Reading the Industrial Revolution

INCLOSURE, in husbandry, the fence or hedge made to inclose lands.

FALLOW, a pale red colour, like that of brick half burnt: such is that of a fallow-deer.

TURNEP, in botany, a species of brassica. For the culture of them, see AGRICULTURE, p. 67.

PLOUGH, in agriculture, a machine for turning up the soil, contrived to save the time, labour, and expence, that without this instrument must have been employed in digging land, to prepare it for the sowing of all kinds of grain. See AGRICULTURE, p. 54.

THE general principles of the new husbandry may be reduced to two, viz. the promoting the growth of plants by hoeing, and the saving of seed; both of which are equally profitable to the farmer. […] As, in the practice of the new husbandry, plants grow with greater vigour than by the old method, the land should be sowed thinner. It is this principle of the new husbandry that has been chiefly objected to; for, upon observing the land occupied by a small number of plants, people are apt to look upon all the vacant space as lost. But this prejudice will soon be removed, when it is considered, that, in the best land cultivated in the common method, and sown very thick, each seed produces but one or two ears; that, in the same land sown thinner, every seed produces two or three ears; and that a single seed sometimes produces eighteen or twenty ears.

THAT the antiquity of this art is beyond all others, cannot well be doubted; seeing we are informed by Scripture, that Adam was sent from the garden of Eden to till the ground; and, this being the case, he certainly must have known how to do so.

PLOUGH, in agriculture: A machine for turning the soil by the action of cattle, contrived to save the time, labour, and expence, which, without this instrument, must have been employed in digging the ground, and fitting it for receiving all sorts of seed. See AGRICULTURE, no 83-95. Amidst all the varieties which can occur in the manner of ploughing the ground, arising from difference of soil, local habits, and other causes, there is still a sameness in the task which gives a certain uniformity to the chief parts of the instrument, and should therefore furnish principles for its construction. There is not, perhaps, any invention of man that more highly merits our utmost endeavours to bring it to perfection; but it has been too much neglected by those persons who study machines, and has been considered as a rude tool, unworthy of their attention. […] But these opinions are ill founded. The difficulty is indeed great, and it is neither from the ignorant farmer nor the rude artist that we can expect improvement. It requires the serious consideration of the most accomplished mechanician; but from him we may expect improvement. […] It seems, then, a determinate problem (to use the language of mathematicians), because the operation depends on the invariable laws of mechanical nature.

MANCHESER, a large town of Lancashire, forty miles south-east of Lancaster.

Attention was first directed to the possibility of contriving a self-acting mule, in consequence of the frequency of "turns-out" amongst the spinners, and the intolerable domination which they were enabled to exercise, from the circumstance of a comparatively small class of workmen having it in their power at any moment to suspend the whole trade of cotton spinning. One "spinner" has three or four young hands immediately dependent upon himself; he has also four or five virtually dependent on him, inasmuch as they being occupied in preparing the raw cotton for him to spin, if he take a fit of idleness or insubordination, the preliminary processes are of course suspended. In the same way, if the spinners, as a body, become idle, the weavers, and eventually the bleachers, spinners, and printers, are brought to a stand; in fact, the whole cotton trade is locked up, and misery and privation are the immediate and wide-spread results.

COTTON, in commerce, a soft downy substance found on the bombax, or cotton tree. See BOMBAX. Cotton is separated from the seeds of the plant by a mill, and then spun and prepared for all sorts of fine works, as stockings, waistcoats, quilts, tapestry, curtains, &c. With it they likewise make muslin, and sometimes it is mixed with wool, sometimes with silk, and even with gold itself. The finest sort comes from Bengal and the coast of Coromandel.

The cotton manufacture had its origin in the East, where the cotton plant is indigenous, and where the climate renders a light and absorbent fabric a suitable clothing for the people. It has in consequence been long established over every part of Asia, although it is only in India that it is carried on extensively, with a view to foreign exchange. Arrian mentions cotton cloth among the commodities which the Romans brought from India; but the quantity imported by them was inconsiderable, arising from the preference which they gave to woollen clothing. Dr Robertson remarks, that the difference between the cargoes imported from India in ancient and modern times, appears to have arisen, not from any diversity in the nature of the goods prepared for sale in that country, but from variety in the tastes or in the wants of the nations with which they have successively traded. The implements used by the Indians in the different processes of the cotton manufacture, from the cleaning of the wool to its conversion into the finest muslin, may be purchased for the value of a few shillings, and are of so rude and simple a construction as to be evidently the invention of a very early period.

Hargreaves died in great poverty a few years after his removal to Nottingham. While Hargreaves was producing the common jenny, Mr Arkwright (afterwards Sir Richard Arkwright) was employed in contriving that wonderful piece of mechanism, the spinning frame, which, when put in motion, performs of itself the whole process of spinning, leaving to the workman only the office of supplying the material, and of joining or piecing the thread when it happens to break.

MACHINERY, in epic and dramatic poetry, is when the poet introduces the use of machines, or brings some supernatural being upon the stage, in order to solve some difficulty, or to perform some exploit out of the reach of human power. See COMPOSITION.

THE denomination Machine is now vulgarly given to a great variety of subjects, which have very little analogy by which they can be classed with propriety under any one name. We say a travelling machine, a bathing machine, a copying machine, a threshing machine, an electrical machine, &c. &c. The only circumstance in which all these agree seem to be, that their construction is more complex and artificial than the utensils, tools, or instruments which offer themselves to the first thoughts of uncultivated people. They are more artificial than the common cart, the bathing tub, or the flail. In the language of ancient Athens and Rome, the term was applied to every tool by which hard labour of any kind was performed; but in the language of modern Europe, it seems restricted either to such tools or instruments as are employed for executing some philosophical purpose, or of which the construction employs the simple mechanical powers in a conspicuous manner, in which their operation and energy engage the attention. An electrical machine, a centrifugal machine, are of the first class; a threshing machine, a fire machine, are of the other class. It is nearly synonymous, in our language, with ENGINE; a term altogether modern, and in some measure honourable, being bestowed only, or chiefly, on contrivances for executing work in which ingenuity and mechanical skill are manifest.

POLITICAL ECONOMY MAY be defined the science which relates to the production, multiplication and distribution of Wealth. HISTORY. The acquisition of wealth must at all times have been an object of interest and attention to mankind. Yet it was not for a long time reduced into a science, but was left merely to the industry and practical observation of men engaged in the different branches of industry. We find little or nothing in the ancient writers which can be considered as belonging to this department of science. Among them agriculture appears to have been more honoured and attended to, than either trade or manufactures. The latter especially were considered as unworthy of freemen, and were abandoned entirely to slaves. Yet the ancient world had its commercial states; and perhaps had the monuments of Phœnician or Carthaginian literature come down to us, they might in some measure have supplied this blank.

USURY, in the general, denotes a gain or profit which a person makes of his money, by lending the same; or it is an increase of the principal, exacted for the loan thereof; or the price a borrower gives for the use of a sum credited to him by the lender, called also interest. The word usury is generally taken in an evil sense, viz. for an unlawful profit which a person makes of his money; in which sense it is, that usury is forbidden by the civil and ecclesiastical, and even by the law of nature. See LAW, Tit. xxxiii. 27.

USURY, an unlawful contract upon the loan of money, to receive the same again with exorbitant increase. By statute 37 Hen. VIII. c. 9, the rate of interest was fixed at ten per cent. per annum; which the statute 13 Eliz. c. 5 confirms, and ordains that all brokers shall be guilty of a præmunire who transact any contracts for more, and the securities themselves shall be void. The statute 21 Jac. I. c. 17, reduced interest to eight per cent.; and it having been lowered in 1650, during the usurpation, to six per cent., the same reduction was re-enacted after the restoration by statute 12 Car. II. c. 13; and the statute 13 Anne, st. 2, c. 16, reduced it to five per cent.

The object of this article is to explain the general laws which regulate the increase or decrease of population, and the manner in which they affect the state and condition of human society. In taking a view of animated nature, we cannot fail to be struck with a prodigious power of increase in plants and animals. Their capacity in this respect is, indeed, almost infinitely various, according with the endless variety of the works of nature, and the different purposes which they seem appointed to fulfil. But whether they increase slowly or rapidly, if they increase by seed or generation, their natural tendency must be to increase in a geometrical ratio, that is, by multiplication; and at whatever rate they are increasing during any one period, if no further obstacles be opposed to them, they must proceed in a geometrical progression.

It will be found that they are all resolvable into moral restraint, vice, and misery. And if, from the laws of nature, some check to the increase of population be absolutely inevitable, and human institutions have any influence upon the extent to which each of these checks operates, a heavy responsibility will be incurred, if all that influence, whether direct or indirect, be not exerted to diminish the amount of vice and misery.

ALL governments, in every age of the world, have interfered too much with the affairs of their subjects. A notion has very generally prevailed, that certain branches of commerce were sometimes advantageous to society, though ruinous to those who should attempt to carry them on; and that other branches, though profitable to individuals, were frequently inconsistent with the general advantage. On a first view, this opinion, though essentially erroneous, seems sufficiently plausible. Many of the pursuits of individuals apparently conduce very little, and may sometimes even seem hostile, to the interests of the whole; and hence we are naturally enough led to infer, that the public advantage would be best consulted by their prohibition. Nothing evinces more strikingly the prevalence of this notion of the propriety of restricting and directing the operations of industry and the investment of capital, than the regulations respecting the trade in corn.

WAGES, (in Political Economy), constitute the reward or compensation paid to labourers by those who employ them, in return for their services. Taken in its widest sense, the term labourers is very comprehensive. In addition to the myriads who are engaged in agricultural, commercial, and manufacturing pursuits, it comprises all sorts of public functionaries, from the prime minister downwards, with those who crowd the ranks of what are called the learned and liberal professions. These parties, how widely soever they may differ in everything else, agree in this, that they exchange their services for valuable considerations of one sort or other. Their entire subsistence, in so far at least as they depend on their employment, is derived from wages; and they are as evidently labourers as if they handled a shuttle or a spade, or held a plough.

THE laws comprehended under this title, and regulating the relief, maintenance, and employment of the poor, form so important and peculiar a feature in the polity of England, as to demand a careful notice. Especially as the administration of the system, within the last twenty-five years, has been so essentially altered, as to render any previous account, in a great measure, obsolete; and the effects of the system have been so widely extended, and so sensibly felt, as to obtain a considerable degree of public attention.

UNTIL very recently, the great interest felt in the body of laws comprehended under the above title, was derived from the consciousness of the danger with which the manner of their administration in England threatened the property of the rich, and the morality of the whole people. As the law continues fundamentally the same as it was before the adoption of an improved administration, that source of interest in these institutions remains; but the present sense of security renders possible a calmer and more dispassionate examination of their merits and demerits than could previously to the year 1834 have been made by the most candid persons acquainted with the rapid progress of the evils of the system.

APPRENTICESHIP, the servitude of an apprentice, or the duration of his indenture. Seven years seem anciently to have been, all over Europe, the usual term established for the duration of apprenticeships in the greater part of incorporated trades.

All those petty contrivances of corporations, therefore, though they may originate in the lowest mercantile jealousy, and though they may be exceedingly absurd, cannot materially disturb the general progress of things; and, though they may harass individuals, their effect on the industry of a great country hardly deserves notice; their bad effects being corrected by those general causes on which society depends for completing its arrangements, in spite of the obstacles arising from the mistaken policy of legislators.

PUNISHMENT, in law, the penalty which a person incurs on the breach or transgression of any law.

This is a department of jurisprudence and administrative science which in later times has totally changed its character, and requires a new method of treatment. From being matter of mere speculation, it has become matter of practice and of induction from observed facts. In earlier editions of the Encyclopædia it was treated by one of those accomplished and sagacious inquirers, whose able exposure of existing defects produced the many experiments and improvements which supply the materials of this exposition. Mr Mill found no system of prison discipline acknowledged and acted on, although Howard, Beccaria, and Bentham had preceded him in endeavouring to establish such a system. Hence he thought it necessary to go back to the first principles of punishment, and realize them into rules of practice for the future guidance of mankind.

SLAVERY is a word, of which though generally understood, it is not easy to give a proper definition. An excellent moral writer has defined it to be "an obligation to labour for the benefit of the master, without the contract or consent of the servant." But may not he be properly called a slave who has given up his freedom to discharge a debt which he could not otherwise pay, or who has thrown it away at a game of hazard?

On the principle of compensation most men were agreed; there was guilt, it is true, in the very act upon which the claim was grounded, but the nation was a thousand times guiltier than the planters, and it would have ill become us to make the minor offenders the only sufferers.

At Helmsdale, on the east coast, many of those small tenants who were removed by the introduction of sheep farming have also embarked in the fisheries with considerable success; and large sums have been expended within these few years by the noble proprietor of the Sutherland estate in erecting the necessary buildings.

Sutherland is eminently adapted by nature for sheep-grazing; and the plans of converting it into extensive sheep-walks, which have been for some years carrying into execution, have greatly augmented the revenue of the proprietors, and added to the commercial wealth of the nation; but they have doubtless been attended with much suffering to the small tenants whom it was necessary to dispossess. The people who had been removed from the interior in 1818 and 1819, when these great changes took place, are densely settled along the sea-coast; in some instances about thirty cottagers occupying the land formerly in the possession of twelve. They have likewise been obliged to make a violent change in their occupations and habits: instead of tending flocks, and following other rural occupations, they have been forced to encounter the hardships and dangers of the sea, and occupy themselves with the fisheries; and many families have preferred emigration from their native country, to engaging in occupations so entirely foreign to their previous habits.

The regions in the interior, from which the aborigines were removed, are occupied with sheep farms, and the grazing of sheep or cattle appears to be the only purpose to which such districts of country can be applied.

THE natural propensity of mankind is to settlement and rest, and this principle is still farther strengthened by the influence of local associations over the mind. Every one is strongly attached to the place of his birth, or to the place where he has passed his earlier years, and it may be generally remarked, that, in whatever spot man fixes his abode, there he takes root.

WOMAN, the female of man. See HOMO.

WOMAN, the female of the human species. See HOMO.