ry
required bodies of laborers working regular hours under the control of
their employers and in the buildings where the machines were placed
and the power provided. Such groups of laborers or "mill hands"
were gradually collected where the new kind of manufacturing was going
on. Thus factories, in the modern sense, came into existence--a new
phenomenon in the world.

[Illustration: Mule-spinning in 1835.]

[Illustration: Power-loom Weaving in 1835. (Baines: _History of Cotton
Manufacture_.)]

These changes in manufacturing and in the organization of labor came
about earliest in the manufacture of cotton goods, but the new
machinery and its resulting changes were soon introduced into the
woollen manufacture, then other textile lines, and ultimately into
still other branches of manufacturing, such as the production of
metal, wooden, and leather goods, and, indeed, into nearly all forms
of production. Manufacturing since the last decades of the eighteenth
century is therefore usually described as being done by the "factory
system," as contrasted with the domestic system and the gild system of
earlier times.

The introduction of the factory system involved many changes: the
adoption of machinery and artificial power, the use of a vastly
greater amount of capital, and the collection of scattered laborers
into great strictly regulated establishments. It was, comparatively
speaking, sudden, all its main features having been developed within
the period between 1760 and 1800; and it resulted in the raising of
many new and difficult social problems. For these reasons the term
"Industrial Revolution," so generally applied to it, is not an
exaggerated nor an unsuitable term. Almost all other forms of economic
occupation have subsequently taken on the main characteristics of the
factory system, in utilizing improved machinery, in the extensive
scale on which they are administered, in the use of large capital, and
in the organization of employees in large bodies. The industrial
revolution may therefore be regarded as the chief characteristic
distinguishing this period and the times since from all earlier ages.

[Illustration: A Canal and Factory Town in 1827.]

*58. Iron, Coal, and Transportation.*--A vast increase in the production
of iron and coal was going on concurrently with the rise of the
factory system. The smelting of iron ore was one of the oldest
industries of England, but it was a declining rather than an advan