dition is not bettered by the exchange with other countries, either of goods or of knowledge. They have the fox's skin, but they do not know how to convert it into value, by being furriers themselves, or by communication with stranger" furriers.

66

The people of the East, amongst whom a certain degree of civilization has existed from high antiquity, were not only the growers of many productions which were unsuited to the climate and soil of Europe, but they were the manufacturers also. Cotton, for instance, was cultivated from time immemorial in Hindustan, in China, in Persia, and in Egypt. Cotton was a material easily grown and collected; and the patient industry of the people by whom it was cultivated, their simple habits, and their few wants, enabled them to send into Europe their manufactured stuffs of a fine and durable quality, under every disadvantage of landcarriage, even from the time of the ancient Greeks. Before the discovery, however, of the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope, cotton goods in Europe were articles of great price and luxury. M. Say well observes that, although cotton stuffs were cheaper than silk (which was formerly sold for its weight in gold), they were still articles which could only be purchased by the most opulent; and that, if a Grecian lady could awake from her sleep of two thousand years, her astonishment would be unbounded to see a simple country girl clothed with a gown of printed cotton, a muslin kerchief, and a coloured shawl.

When India was open to the ships of Europe, the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the English sold cotton goods in every market in considerable quantities. These stuffs bore their Indian names of calicoes and muslins; and whether bleached or dyed, were equally valued as amongst the most useful and ornamental articles of European dress.

In the seventeenth century France began to manufacture into stuffs the raw cotton imported from India, as Italy had done a century before. A cruel act of despotism drove the best French workmen, who were Protestants, into

England, and we learned the manufacture. The same act of despotism, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, caused the settlement of silk-manufacturers in Spitalfields. We did not make any considerable progress in the art, nor did we use the material of cotton exclusively in making up the goods. The warp, or longitudinal threads of the cloth, were of flax, the weft only was of cotton; for we could not twist it hard enough by hand to serve both purposes. This weft was spun entirely by hand with a distaff and spindle-the same process in which the women of England had been engaged for centuries; and which we see represented in ancient drawings. Our manufacture, in spite of all these disadvantages, continued to increase; so that about 1760, although there were fifty thousand spindles at work in Lancashire alone, the weaver found the greatest difficulty in procuring a sufficient supply of thread. Neither weaving

nor spinning was then carried on in large factories. They were domestic occupations. The women of a family worked at the distaff or the hand-wheel, and there were two opera

tions necessary in this department; roving, or coarse spinning, reduced the carded cotton to the thickness of a quill, and the spinner afterwards drew out and twisted the roving into weft fine enough for the weaver. The spinsters of England were carrying on the same operation as the spinsters of India. In the middle of the last century, according to Mr. Guest, a writer on the cotton-manufacture, very few weavers could procure weft enough to keep themselves constantly employed. "It was no uncommon thing," he says, "for a weaver to walk three or four miles in a morning, and call on five or six spinners, before he could collect weft to serve him for the remainder of the day; and when he wished to weave a piece in a shorter time than isual, a new ribbon or gown was necessary to quicken the exertions of the spinner."

That the manufacture should have flourished in England at all under these difficulties is honourable to the industry of our country; for the machinery used in weaving was also of the rudest sort, so that, if the web was more than three feet wide, the labour of two men was necessary to throw the shuttle. English cotton goods, of course, were very dear, and there was little variety in them. The cloth made of flax and cotton was called fustian; for which article Manchester was famous, as well as for laces. We still received the calicoes and printed cottons from India.

In a country like ours, where men have learned to think, and where ingenuity therefore is at work, a deficiency in material or in labour to meet the demand of a market is sure to call forth invention. It is about a century ago since it was perceived that spinning by machinery might give the supply which human labour was inadequate to produce, because doubtless the remuneration for that labour was very small. The work of the distaff, as it was carried on at that period, in districts partly agricultural and partly commercial, was, generally, an employment for the spare hours of the young women, and the easy industry of the old. It was a labour that was to assist in maintaining the

family,—not a complete means for their maintenance. The supply of yarn was therefore insufficient, and ingenious men applied themselves to remedy that insufficiency. Spinning-mills were built at Northampton in 1733, in which, it is said, although we have no precise account of it, that an apparatus for spinning was erected. A Mr. Lawrence Earnshaw, of Mottram, in Cheshire, is recorded to have invented a machine, in 1753, to spin and reel cotton at one operation; which he showed to his neighbours and then destroyed it, through the generous apprehension that he might deprive the poor of bread. We must admire the motive of this good man, although we are now enabled to show that his judgment was mistaken. Richard Arkwright, a barber of Preston, invented, in 1769, the principal part of the machinery for spinning cotton, and by so doing he was the means of accomplishing the enormous results detailed in the following summary. "We find that there were in Great Britain, in 1860, some 2650 cotton factories, employing a population of about 440,000 persons, of whom 90 per cent. were adults, and 56 per cent. females. A power equal to that of 300,000 horses, of which 18,500 was water-power, drove the machinery which quick eyes and active fingers guided and governed. Among other offices performed by this giant force was the twirling of more than thirty million spindles, at rates varying from 4000 to 6000 revolutions per minute. Each of these spindles could consume 9 ounces of cotton-wool per week; their required food for the year, therefore, exceeded 1,050,000,000 pounds of cotton. The actual consumption for the year, inclusive of waste, amounted to 1,083,000,000 pounds, and the total quantity imported to 1,390,000,000 pounds. Three hundred and fifty thousand power-looms threw their shuttles with unerring regularity, impelled by the strength of these steam and water horses, and besides supplying the household requirements of this kingdom, which in the article of cotton manufactures then amounted to 24,000,000l. in annual value, and 180,000,000 pounds in weight-this

P

population, these spindles, and these looms, being paid, established, supported, and provisioned by manufacturers possessed of fixed capital to the amount of 65,000,000l., produced for exportation more than 2,776,000,000 yards of cotton cloth, besides 197,000,000 pounds of cotton twist and yarn. In addition to this they manufactured and exported hosiery and small wares valued at 1,800,000l., and the total declared value of the cotton exports for the year exceeded 52,000,000l. sterling. The productions of the British cotton manufacture for 1860, exceeded 76,000,000l. in value, or nearly 6,000,000l. more than the gross revenue of the kingdom for the same period, and of this stupendous trade Lancashire engrossed nearly 75 per cent.”*

And how did Arkwright effect this great revolution? He asked himself whether it was not possible, instead of a wheel which spins a single thread of cotton at a time, and by means of which the spinner could obtain in twenty-four hours about two ounces of thread,—whether it might not be possible to spin the same material upon a great number of wheels, from which many hundreds of threads might issue at the same moment. The difficulty was in giving to these numerous wheels, spinning so many threads, the peculiar action of two hands when they pinch, at a little distance from each other, a lock of cotton, rendering it finer as it is drawn out. It was necessary, also, at the same time, to imitate the action of the spindle, which twisted together the filaments at the moment they had attained the necessary degree of fineness. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to give an adequate idea, by words, of the complex machinery by which Arkwright accomplished his object. Since Arkwright's time prodigious improvements have been made in the machinery for cottonspinning; but the principle remains the same, namely, to enable rollers to do the work of human fingers, with much greater precision, and incomparably cheaper. We will

"The Cotton Famine," by R. Arthur Arnold, a paper read at the meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, in 1864.