a
combination of the principles of both machines. This was a long step
forward, and greatly facilitated the spinning of the raw material into
yarn. The invention was, in fact, a revolution in itself. Like so many
other great inventors, Crompton died in poverty.

Even now, however, the actual weaving had to be done by hand. Not until
1785, when Dr. Cartwright, a parson, invented a "power loom," was it
deemed possible to weave by machinery. Cartwright's invention, coming in
the same year as the general introduction of Watt's steam engine in the
cotton industry, made the industrial revolution. Had the revolution come
slowly, had the inventors of the new industrial processes been able to
accomplish that, it is most probable that much of the misery of the
period would have been avoided. As it was, terrible poverty and hardship
attended the birth of the new industrial order. Owing to the expense of
introducing the machines, and the impossibility of competing with them
by the old methods of production, the small manufacturers themselves
were forced to the wall, and their misery, compelling them to become
wage-workers in competition with other already far too numerous
wage-workers, added greatly to the woe of the time. William Morris's
fine lines, written a hundred years later, express vividly what many a
manufacturer must have felt at that time:--

"Fast and faster our iron master,
The thing we made, forever drives."

But perhaps the worst of all the results of the new regime was the
destruction of the personal relations which had hitherto existed between
the employers and their employees. No attention was paid to the
interests of the latter. The personal relation was forever gone, and
only a hard, cold cash nexus remained. Wages went down at an alarming
rate, as might be expected; the housing conditions became simply
inhuman. Now it was discovered that a child at one of the new looms
could do more than a dozen men had done under the old conditions, and a
tremendous demand for child workers was the result. At first, as H. de
B. Gibbins[13] tells us, there was a strong repugnance on the part of
parents to sending their children into the factories. It was, in fact,
considered a disgrace to do so. The term "factory girl" was an insulting
epithet, and it was impossible for a girl who had been employed in a
factory to obtain other employment. She could not look forward to
marriage with any but the very lowest of me