ages bestowed by farming on a large
scale and the investment of capital for the improvement of the soil.

Meanwhile, the industrial movement did not stop here. Single capitalists
began to set up spinning jennies in great buildings and to use
water-power for driving them, so placing themselves in a position to
diminish the number of workers, and sell their yarn more cheaply than
single spinners could do who moved their own machines by hand. There
were constant improvements in the jenny, so that machines continually
became antiquated, and must be altered or even laid aside; and though the
capitalists could hold out by the application of water-power even with
the old machinery, for the single spinner this was impossible. And the
factory system, the beginning of which was thus made, received a fresh
extension in 1767, through the spinning throstle invented by Richard
Arkwright, a barber, in Preston, in North Lancashire. After the steam-
engine, this is the most important mechanical invention of the 18th
century. It was calculated from the beginning for mechanical motive
power, and was based upon wholly new principles. By the combination of
the peculiarities of the jenny and throstle, Samuel Crompton, of Firwood,
Lancashire, contrived the mule in 1785, and as Arkwright invented the
carding engine, and preparatory ("slubbing and roving") frames about the
same time, the factory system became the prevailing one for the spinning
of cotton. By means of trifling modifications these machines were
gradually adapted to the spinning of flax, and so to the superseding of
hand-work here, too. But even then, the end was not yet. In the closing
years of the last century, Dr. Cartwright, a country parson, had invented
the power-loom, and about 1804 had so far perfected it, that it could
successfully compete with the hand-weaver; and all this machinery was
made doubly important by James Watt's steam-engine, invented in 1764, and
used for supplying motive power for spinning since 1785.

With these inventions, since improved from year to year, the victory of
machine-work over hand-work in the chief branches of English industry was
won; and the history of the latter from that time forward simply relates
how the hand-workers have been driven by machinery from one position
after another. The consequences of this were, on the one hand, a rapid
fall in price of all manufactured commodities, prosperity of commerce and
manufacture, the con