Old weavers in the villages get work, together with their wives and families.  Even farm labourers are impressed.  Blemishes for which at other times deductions would be claimed are now over-looked.  Carts are sent round to the villages and hamlets with work for the weavers, so that time may not be lost in going to the warehouses to take back or carry home work.  Then comes the ebb:  ’the immediate effect is that all the less skilful workmen, the dissolute and disorderly, are denied work; the third and fourth looms, those worked by the sons and daughters of the weavers, are all thrown out of use’.  The intensiveness of cultivation has been reduced in the towns, the least remunerative no longer pays.

The ebb of the tide, which reduces the quantity of employment in the towns, leaves the country districts high and dry.  ’At such times the country towns and villages to which work is liberally sent, when there is a demand for goods, suffer still more.  A staff or skeleton only is kept in pay, and that chiefly with a view to operations when a demand returns.’[35] A skeleton—­well said.

Occasional cultivation is bad for land, and worse for human beings.  The ribbon-weaving villages north of Coventry are a disorderly eruption from the town.  Coventry itself has the better-paid ‘engine weaving’; the rural districts have the ‘single hand trade’.  The country workers, say the Commissioners, ’retain most of their original barbarism with an accession of vice’.  The yokels who went out to the French wars innocent boys returned confirmed rogues.  Bastardy is greater than ever, despite the new Poor Law.  ’It may surprise the denouncers of the factory system to find all the vices and miseries which they attribute to it, flourishing so rankly in the midst of a population not only without the walls of a factory, but also beyond the contamination of a large town.’[36] It may have surprised such people, but it does not surprise us who are surveying the industrial scene and beginning to apprehend the rottenness of that worm-eaten structure which under the misnomer of domestic industry marks the half-way house to full capitalism.

4.  Let us now journey to the factory districts of Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire where town lies close upon town, and the tall chimneys envelop in smoke the cottages in which hand-loom weavers work and the children of hand-loom weavers sleep.  Let us suppose that we have found our position by Leeds.  We should like to follow the track of the new railroads, for we have in our pocket a small green book: 

’Bradshaw’s Railway Time Tables and Assistant to
Railway Travelling’.

‘10th Mo. 19th, 1839.  Price Sixpence.’