we
find the London weavers complaining of the foreigners' competition, but
especially that "they have made so bould of late as to devise engines
for working of tape, lace, ribbin, and such like, wherein one man doth
more among them than 7 Englishe men can doe; so as their cheap sale of
commodities beggereth all our Englishe artificers of that trade, and
enricheth them." [2]

At a much more recent period new inventions have had to encounter
serious rioting and machine-breaking fury. Kay of the fly-shuttle,
Hargreaves of the spinning-jenny, and Arkwright of the spinning-frame,
all had to fly from Lancashire, glad to escape with their lives.
Indeed, says Mr. Bazley, "so jealous were the people, and also the
legislature, of everything calculated to supersede men's labour, that
when the Sankey Canal, six miles long, near Warrington, was authorized
about the middle of last century, it was on the express condition that
the boats plying on it should be drawn by men only!" [3] Even improved
agricultural tools and machines have had the same opposition to
encounter; and in our own time bands of rural labourers have gone from
farm to farm breaking drill-ploughs, winnowing, threshing, and other
machines, down even to the common drills,--not perceiving that if their
policy had proved successful, and tools could have been effectually
destroyed, the human race would at once have been reduced to their
teeth and nails, and civilization summarily abolished.[4] It is, no
doubt, natural that the ordinary class of workmen should regard with
prejudice, if not with hostility, the introduction of machines
calculated to place them at a disadvantage and to interfere with their
usual employments; for to poor and not very far-seeing men the loss of
daily bread is an appalling prospect. But invention does not stand
still on that account. Human brains WILL work. Old tools are improved
and new ones invented, superseding existing methods of production,
though the weak and unskilled may occasionally be pushed aside or even
trodden under foot. The consolation which remains is, that while the
few suffer, society as a whole is vastly benefitted by the improved
methods of production which are suggested, invented, and perfected by
the experience of successive generations.

The living race is the inheritor of the industry and skill of all past
times; and the civilization we enjoy is but the sum of the useful
effects of labour during the past centurie