great political economist, Adam Smith, whose book was first published in 1771, marks the beginning of the transition between this system and that of the great machine industries; but his work implies throughout the Division of Labour system.
That system was now to melt into 163 the new one: the workman, from being a machine, was to become the auxiliary of a machine. The invention of the spinning-jenny by Hargreaves in 1760 is the first event of the beginning of this Industrial Revolution. From thence to the utilisation of steam as a motive-force, and thence again to our own days, the stream of invention has been continuous. The discovery that iron could be made with pit-coal removed the seat of the iron manufacture from the wooded countries of the south and west, where on iron-works, called “bloomeries,” used to be carried on, and in which wood was the fuel used, to the northern and midland coal districts, and all manufacture of any importance flowed to the seat of fuel, so that South Lancashire, for instance, was changed from a country of moorland and pasture, with a few market towns and the ancient manufacturing city of Manchester, into a district where the “villages,” still so called, but with populations of from fifteen or twenty to thirty thousand souls, are pretty much contiguous, and the country has all but 164 disappeared. Of course a great part of this is the work of the years that have followed on the invention of railways; but even in the earlier period of this industrial revolution the change was tremendous and sudden, and the sufferings of the working classes very great, as no attempt was made to alleviate the distress that was inevitably caused by the change from the use of human hands to machinery. Nor indeed could it have been made in a country governed by bourgeois constitutionalism until measures were actually forced on the Government.
In 1811 the prevailing distress was betokened by the first outbreak of the Luddites. These were organised bands of men who went about breaking up the machinery which was the immediate cause of their want of