Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: to the national or international market, it became restricted to a narrower sphere. In that sphere it still performs a distinct social service. " That sphere," writes Professor Bucher, "today is the country, the districts where it still finds the conditions of existence that gave birth to it in the Middle Ages."' During this period there was a remarkable application of wind and water power to industrial processes formerly carried on by human or animal power. This fact, together with the many inventions which were expressions of ways of utilizing these new forces, is significant when considered with reference to the inauguration of free labor. THE FACTORY SYSTEM, OR THE PERIOD OF NATIONAL ECONOMY. The factory system arose in response to the use of steam as a motive power. Before steam could be utilized as a motive power it was necessary to invent means of applying it to a given work. At this point science came to the aid of industry and contributed the knowledge by means of which steam could be applied and controlled. The history of the application of steam to means of travel and transportation is the recordof the change from exploiting the immediate locality in the interests of industry to that of exploiting the remotest regions of the known world. It is a record of the change from the sale of goods at a local mafket to the sale of them in the great markets of the world. The history of the application of steam to the manufacturing process is the history of the change from the simple handicraft labor with simple tools in the interests of the immediate locality, to the centralized system, which represents the organization of the entire process of production for a national market in the most effective way yet known. 1 Industrial Evolution, p. 211. While it is a ser... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.