never were on
a loom before are now put to the trade. Fresh hands are introduced. From
the Metropolis the demand for labour pushes outwards over the country.
Recourse is had to 'inferior soils'. 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, an