MACHINERY IN THE TEXTILE TRADES 613 
securing the well-being of the labourer that they hung aloof AD 117 
for a time from the humanitarian effort to remedy particular ’ 
abuses by new legislation. 
We have no adequate means of gauging the. rapidity 
and violence of the Industrial Revolution which occurred in 
England during the seventy years from 1770 to 1840; it the seventy 
commenced with the changes in the hardware trades, which Yruserial 
have been already described, but the crisis occurred when in- #¢0#n 
ventive progress extended to the textile trades. Despite the 
gradual economic development, it seems likely enough that, 
while centuries passed, there was little alteration in the general 
aspect of England; but thé whole face of the country was changed the 
changed by the Industrial Revolution, In 1770 there was ot go h ace 
no Black Country, blighted by the conjunction of coal and cuniry- 
iron trades; there were no canals, or railways, and no factory 
towns with their masses of population, The differentiation 
of town and country had not been carried nearly so far as it 
is to-day. All the familiar features of our modern life, and 
all its most pressing problems, have come to the front within 
the last century and a quarter. 
243. The changes included in the term Industrial Revo- 
lution are so complicated and so various that it is not easy 
to state, far less to solve, the questions which they raise. 
There have been many different forms of industrial invention. 
Sometimes there has been the introduction of new processes, ghar 
as in the important series of experiments by which the duction 
problem of smelting and working iron, with fuel obtained 
from coal, was finally solved; and this, as we have seen, was 
of extraordinary importance. Other improvements have con- 
sisted in the employment of new implements, by which the por of new 
skilled labourer is assisted to do his work more quickly or ments, 
better; one example has been noticed in the flying shuttle, 
and the substitution of the spinning-wheel for the whorl and 
spindle was another. But such a change is hardly to be 
described as the introduction of machinery. A machine, 
a8 commonly understood, does not assist a man to do his 
work?, it does the work itself, under human guidance: its 
1 There may be machines that go by human power, but do the work in quite 
» different way from that in which it has previously been done : e.g. the bicycle, or 
spinning-jenny.