The essence of the Industrial Revolution is the substitution of completion for the mediaeval regulations which had previously controlled the production and distribution of wealth. There were two new system of thought: Economic Science, and its antithesis, Socialism. The development of Economic Science in England has four chief landmarks.

-Wealth of Nations (1776) By Adam Smith

-Essay on Population (1798) By Malthus

-Principles of political Economy and Taxation (1817) By Ricardo

-Principles of Political Economy (1848) By Mill

Adam Smith had concentrated all his attention on a large production. Malthus directed his inquires, not to the causes of wealth but to the causes of poverty, and found them in his theory of population. Ricardo showed how wealth is distributed under such a system, a problem which could not have occurred to any one before his time. A great advance was made by Mill's attempt to show what was and what was not inevitable under a system of free competition. 

Coming to the facts of the Industrial Revolution, the first thing that strikes us is the far greater rapidity which marks the growth of population and we notice the relative and positive decline in the agricultural population.

Decrease in rural population was obeyed to different causes:

- the destruction of the common-field system of cultivation

- the enclosure, on a large scale, of common and waste lands

-and the consolidation of small farms into large.

The Economic Science was based on the free market, a market in which there is no economic intervention and regulation by the state, except to uphold private contracts and the ownership of property, and the price of the products was decided by supply and demand.  

Thanks to a more scientific approach in agriculture the production was improved. The period was one of great agricultural advance; the breed of cattle was improved, rotation of crops was generally introduced, the steam-plough was invented, agricultural societies were instituted. In one respect alone the change was injurious. In consequence of the high prices of corn which prevailed during the French war, some of the finest permanent pastures were broken up.

Passing to manufactures, we find here the all-prominent fact to be the substitution of the factory for the domestic system the consequence of the mechanical discoveries of the time. There were four great inventions that altered the character of the cotton manufacture:

-the spinning-jenny

-the water-frame

-Crompton’s mule

-the self-acting mule

None of these by themselves would have revolutionized the industry.

In 1769 - the year in which Napoleon and Wellington were born - James Watt  took out his patent for the steam-engine.  But the most famous invention of all was the power-loom.

A further growth of the factory system took space independent of machinery, and owed its origin to the expansion of trade, an expansion which was itself due to the great advance made at this time in the means of communication. The canal system was being rapidly developed throughout the country. Between 1818 and 1829 more than a thousand additional miles of turnpike road were constructed; and the next year, 1830, saw the opening of the first railroad. These improved means of communication caused an extraordinary increase in commerce.

These altered conditions in the production of wealth necessarily involved an equal revolution in its distribution. In agriculture the prominent fact is an enormous rise in rents.

Much of this rise, doubtless, was due to money invested in improvements — the first Lord Leicester is said to have expended £ 400,000 on his property — but it was  far more largely the effect of the enclosure system, of the consolidation of farms, and of the high price of corn during the French war. In consequence, their character completely changed; they ceased to work and live with their labourers, and became a distinct class.     The high prices of the war time thoroughly demoralised them, for their wealth then increased so fast, that they were at a loss what to do with it. Cobbett has described the change in their habits, the new food and furniture, the luxury and drinking, which were the consequences of more money coming into their hands than they knew how to spend. The effects of the Industrial Revolution prove that free competition may produce wealth without producing well-being. We all know the horrors that ensued in England before it was restrained by legislation and combination.