“All these considerations drove the cotton-spinners to that important change in the economy of English manufactures, the introduction of the factory system; and when that system had once been adopted, such were its pecuniary advantages that mercantile competition would have rendered it impossible, even had it been desirable, to abandon it.” (Baines, ‘History of Cotton Manufacture,’ pages 183, 185.)
It was not to be expected that Arkwright would enjoy undisturbed so valuable a monopoly as that which he had created, and many persons infringed his patents, in the belief that he was not the real owner of the inventions which he claimed. An attempt was made in 1772 to set aside his first patent for the water-frame; but this failed, and he retained the enjoyment of that patent unquestioned till the expiration of the fourteen years. To preserve his second patent, for the carding, drawing, and roving machines, he brought several actions against master-spinners, one of which, against Colonel Mordaunt, was tried in 1781, and a verdict was obtained for the defendant, setting aside the patent. Arkwright for some time did not contest this decision. But in 1785, he made another attempt to establish his second patent before a court of law; and in the first instance obtained a verdict in his own favour, but on the cause being reheard, the patent was finally declared invalid.
Notwithstanding this defeat, Arkwright rapidly acquired a very large fortune, through the magnitude of his concerns, and his industry, penetration, and skill in business. On the dissolution of his partnership with the Messrs. Strutt about 1783, the extensive works at Cromford fell to his share. In 1786, he was High Sheriff of Derbyshire, and was knighted, on occasion of presenting an address to the King. We find no other record worth notice of the last years of his life. He died, August 3, 1792, in his sixtieth year.
Arkwright’s originality and honesty as an inventor have been violently impugned by Mr. Guest, in his History of the Cotton Manufacture. The arguments on the other side may be seen in the Edinburgh Review, No. 91, to which Guest published a reply. Mr. Baines’s History of the Cotton Manufacture, which we have chiefly followed and largely quoted from in this account, contains the latest and fullest account which we have seen of Arkwright’s character and history. There appears to have been some alloy of selfishness and disingenuousness in his disposition, some ground for the statement of counsel in the trial of 1785: “It is a notorious story in the manufacturing counties; all men that have seen Mr. Arkwright in a state of opulence have shaken their heads, and thought of these poor men, Highs and Kay, and have thought, too, that they were entitled to some participation of the profits.” Still it becomes us to speak with gentleness of the faults of a person to whose talents, nationally speaking, we owe so much: and there is much to be said in extenuation of them, in consideration of the lowness of his original calling, of the self-complacency and sensitive jealousy common to almost all schemers, and the fascination of wealth when it flows largely and unexpectedly upon a man bred in extreme poverty. As an inventor Arkwright’s merit is undeniable. Mr. Baines, who seems to have judged calmly and impartially, assigns to him the high praise, that “in improving and perfecting mechanical inventions, in exactly adapting them to the purposes for which they were intended, in arranging a comprehensive system of manufacturing, and in conducting vast and complicated concerns, he displayed a bold and fertile mind, and consummate judgment, which, when his want of education, and the influence of an employment so extremely unfavourable to mental expansion as that of his previous life, are considered, must have excited the astonishment of mankind. But the marvellous and ‘unbounded invention,’ which he claimed for himself and which has been too readily accorded to him—the _creative faculty_ which devised all that admirable mechanism, so entirely new in its principles, and characteristic of the first order of mechanical genius—which has given a new spring to the industry of the world, and within half a century has reared up the most extensive manufacture ever known—this did not belong to Arkwright.” * * * * * *