CHAPTER XVIII.

EARLY INTERCOURSE WITH FOREIGN NATIONS.-PROGRESS OF THE COTTON MANUFACTURE.-HAND-SPINNING.-ARKWRIGHT.-CROMPTON, WHITNEY AND THE COTTONGIN.-PROGRESS OF THE COTTON MANUFACTURE IN AMERICA.-ESPECIAL BENEFITS OF MACHINERY IN THIS MANUFACTURE.

THERE was a time when the people of England were very inferior to those of the Low Countries, of France, and of Germany, in various productions of manufacturing industry. What first gave an impulse to the woolen trade, which for several centuries was the great staple of England, was the procuring foreign workmen to teach the English people their craft. Before that period the nations on the Conti-. nent had a proverb against the English. They said, “the stranger buys of the Englishman the skin of the fox for a groat, and sells him the tail for a shilling." The proverb meant that the people of England had not skill to convert the raw material into an article of use, and that they paid a large price for the labor and ingenuity which made their native material available to themselves.

But still the intercourse, such as it was then, with "the stranger" was better than no intercourse. They gave the rough and stinking fox's skin for a groat, and received the nicely dressed tippet for a shilling. The next best thing to dressing the skin themselves was to pay other people for dressing it. Without foreign communication the English could not have got that article of clothing at all.

All nations that have made any considerable advance in civilization have been commercial nations. The arts of life are very imperfectly understood in countries which have little communication with the rest of the world, and consequently the inhabitants are poor and wretched; their condition 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.

The people of the East, among 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

MICROSCOPIC APPEARANCE OF THE COTTON FIBER.

immemorial in Hindoostan, 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 dura

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ble quality, under every disadvantage of land-carriage, even from the time of the ancient Greeks. Before the discovery, however, of the passage of 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 colored 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 among 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 Englishmen learned the manufacture. The same act of despotism, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, caused the settlement of silk manufacturers in England. The English did not make any considerable progress in the art, nor did they 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 they could not twist it hard enough by hand to serve both purposes. The accompanying figures are enlarged representations of a piece of cotton cloth, showing the position and distinctions of the warp and weft; the longitudinal lines (represented in the lower figure by dots) constituting the warp, and the lines at

right angles, or running across the figure, the weft. 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. The manufacture, in spite of all these disadvantages, continued to increase; so that about 1760, although there were fifty thousand spindles at work in the county of 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 operations necessary in this department; roving, or coarse spinning, reduced the carded cotton to the thickness of a quill, and the spinner afterward 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 spin sters of India. In the middle of the last century, according to Mr. Guest, a writer on the cotton manufacture, very few English 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

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usual, 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 honorable to the industry of that 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 labor 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. England, however, still received the calicoes and printed cottons from India.

In a country where men have learned to think, and where ingenuity therefore is at work, a deficiency in material or