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no longer sends us his calicoes and his colored stuff's; we make them ourselves. But he sells us fifty times the amount of raw cotton that he used to when the machinery was first set up. The workman on the banks of the Ganges is no longer weaving calicoes in his loom of reeds under the shadow of a palm-tree; but he is gathering fifty times as much cotton as he gathered before, and making fifty times as much indigo to color it with.

The change that has been produced upon the labor 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 been made 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 burned. 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 labor, or both. "Which is the cheapest," said the committee of the House of Commons 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 piece made by the power-loom is the cheapest." This answer was decisive. The hand-loom weavers of England have continued to struggle, even up to this time, with the greater productive power of the power-loom; but the struggle is nearly over. It would have been terminated long ago, if the miserable wages which the hand-loom weaver obtained, had not

been eked out by charitable contributions. It was the duty of society to break the fall of the workman 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 labor to mitigate. Upon the introduction of the spinning machinery into England, 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 in England, 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 other countries 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 England? 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 can not build walls of brass round any country; 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 English merchants laughed at him. The whole coast of France, and Holland, and Italy, became one

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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 customhouse 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 England had triumphed eighty years ago 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 England would have been foolish enough to reject. Forty years ago the manufacturers of the United States had adopted the power-loom.

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 can not 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 cotton wool 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 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 diminished the price of clothing.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE WOOLEN MANUFACTURE.--DIVISIONS OF EMPLOYMENT.-EARLY HISTORY.PROHIBITORY LAWS.-THE JACQUARD LOOM.-MIDDLE-AGE LEGISLATION.-SUMPTUARY LAWS.-THE SILK MANUFACTURE.-RIBBON-WEAVING.-THE LINEN MANUFACTURE.-OLD WOOLEN RAGS.-CLOTH-PRINTING.-BLEACHING.

THOSE who have not taken the trouble to witness, or to inquire into, the processes by which they are surrounded with the conveniences and comforts of civilized life, can have no idea of the vast variety of ways in which invention is at work to lessen the cost of production. The people of India, who spin their cotton wholly by hand, and weave their cloth in a rude loom, would doubtless be astonished when they first saw the effects of machinery, in the calico which is returned to their own shores, made from the material brought from their own shores, cheaper than they themselves could make it. But their indolent habits would not permit them to inquire how machinery produced this wonder. There are many among us who only know that the wool grows upon the sheep's back, and that it is converted into a coat by labor and machinery. They do not estimate the prodigious power of thought-the patient labor-the unceasing watchfulness, the frequent disappointment, the uncertain profit-which many have had to encounter in bringing this machinery to perfection, and in organizing the modes of its working, in connection with labor. Further, their knowledge of history may have been confined to learning by rote the dates when kings