beyond their horizon, was sweeping through mankind.  They were comfortable in their silent vegetation, and but for the industrial revolution they would never have emerged from this existence, which, cosily romantic as it was, was nevertheless not worthy of human beings.  In truth, they were not human beings; they were merely toiling machines in the service of the few aristocrats who had guided history down to that time.  The industrial revolution has simply carried this out to its logical end by making the workers machines pure and simple, taking from them the last trace of independent activity, and so forcing them to think and demand a position worthy of men.  As in France politics, so in England manufacture, and the movement of civil society in general drew into the whirl of history the last classes which had remained sunk in apathetic indifference to the universal interests of mankind.

The first invention which gave rise to a radical change in the state of the English workers was the jenny, invented in the year 1764 by a weaver, James Hargreaves, of Standhill, near Blackburn, in North Lancashire.  This machine was the rough beginning of the later invented mule, and was moved by hand.  Instead of one spindle like the ordinary spinning-wheel, it carried sixteen or eighteen manipulated by a single workman.  This invention made it possible to deliver more yarn than heretofore.  Whereas, though one weaver had employed three spinners, there had never been enough yarn, and the weaver had often been obliged to wait for it, there was now more yarn to be had than could be woven by the available workers.  The demand for woven goods, already increasing, rose yet more in consequence of the cheapness of these goods, which cheapness, in turn, was the outcome of the diminished cost of producing the yarn.  More weavers were needed, and weavers’ wages rose.  Now that the weaver could earn more at his loom, he gradually abandoned his farming, and gave his whole time to weaving.  At that time a family of four grown persons and two children (who were set to spooling) could earn, with eight hours’ daily work, four pounds sterling in a week, and often more if trade was good and work pressed.  It happened often enough that a single weaver earned two pounds a week at his loom.  By degrees the class of farming weavers wholly disappeared, and was merged in the newly arising class of weavers who lived wholly upon wages, had no property whatever, not even the pretended property of a holding, and so became working-men, proletarians.  Moreover, the old relation between spinner and weaver was destroyed.  Hitherto, so far as this had been possible, yarn had been spun and woven under one roof.  Now that the jenny as well as the loom required a strong hand, men began to spin, and whole families lived by spinning, while others laid the antiquated, superseded spinning-wheel aside; and, if they had not means of purchasing a jenny, were forced to live upon the wages of the father alone.  Thus began with spinning and weaving that division of labour which has since been so infinitely perfected.