is misnamed 'domestic industry'. The life they lead is a sordid
replica of an all too sordid original.

Cobbett in a tirade against the Lords of the Loom[33] idealized the
old-time union of agriculture and manufacture. The men should work in
the fields, while the women and children stayed at home at their
spinning wheels, making homespun for the family garments. But the
picture was a vanishing one even in his day. Domestic industry does not
mean this. The rural distress revealed in the Hand-loom Weavers
Commission is the distress of specialized hand-workers, male and female,
who are clinging desperately to the worst-paid branch of a dying trade.
The worsted industry of East Anglia is perishing, defeated by the
resources of Yorkshire, of which the power-loom is only one. The cloth
trade in the Valley of Stroud (Gloucester) is a shadow of its former
self. It has lost the power of recovering from a depression. The next
period of slackness that comes along may bankrupt the business and rob a
village of specialized hand-workers of their main employment.

In Devonshire, the serge trade, which used to give employment to looms
in almost every town and village, has become so unremunerative that it
has passed into the hands of the wives and daughters of mechanics and
agricultural labourers. In Oxfordshire in 1834, we are told by the Poor
Law Commissions of that year, glove and lace making were vanishing
occupations. In the neighbourhood of Banbury 'some make lace and gloves
in the villages. Formerly spinning was the work for women in the
villages, now there is scarcely any done.'[34]

Since 1834 the process of disintegration had proceeded apace.

We must not, however, convey the impression that domestic industry in
1842 had all but vanished from the countryside. In its ancient
strongholds it still endures, but it is in an unhealthy condition, and
the towns are sucking its life-blood away.

To illustrate this, let us describe the course of a boom in domestic
industry and study how the trade boom of 1833-7 reached through to the
country silk weavers in Essex and other places all around London. The
terms which we usually apply to the cultivation of land are apposite.
The town workers represent the intensive margin of cultivation, the
country workers the extensive margin. First of all the Spitalfield
weavers, who have been short of work, have more work given to them. The
weavers' wives also get work, and their boys and girls who