Scores of acts against fraudulent
manufacturers and against inclosures were passed in vain, because they
ran counter to economic conditions. The products of the new factories,
like Jack of Newbury's kerseys, could not equal in quality the older
home-made article, because the home-made article was produced under
non-economic conditions. Spinsters today knit better garments than
those turned out in bulk, because neither time nor money is any
consideration with them; they knit for occupation, not for a living,
and they can afford to devote more labour to their produce than they
could possibly do if they depended upon it for subsistence. The case
was the same with the home-products of earlier times, and compared with
them the newer factory-product was shoddy; because, if the manufacturer
was to earn a living from his industry he must produce a certain
quantity within a limited time. These by-products of the home were
enabled to hold their own against the factory products until the
development of machinery in the eighteenth century; and until that time
the factory system, although factories existed on a rudimentary scale,
did not fully develop. So far as it did develop, it meant an increase
in the efficiency and in the total wealth of the nation, but a decrease
in the prosperity of thousands of individual households.
The effect of inclosures was very similar. The old system of the
villagers cultivating in turn strips of land in open fields was
undoubtedly unsound, if the amount of wealth produced is the sole
criterion; but it produced enough for the individual village-community,
and the increased production accruing from inclosures went to swell the
total wealth of the nation and of those who manipulated it at the cost
of the tillers of the soil.
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