quantity of cloth manufactured could not have been equal to one five-hundreth part of that which is now manufactured for home consumption. Where one person a century ago consumed one yard, the consumption per head has risen to about twenty-six yards. This vast difference in the comforts of every family, by the ability which they now possess of easily acquiring warm and healthful clothing, is a clear gain to all society, and to every one as a portion of society. It is more especially a gain to the females and the children of families, whose condition is always degraded when clothing is scanty. The power of procuring cheap clothing for themselves, and for their children, has a tendency to raise the condition of females more than any other addition to their stock of comfort It cultivates habits of cleanliness and decency; and those are little acquainted with the human character who can doubt whether cleanliness and decency are not only great aids to virtue, but virtues themselves. John Wesley said, that cleanliness was next to godliness. There is little self-respect amidst dirt and rags, and without self-respect there can be no foundation for those qualities which most contribute to the good of society. The power of procuring useful clothing at a cheap price has raised the condition of women amongst us, and the influence of the condition of woman upon the welfare of a community can never be too highly estimated.

We have suffered these calculations of the cost of cotton fabrics to remain unaltered, for it may be hoped that the effects of the great calamity called "The Cotton Famine" are passing away, and that we are returning to a more healthful condition as regards this great branch of national industry.

The creation of employment amongst ourselves by the cheapness of cotton-goods produced by machinery, is not to be considered as a mere change from the labour of India to the labour of England. It is a creation of employment, operating just in the same manner as the machinery did for

printing books. The Indian, it is true, no longer sends us his calicoes and his coloured stuffs; we make them ourselves. But he sent us ten years ago fifty times the amount of raw cotton that he sent when the machinery was first set up. The quantity that he now sends us, since the failure of the cotton supply from the United States, is so large that it has been the main cause of the renewing prosperity of our cotton districts. The workman on the banks of the Ganges is no longer weaving calicoes for us in his loom of reeds under the shadow of a palm-tree; but he is making enormous additions to the industrial prosperity of that vast country over which the queen of England is the supreme ruler, and whose government is now doing its best to promote the interests of a hundred and fifty millions of subjects, by leading them onward in the march of civilization.

The change that has been produced upon the labour of India by the machinery employed for spinning and weaving cotton, has a parallel in the altered condition of the handloom weavers in Great Britain. In 1785, Dr. Cartwright produced his first power loom. It was a rude machine compared with the refinements that have successively carried on his principle. Every resistance was made to the introduction of this new power. The mill-owners were slow to perceive its advantages; the first mills in which these. looms were introduced were burnt. The hand-loom weavers worked at a machine which little varied from that with which their Flemish instructors had worked three centuries before. But no prejudice and no violence could prevent the progress of the new machine. The object for which machines are established, and the object which they do effect, is cheapness of production. Machines either save material, or diminish labour, or both. "Which is the cheapest," said the committee to Joseph Foster, "a piece of goods made by a power-loom, or a piece of goods made by a hand-loom ?" He answered, "A power-loom is the cheapest."* This *See p. 104.

answer was decisive.

The hand-loom weavers continued to struggle with the greater productive power of the powerloom; but the struggle is over. It would have been terminated long ago if the miserable wages which the handloom weaver obtained had not been eked out by parochial contributions. It was the duty of society to break the fall of the workmen who were thrust out of their place by the invention; but had society attempted to interpose between the new machines and the old, so as to have kept the old workers to their less profitable employment, there would have been far more derangements of labour to mitigate. Upon the introduction of the spinning machinery there was great temporary distress of the hand-spinners, with rioting and destruction of spinning-mills. If these modes of resistance to invention had gone on to prevent altogether the manufacture of cotton-thread by the spinning machinery, the consumption of cotton-cloth would have been little increased, and the number of persons engaged in the manufacture would have been twenty, thirty, or even forty times less than the present number. But there would have been another result. Would the great body of the people of Europe have chosen to wear for many years dear cloth instead of cheap cloth, that a few thousand spinners might have been kept at their ancient wheels in Lancashire? Capital can easily shift its place, and invention follows where capital goes before. The people of France, and Germany, and America, would have employed the cheap machine instead of the dear one; and the people of England would have had cheap cloth instead of dear cloth from thence. We cannot build a wall of brass round our islands; and the thin walls of prohibitive duties are very easily broken through. A profit of from twenty to thirty per cent. will pour in any given quantity of smuggled goods that a nation living under prohibitive laws can demand. Bonaparte, in the height of his power, passed the celebrated Berlin decree for the exclusion of all English produce from the continent of Europe. But our merchants laughed at

him. The whole coast of France, and Holland, and Italy, became one immense receiving-place for smuggled goods. If he had lined the whole coast with all the six hundred thousand soldiers that he marched to Russia, instead of a few custom-house officers, he could not have stopped the introduction of English produce. It was against the nature of things that the people who had been accustomed to cheap goods should buy dear ones; or that they should go without any article, whether of necessity or luxury, whose use had become general. Mark, therefore, if the cotton-spinners of Lancashire had triumphed over Arkwright's machinery, there would not have been a single man, woman, or child of those spinners employed at all, within twenty years after that most fatal triumph. The manufacture of cotton would have gone to other countries; cotton-spinning in England would have been at an end. The same thing would have happened if the power-loom, fifty years ago, had been put down by combination; other countries would have used the invention which we should have been foolish enough to reject.

In the cotton manufacture, which from its immense amount possesses the means of rewarding the smallest improvement, invention has been at work, and most successfully, to make machines that make machines that make the cotton thread. There is a part of the machinery used in cotton-spinning called a reed. It consists of a number of pieces of wire, set side by side in a frame, resembling, as far as such things admit of comparison, a comb with two backs. These reeds are of various lengths and degrees of fineness; but they all consist of cross pieces of wire, fastened at regular intervals between longitudinal pieces of split cane, into which they are tied with waxed thread. A machine now does the work of reed-making. The materials enter the machine in the shape of two or three yards of cane, and many yards of wire and thread; and the machine cuts the wire, places each small piece with unfailing regularity between the canes, twists the thread round the cane

with a knot that cannot slip, every time a piece of wire is put in, and does several yards of this extraordinary work in less time than we have taken to write the description. There is another machine for making a part of the machine for cotton-spinning, even more wonderful. The cottonwool is combed by circular cards of every degree of fineness; and the card-making machine, receiving only a supply of leather and wire, does its own work without the aid of hands. It punches the leather-cuts the wire-passes it through the leather-clinches it behind-and gives it the proper form of the tooth in front-producing a complete card of several feet in circumference in a wonderfully short time. All men feel the benefit of such inventions, because they lessen the cost of production. The necessity for them always precedes their use. There were not reed-makers and card-makers enough in England to supply the demands of the cotton machinery; so invention went to work to see how machines could make machines; and the consequent diminished cost of machinery has diminshed the price of clothing.

We cannot close this chapter without adverting to the blessings in disguise which the failure of the raw material of the cotton manufacture has produced. For three years there was much suffering, unexampled privation, in the sudden transition from a period of long prosperity to one of general misfortune. The mills were wholly or partially stopped; the work-people were idle. From 1862 the pressure of want had been mitigated by the charitable agency of numerous committees who dispersed two millions sterling with the discrimination of true benevolence. At the crisis of the calamity there were nearly half a million of persons receiving assistance from these committees, and from boards of guardians. In 1863, when there were fortyfive thousand men and boys out of employment in the cotton districts, the Public Works Act was passed, and a million and three quarters have been expended in employing the operatives upon labours of public utility. The