and rapid growth of the unit of production. And
here machinery is the chief external cause. Gigantic railways and
steamship companies are the successors of stage coach businesses and
small shippers. The size and value of the modern cotton factory, iron
works, sugar refinery, or brewery are incomparably greater than the
units of which these industries were composed a century and a half
ago. In certain highly-machined industries the size of the unit is so
enlarged that the number of businesses engaged in turning out the
ever-growing output is actually diminishing. Among textile industries
the spinning mills of England and Wales show a marked diminution in
numbers between 1870 and 1890, while a similar movement in weaving
mills is only retarded by the capacity of small sweating masters to
compete with the more developed factories in certain minor branches,
such as tape manufacture, and by the survival of the home worker
owning his loom and hiring his power in such trades as the ribbon
weaving of Coventry.[100]

The following statistics[101] of the cotton and woollen industries in
Great Britain serve to illustrate the growing size of the unit of
production in the representative branches of textile work:--

KEY:
A: Spinning.
B: Weaving.
C: Spinning and Weaving.
D: Others.
E: Total.
F: Spinning.
G: Doubling.
H: Power-Looms.

COTTON.
NO. OF MILLS. NO. OF SPINDLES.
A B C D E F G H
1870 1108 693 532 150 2483 33,995,221 3,723,537 440,676
1890 935 990 438 175 2538 40,511,934 3,992,885 615,714

WOOLLEN.
1870 648 109 860 212 1829 2,531,768 160,993 48,140
1890 494 124 895 280 1793 2,107,209 299,793 61,831

This increase of the number of spindles and looms in the average
textile mill is more significant when the "speeding up" of modern
machinery is taken into account. The increased size of the unit of
industry as measured by productivity is even greater than appears from
the statistics above quoted.

Schulze-Gaevernitz points out that in the thirty years between 1856
and 1885, while the factories in cotton spinning and weaving only
increased from 2210 to 2633, the number of spindles increased from
28,010,217 to 44,348,921, the number of looms from 298,847 to 560,955,
and that since both spindles and loom