ABSTRACT
THE period covered by this volume marks the significant beginnings of the factory system rather than its full flowering, years of important experimentation and uneven development from one industry to another and in different parts of the country. No rigorous definition of the terms "factory" or "factory stage" is here attempted; the actual process of industrial evolution does not tolerate clean-cut categories and precise definitions. But the terms are nevertheless useful as indicating a trend, the direction of change in the organization of industry in the course of which increasingly large aggregations of workers were assembled under the general supervision of an employer who, paying money wages and furnishing buildings, raw materials, and power-operated machines, organized the production of goods for general market sale. The trend was toward heavy capital investment, integration of industrial processes, and mass production. These and other characteristics noted in the following pages were symptoms of this new development, but all of them will not be found in every early factory, nor is it possible to draw a sharp distinction between the so-called mills and the early factories. Certainly the small neighborhood gristmill was a far cry from the modern factory; yet the larger merchant flour mills of the late eighteenth century evidenced many factory characteristics.
