The Industrial Revolution brought "the dark Satanic mills" and all the squalor associated with them. To be sure, life for a significant part of the population at the margin of subsistence during the early days of the Industrial Revolution was misery. But it was life. A half-century earlier, many of those miserable souls would have died as infants or children.
Nonetheless, within decades of the emergence of the new order the visible misery and the evident wretched struggle for subsistence inspired competing visions of economic organization. Robert Owen, a successful British factory owner, in a challenge to Smith, averred that unrestrained laissez-faire by its nature would lead to poverty and disease.