Country Life
FACTORY VILLAGES.
Not one, but scores of smaller factories are now moving out into our country villages. The change, immensely accelerated by the spread of electric power, has this spring —if a personal experience goes for anything—begun to take on the dimensions almost of a national movement. Any old building, or even a country house, is bought (usually for a song) and rapidly adapted to factory purposes. Now modern factories are not necessarily big affairs. You may make hats or explosives or even paper or biscuits within a small compass ; and the art of labour-saving has been so developed that a very few hands—most of them women's hands at that—can turn out an immense quantity of manu- factured material. So compact and quiet is the new factory of this type that you may pass through the village many times, you may even spend weeks within its pale, and never discover that it harbours a factory at all.
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