(^208) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
had jumped ahead on the strength of rural manufacture (putting-out),
but the dispersion of activity across hill and dale was driving up costs
of distribution and collection. Meanwhile, trying to meet demand,
employers raised wages, that is, they increased the price they paid for
finished work. To their dismay, however, the higher income simply
permitted workers more time for leisure, and the supply of work actu
ally diminished. Merchant-manufacturers found themselves on a tread
mill. In defiance of all their natural instincts, they came to wish for
higher food prices. Perhaps a rise in the cost of living would compel
spinners and weavers to their task.*
The workers, however, did respond to market incentives. They were
contractors as well as wage laborers, and this dual status gave them op
portunity for self-enrichment at the expense of the putter-out. Spinners
and weavers would take materials from one merchant and then sell the
finished article to a competitor, stalling now one, now another, and
juggling their obligations to a fare-thee-well. They also learned to set
some of the raw material aside for their own use: no backward-bending
supply curve when working for their own gain. Trying to conceal the
embezzlement, weavers made thinner, poorer fabrics and filled them
out by artifice or additive. The manufacturer in turn tried to discour
age such theft by closely examining each piece and if necessary "abat
ing" the price of the finished article. This conflict of interests gave rise
to a costly cold war between employer and employed.
The manufacturers clamored for help from the civil authorities. They
called for the right to inflict corporal punishment on laggards and
deadbeats (no use trying to fine them); also the right to enter the
weavers' cottages without warrant and search for embezzled materials.
These demands got nowhere. An Englishman's home was his castle, sa
cred.
Little wonder, then, that frustrated manufacturers turned their
Wadsworth and Mann, hardly serious—The Cotton Trade, p. 414. Yet the unevenness
of the yarn produced by hand spinners—both the individual's work and from one
spinner to the next—meant that weavers had to buy far more yarn than they actually
used in order to have enough of a given quality. The machine promised to end that—
Ibid., p. 416.
- These constraints were the more vexatious in a context of rising consumer demand.
The growing appetite for things should have increased the supply of labor; and so it
did in the long run. But in the short, demand got ahead of supply, and manufacturers
got impatient. On the link between consumption and industry, see de Vries, "Indus
trial Revolution."