There were mules and steam-engines before there were any labourers,
 whose exclusive occupation it was to make mules and steam-engines; just
 as men wore clothes before there were such people as tailors. The inventions
 of Vaucanson, Arkwright, Watt, and others, were, however, practicable,
 only because those inventors found, ready to hand, a considerable number
 of skilled mechanical workmen, placed at their disposal by the manufacturing
 period. Some of these workmen were independent handicraftsman of various
 trades, others were grouped together in manufactures, in which, as before-mentioned,
 division of labour was strictly carried out. As inventions increased in
 number, and the demand for the newly discovered machines grew larger, the
 machine-making industry split up, more and more, into numerous independent
 branches, and division of labour in these manufactures was more and more
 developed. Here, then, we see in Manufacture the immediate technical foundation
 of modern industry. Manufacture produced the machinery, by means of which
 modern industry abolished the handicraft and manufacturing systems in those
 spheres of production that it first seized upon. The factory system was
 therefore raised, in the natural course of things, on an inadequate foundation.
 When the system attained to a certain degree of development, it had to
 root up this ready-made foundation, which in the meantime had been elaborated
 on the old lines, and to build up for itself a basis that should correspond
 to its methods of production. Just as the individual machine retains a
 dwarfish character, so long as it is worked by the power of man alone,
 and just as no system of machinery could be properly developed before the
 steam-engine took the place of the earlier motive powers, animals, wind,
 and even water; so, too, modern industry was crippled in its complete development,
 so long as its characteristic instrument of production, the machine, owed
 its existence to personal strength and personal skill, and depended on
 the muscular development, the keenness of sight, and the cunning of hand,
 with which the detail workmen in manufactures, and the manual labourers
 in handicrafts, wielded their dwarfish implements. Thus, apart from the
 dearness of the machines made in this way, a circumstance that is ever
 present to the mind of the capitalist, the expansion of industries carried
 on by means of machinery, and the invasion by machinery of fresh branches
 of production, were dependent on the growth of a class of workmen, who,
 owing to the almost artistic nature of their employment, could increase
 their numbers only gradually, and not by leaps and bounds. But besides
 this, at a certain stage of its development, modern industry became technologically
 incompatible with the basis furnished for it by handicraft and 362Manufacture.
 The increasing size of the prime movers, of the transmitting mechanism,
 and of the machines proper, the greater complication, multiformity and
 regularity of the details of these machines, as they more and more departed
 from the model of those originally made by manual labour, and acquired
 a form, untrammelled except by the conditions under which they worked,
 [18] the perfecting of the automatic system, and the
 use, every day more unavoidable, of a more refractory material, such as
 iron instead of wood – the solution of all these problems, which sprang up
 by the force of circumstances, everywhere met with a stumbling-block in
 the personal restrictions, which even the collective labourer of Manufacture
 could not break through, except to a limited extent. Such machines as the
 modern hydraulic press, the modern power-loom, and the modern carding engine,
 could never have been furnished by Manufacture.