he "frames" used for
weaving were likewise owned by them, and were rented out to the
workers, who continued, however, to work in their own homes.[48]

Sec. 12. Two further steps remained to be taken in the transition from
the "domestic" to the "factory" system, the one relating to the
ownership of "power," the other to the work-place, (_a_) The
substitution of extra-human power owned by the employer for the
physical power of the worker; (_b_) the withdrawal of the workers from
their homes, and the concentration of them in factories and
work-places owned by the capitalists.

Although these steps were not completely taken until the age of steam
had well set in, before the middle of the eighteenth century there
were found examples of the factory, complete in its essential
character, side by side and in actual competition with the earlier
shapes of domestic industry.

Capitalist ownership of extra-human industrial "power" was of course
narrowly restricted before the age of steam. Water-power, horse-power,
and to a much smaller extent, wind-power, were utilised. But the most
important services water rendered to industry prior to the great
inventions were in facilitating the transport of goods, and in certain
subsidiary processes of manufacture such as dyeing. Though a
considerable number of water-mills existed early in the century, they
played no large part in manufacture. A natural force so strictly
confined in quantity and in local application, and subject to such
great waste from the backward condition of mechanical art, was not
able to serve to any great extent as a substitute for or aid to the
muscular activity of man.

But although the economy of mechanical power was not yet operative to
any appreciable extent in concentrating labour, certain other notable
economics of large-scale production were beginning to assert
themselves in all the leading manufactures. Indeed so powerful are
some of the economies of division of labour and co-operation even in a
primitive condition of the industrial arts, that Professor Ashley
considers it not improbable that the great manufactory might have
become an important or even a dominant feature of the woollen trade as
early as the sixteenth century, if legislative enactments had not
stood in the way.[49] As it was, these earlier centralising forces,
while they drove the workers to work and live in closer and compacter
masses, did not at first dispose them in factories to any great