place was
prosperous.

* * * * *

Just here let us make a digression and inspect the peculiar conditions
of the time.

It was a period of transition--the old was dying, the new was being
born. Both experiences were painful.

There was a rapid displacement of hand labor. One machine did the work
of ten or more persons. What were these people who were thrown out, to
do? Adjust themselves to the new conditions, you say. True, but many
could not. They starved, grew sick, ate their hearts out in useless
complaining.

Only a few years before, and the spinning of flax and wool was
exclusively a home industry. Every cottage had its spinning-wheel and
loom. There was a garden, a cow, a pig, poultry and fruits and flowers.
The whole household worked, and the wheel and loom were never idle while
it was light. The family worked in relays.

It was a very happy and prosperous time. Life was simple and natural.
There was constant labor, but it was diversified. The large flocks of
sheep, raised chiefly for wool, made mutton cheap. Everything was
home-made. People made things for themselves, and if they acquired a
superior skill they supplied their neighbors, or exchanged products with
them. As the manufacturing was done in the homes, there was no crowding
of population. The factory boarding-house and the tenement were yet to
come.

This was the condition up to Seventeen Hundred Seventy. From then until
Seventeen Hundred Ninety was the time of transition. By Seventeen
Hundred Ninety, mills were erected wherever there was water-power, and
the village artisans were moving to the towns to work in the mills.

For the young men and women it was an alluring life. The old way gave
them no time to themselves--there was the cow to milk, the pigs and
poultry to care for, or the garden making insistent demands. Now they
worked at certain hours for certain wages, and rested. Tenements took
the place of cottages, and the "public," with its smiling barkeep, was
always right at the corner.

Hargreaves, Arkwright, Watt and Eli Whitney had worked a revolution more
far-reaching than did Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre and Marat.

Here creeps in an item interesting to our friends who revel in syntax
and prosody. Any machine or apparatus for lifting has been called a
"jack" since the days of Shakespeare. The jack was the bearer of
bundles, a lifter, a puller, a worker. Any coarse bit of mechanism was
called a jack