of all the English workers, and,
therefore, the most restless and most hated by the bourgeoisie. It
stands as a whole, and the cotton-workers pre-eminently stand, at the
head of the labour movement, as their masters the manufacturers,
especially those of Lancashire, take the lead of the bourgeois agitation.

We have already seen in the introduction how the population employed in
working up the textile materials were first torn from their former way of
life. It is, therefore, not surprising that the progress of mechanical
invention in later years also affected precisely these workers most
deeply and permanently. The history of cotton manufacture as related by
Ure, {134a} Baines, {134b} and others is the story of improvements in
every direction, most of which have become domesticated in the other
branches of industry as well. Hand-work is superseded by machine-work
almost universally, nearly all manipulations are conducted by the aid of
steam or water, and every year is bringing further improvements.

In a well-ordered state of society, such improvements could only be a
source of rejoicing; in a war of all against all, individuals seize the
benefit for themselves, and so deprive the majority of the means of
subsistence. Every improvement in machinery throws workers out of
employment, and the greater the advance, the more numerous the
unemployed; each great improvement produces, therefore, upon a number of
workers the effect of a commercial crisis, creates want, wretchedness,
and crime. Take a few examples. The very first invention, the jenny,
worked by one man, produced at least sixfold what the spinning-wheel had
yielded in the same time; thus every new jenny threw five spinners out of
employment. The throstle, which, in turn, produced much more than the
jenny, and like it, was worked by one man, threw still more people out of
employment. The mule, which required yet fewer hands in proportion to
the product, had the same effect, and every improvement in the mule,
every multiplication of its spindles, diminished still further the number
of workers employed. But this increase of the number of spindles in the
mule is so great that whole armies of workers have been thrown out of
employment by it. For, whereas one spinner, with a couple of children
for piecers, formerly set six hundred spindles in motion, he could now
manage fourteen hundred to two thousand spindles upon two mules, so that
two adult spinners and a