ngaged in textile industries and dress, though
under the latter head there is of course still a good deal of hand
industry.

It seems evident that modern improvements in machinery under normal
circumstances favour the employment of women rather than of men. There
is some reason to suppose that machinery also favours the employment
of children as compared with adults, where the economic forces are
allowed free play. In the textile industries of the United States the
work of women and children predominates even more largely than in
England; in 1880 the number of women and children employed were
112,859 as compared with 59,685 men, while in Massachusetts out of
61,246 work-people only 22,180 were adult males. So far as legislation
and public opinion do not interfere, the tendency is strongly in
favour of employing children. Mr. Wade says, in _Fibre and Fabric_,
"The tendency of late years is towards the employment of child labour.
We see men frequently thrown out of employment owing to the spinning
mule being displaced by the ring-frame, or children spinning yarn
which men used to spin. In the weave-shops, girls and women are
preferable to men, so that we may reasonably expect that in the not
very distant future all the cotton manufacturing districts will be
classed in the category of she-towns."[243]

Sec. 2. In modern machinery a larger and larger amount of inventive skill
is engaged in adjusting machine-tending to the physical and mental
capacity of women and children. The evolution of machinery has not
moved constantly in this direction. In cotton-spinning, for example,
the earlier machines--Hargreave's jennies and Arkwright's
water-frames--were generally worked by women and children, the women
who had been engaged in the use of the older instruments--the distaff,
spindle, hand-wheel--coming into the mills. But the growing complexity
and size of the mule made it too cumbrous for women and children, and
spinning for a while became a male occupation in England. In the
United States the difficulty of procuring male labour stimulated the
invention of the ring spinning-frame, some sixty years ago, which
could be worked by woman's labour. The limitations and imperfections
of this mode of spinning retarded its adoption in England for upwards
of half a century. But recent improvements have led to a rapid
increase of the adoption of the ring-frame in Lancashire. In the low
medium and low counts it is rapidly displacing the mu