A.D. 1776 
—1850. 
oy 
capitalist 
employers, 
rome of 
whom were 
drawn 
mercantile 
business 
and some 
of whom 
kad risen 
from the 
ranks 
618 
LAISSEZ FAIRE 
cloth trade of the West of England ; but the moneyed men of 
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been merchants 
rather than manufacturers of textile goods. It was only with 
the progress of the industrial revolution that the wealthy em- 
ployer of labour attained to anything like the social status 
which had been accorded to successful merchants from time 
immemorial. But the triumph of capital in industry involved 
the rise and prosperity of a large number of captains of industry, 
It seems probable that there was comparatively little 
room for the intrusion of new men in the old centres of the 
cloth trades. There were large and well-established houses 
engaged in this manufacture in the West of England, and 
they had an honourable ambition to maintain the traditions 
of their trades. In Yorkshire, too, there was a class of 
capitalist merchants who were ready to deflect their energies 
into manufacturing as occasion arose. The wealthy em- 
ployers of the West Riding seem to have been chiefly drawn 
from this class. though they were doubtless reinforced to 
some extent by men like Hirst who had risen from the ranks? 
There is reason to believe, however, that in Lancashire, and 
the other areas where the cotton trade was carried on, the 
course of affairs was somewhat different. This industry was 
characterised by an extraordinary expansion, and it offered 
abundant opportunities for new men, of energy and per- 
severance, to force their way to the front. “Few of the men 
who entered the trade rich were successful. They trusted 
too much to others—too little to themselves; whilst on the 
contrary the men who prospered were raised by their own 
efforts —commencing in a very humble way, generally from 
exercising some handicraft, as clockmaking, hatting, &e., and 
pushing their advance by a series of unceasing exertions, 
having a very limited capital to begin with, or even none at 
all, saving their own labour?” The yeomen farmers as a 
class failed to seize the opportunities open to them; but a 
“few of these men, shaking off their slothful habits, both of 
1 For an admirable examination of the growth of this class see P. Mantoux, La 
Révolution Industrielle, 376. 
2 The Woollen Trade during the last Fifty Years, Brit. Mus, 10347. de. 25. 
8 P. Gaskell, Artisans and Machinery, 83.