ABSTRACT
T HE country and the period that witnessed the extraordinary growth of the cotton manufacture, the birth of machine industry and the organization of the factory system, witnessed also a parallel development in the iron industry. This simultaneous progress is a most interesting fact, for the two industries concerned are totally different. They have nothing in common either in their material or their essential processes; and their technical advancement had therefore to proceed by quite different methods. Only deep-lying causes could make them participate in one general evolution. Moreover, the changes in the textile and the metal-working industries are connected by something more than a merely simultaneous development, which we might be tempted to consider as a pure coincidence, for they are mutually complementary, like the different parts of an organized body. The beginnings of machine industry belong to the history of the textile trades, but its final triumph throughout the world was made possible only by the development of the metal industries.
