery must consist in the production and disposition of motive power. The general economies of machinery were found to be two [198] — (1) The increased quantity of motive force it can apply to industry ”

“ The social and moral progress of industrial nations requires, as a first condition of orderly progress, that these cases of arrested growth shall be absorbed into the general mass of machine-industry. ”

“ In all the advanced industrial countries a smaller proportion of the population is engaged in those extractive and domestic industries which belong to rural life, a larger proportion in the manufacturing and distributive industries which belong to towns. But this movement is made possible by the fact that an increasing proportion of the food and the raw materials of manufacture used in these countries is drawn from the labour of the more backward countries. ”

“ But it is the combination of industrial changes in which machinery plays the central part—the increased application of machinery to agriculture reducing the demand for agricultural labour, the development of manufacturing industries in towns, the labour of transport and distribution requiring centralised machinery—that makes this movement physically and economically feasible. The shift in the proportionate demand for labour in towns and in country attributable to machine-production is a principal direct agent in the movement. ”

“ Machinery of manufacture as well as of transport has a levelling tendency which makes directly for expansion of the area of competition. As the spread of knowledge places each part of the industrial world more closely en rapport with the rest, the newest and best methods of manufacture are more rapidly and effectively adopted. ”

“ It is well known how the invention of machinery in the middle of the eighteenth century brought about that industrial revolution, the social and political effects of which are still developing at this hour. Well, I venture to put it forward as a proposition which applies to human evolution, so far back as our evidence goes, that history is the history of great inventions. Of course, it is true that climate and geographical conditions in general help to determine the nature and quantity of the food-supply ”

“ In tracing through the Business, the Trade, and the Industrial Organism the chief structural and functional changes which accompany machine-development, I have not attempted to follow out the numerous branches of social investigation which diverge from the main line of inquiry. ”

“ The direct causal connection between the increased productive power of modern machinery and trade depression clearly emerges from a comparison of the fluctuations in the several departments of industry in different industrial countries. ”

“ The workman, however, still retains the ownership of the implements of his craft and works in his own house. The condition of the worsted trade later in the century, about 1770, well illustrates this industrial form. ”

“ Prizes and bonuses are paid to workmen, who suggest valuable changes or bring in useful hints; and so great are the improvements, that, at times, entire plants are scrapped to make way for new devices that have actually revolutionized the methods in a particular line of production. New combinations of chemical elements and new facts in regard to the qualities of old materials are constantly being discovered, with the result that new industries spring up to make and supply new wants of the people. ”

“ From these considerations it will follow that the order in which the several industries has fallen under the sway of modern industrial methods will largely depend upon the facility they afford to the application of steam-driven machinery. ”

“ As to the sudden industrial progress which has been achieved during our own century, and which is usually ascribed to the triumph of individualism and competition, it certainly has a much deeper origin than that. Once the great discoveries of the fifteenth century were made, especially that of the pressure of the atmosphere, supported by a series of advances in natural philosophy--and they were made under the medieval city organization,--once these discoveries were made, the invention of the steam-motor, and all the revolution which the conquest of a new power implied, had necessarily to follow. ”

“ That nation which, in its intelligent attainment of a higher standard of life, is able to thoroughly assimilate and harmonise the largest variety of those products for which their soil and climate are best adapted, will be foremost in industrial progress and in the other arts of civilisation which spring out of it. ”

“ In a remarkable sketch of the history of civilization, Professor Huxley remarked, in 1887, that the wonderful increase of industrial production by the application of machinery, the improvement of old technical processes and the invention of new ones, constitutes the most salient feature of the world's progress during the last fifty years. ”

“ To this we must add the changes produced by the discovery of steam and the invention of machinery, which rapidly changed England from an agricultural to a manufacturing nation, introduced the factory system, and caused this period to be known as the Age of Industrial Revolution. ”

“ Then steam was applied to industry; the machine replaced the man; semi-skilled and unskilled labor replaced skilled labor; great numbers of men and women, and even of children, crowded together in factories to spin thread, make bolts and washers, weave ribbon, bake bread, manufacture machinery, or do some one of the many hundreds of things now done in factories. The change from home industry to factory industry is well named the Industrial Revolution. It completely overturned the established and accepted means of making a living. ”

“ The industrial development has been rather slow: sugar-refineries, tea-packing, oil-mills, tanneries, steam flour-mills, iron and mechanical works, factories of jute sacks, chemical works, tin-plate works, paper-factories are the chief. ”

“ By the increased number and complexity of these channels connecting different markets and businesses, and relating the most distant classes of consumers, we can measure the evolution of the industrial organism. Through these channels flow the currents of modern industrial life, whose pace, length, and regularity contrast with the feeble, short, and spasmodic flow of commerce in earlier times. This advance in functional activity of distribution is thus expressed by Mr. ”

“ The Industrial Revolution, thus springing from the sudden growth in the use of machinery, occasioned not only economic but political and social results. On the economic side, the effect was to extend old industries and to create new ones, as well as to revolutionize the methods of the production and distribution of wealth. ”