INDUSTRIAL VILLAGES. 289 



cotton-spinning mills and cotton-weaving fac- 

 tories. But, at the same time, all sorts of cottons 

 were woven in hand-looms, in the very suburbs 

 of St. Quentin and in a hundred villages and 

 hamlets around it, to be sold for finishing in the 

 city. And Reybaud remarked that the horrible 

 dwellings in town, and the general condition of 

 the factory hands, stood in a wonderful contrast 

 with the relative welfare of the rural weavers. 

 Nearly every one of these last had his own house 

 and a small field which he continued to cultivate.* 



Even in such a branch as the fabrication of 

 plain cotton velvets, in which the competition 

 of the factories was especially keenly felt, home- 

 weaving was widely spread, in 1863 and even in 

 1878, in the villages round Amiens. Although 

 the earnings of the rural weavers were small, 

 as a rule, the weavers preferred to keep to their 

 own cottages, to their own crops and to their 

 own cattle ; and only repeated commercial 

 crises, as well as several of the above-mentioned 

 causes, hostile to the small peasant, compelled 

 most of them to give up the struggle, and to 

 seek employment in the factories, while part of 

 them have, by this time, again returned to 

 agriculture or taken to market-gardening. 



Another important centre for rural industries 

 was in the neighbourhood of Rouen, where no 



* Le Colon : son regime, ses problem.es. Paris, 1863, p. 170. 

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