THE ECONOMIC OUTLOOK. 579 



cution of them for their immediate livelihood. The new stocking-frames 

 as they were introduced were accordingly destroyed by the handicraft 

 workmen as opportunity favored (over one thousand in a single burst 

 of popular fury), houses were burned, the inventors were threatened 

 and obliged to fly for their lives, and order was not finally restored 

 until the military had been called out and the leading rioters had been 

 arrested and either hanged or transported. Looking back over the 

 many years that have elapsed since this special labor disturbance 

 (one of the most notable in history), the first impulse is to wonder at 

 and condemn what now seems to have been extraordinary folly and 

 wrong on the part of the masses, in attempting to prevent by acts of 

 violence the supersedure of manual labor engaged in making stockings 

 through the introduction and use of ingenious stocking-making ma- 

 chinery. But, on the other hand, when one remembers the number of 

 persons who, with very limited opportunity for any diversity of their 

 industry, and with the low social and mental development incident to 

 the period, found themselves all at once and through no fault of their 

 own deprived of the means of subsistence for themselves and their 

 families, and are further told by the historian of the period* that, 

 from the hunger and misery entailed by this whole series of events, the 

 larger portion of fifty thousand English stocking-knitters and their 

 families did not fully emerge during the next forty years, there is a 

 good deal to be set down to and pardoned on account of average 

 human nature. The ultimate result of the change in the method of 

 making stockings and its accompanying suifering has, however, un- 

 questionably been that for every one person poorly fed, poorly paid, 

 badly clothed, and miserably housed, who at the commencement of the 

 present century was engaged in making stockings on hand-looms or in 

 preparing the materials out of which stockings could be made, ten at 

 least are probably now so employed for a third less number of hours 

 per week, at from three to seven times greater average wages, and 

 living under conditions of comfort that their predecessors could hardly 

 have even anticipated.! 



In strong contrast also with the report of the pitiful distress of the 

 displaced hand-loom weavers of Saxony comes this other statement 

 from many sources : That in all the great manufacturing centers of 

 Germany, and especially in the cities of Chemnitz (where the hand- 

 looms are being rapidly displaced), in Crefeld, Essen, and in Diissel- 



* " History of the Machine-wrought Hosiery Manufactures," by William Felkin, Cam- 

 bridge, England, 1867. 



f The wages of the stocking-knitters in Leicestershire in the early years of this cent- 

 ury were among the very lowest paid in any branch of industry in Great Britain, and 

 did not exceed on an average six shillings a week. In 1880 the wages paid first-class 

 operatives (men) in the hosiery-factory of the late A. T. Stewart, at Nottin;;ham, England, 

 were 44s. fid. per week, and for girls of similar capabilities 16s. &d. Within more recent 

 years further improvements in machinery, by creating a disproportion between the sup- 

 ply of the labor of framework-knitters and the demand for it, has again greatly disturbed 

 the condition of the work-people iu this branch of industry in England, 



