Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/649

 The Industrial Revolution 493 increased. For a century or more steam was used as a motive power. But now steam has to some extent been replaced by gasoline and by electricity, for men have learned how to utilize an electric current to drive great power plants, to run trolleys, and to send messages around the world. III. CAPITALISM AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM 875. The "Domestic" System of Industry. Having seen how machinery was introduced in England in the latter part of the eighteenth century and how steam came to be utilized as a motive power, we have now to consider the important results of these inventions in changing the conditions under which people lived and worked. Up to this time "manufacture" still meant, as it did in the original Latin (manu jacere), "to make by hand." Artisans carried on trades with their own tools in their own homes or in small shops, as the cobbler does today. Instead of working with hundreds of others in great factories and being entirely dependent upon his wages, a workman, in England at least, was often able to give some attention to a small garden plot, from which he derived a part of his support. This old method of manu- facture is known as the domestic system. The introduction of machinery changed this. Hand laborers were no longer able to compete with the swift and tireless machines and found their work growing more and more unprofitable. Large factories sprang up, and the workers now realized that they had to leave their pleasant surroundings and live near their work ; long rows of houses, without gardens or even grassplots, were hastily built around the factory buildings, and thus the ugly tenement districts of our cities came into existence. 876. The Capitalist and the Workingman. There grew up then, as the result of this great revolution in the methods of manu- facturing, two new social classes. There were, on the one hand, the capitalists, who owned the buildings and the machinery and who had the money necessary to run the business and, on the other, the workmen whom they hired to operate the machines.