acres of bleaching-ground which were then used in England and Scotland-for the practice of sending the brown and yellow cloth to Holland had been discontinued—were free for cultivation. But the chlorine was poisonous to the workmen, and imparted a filthy odor to the cloth. Chemistry again went to work, and finally obtained the chlorid of lime, which is the universal bleaching powder of modern manufactures. What used to be the work of eight months is now accomplished in an hour or two; and so a bag of dingy raw cotton may be in Alabama on the first day of the month, and be converted into the whitest calico before the month is at an end.

CHAPTER XX.

HOSIERY MANUFACTURE.-THE STOCKING-FRAME. THE CIRCULAR HOSIERY-MACHINE HATS. GLOVES.-FANS.-LACE MANUFACTURE.-BOBBINET-MACHINE.-PIN-MAK

ING.-NEEDLES.-BUTTONS.-TOYS.-MATCHES.-ENVELOPS.

BEFORE the invention of the first stocking-machine, in the year 1589, by William Lee, an English clergyman, none but the very rich wore stockings, and many of the most wealthy went without stockings at all, that part of dress being sewn together by the tailor, or their legs being covered with bandages of cloth. The covering for the leg was called a "nether-stock," or lower stocking. Philip Stubbes, a tremendous puritanical declaimer against every species of luxury, thus describes the expensive stockings of his time,

1585:

"Then have they nether-stocks to these hosen, not of cloth (though never so fine), for that is thought too base, but of jarnsey, worsted, crewell, silk, thread, and such like, or else at the least of the finest yarn that can be got, and so curiously knit with open seam down the leg, with quirks and clocks about the ancles, and sometime, haply, interlaced with gold or silver threads, as is wonderful to behold. And to such impudent insolency and shameful outrage it is now grown, that every one, almost, though otherwise very poor, having scarce forty shillings of wages by the year, will not stick to have two or three pair of these silk nether-stocks, or else of the finest yarn that may be got, though the price of them be a ryall, or twenty shillings, or more, as com

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monly it is; for how can they be less, when as the very knitting of them is worth a noble or a ryall, and some much more? The time hath been when one might have clothed his body well for less than a pair of these nether-stocks will cost."

It is difficult to understand how those who had only forty shillings a year wages could expend twenty shillings upon a pair of knit stockings. But it is quite clear they were for the rich only; and that very few persons were employed in knitting and embroidering stockings.

William Lee struggled to make stockings cheap. He made a pair of stockings by the frame, in the presence of King James I.; but such was the prejudice of those times, that he could get no encouragement for his invention. His invention was discountenanced, upon the plea that it would deprive the industrious poor of their substance. He went to France, where he met with no better success, and died at last of a broken heart. The great then could discountenance an invention, because its application was limited to themselves. They only wore stockings: the poor who made them had none to wear. Stockings were not cheap enough for the poor to wear, and therefore they went without. Of the millions of people now in this country, how few are without stockings! What a miserable exception to the comfort of the rest of the people does it appear when we see a beggar in the streets without stockings! We consider such a person to be in the lowest stage of want and suffering. Two centuries ago, not one person in a thousand wore stockings; one century ago, not one person in five hundred wore them; now, not one person in a thousand is without them. Who made this great change in the condition of the people of almost all civilized countries? William Lee-who died at Paris of a broken heart. And why did he die of grief and penury? Because the people of his

own days were too ignorant to accept the blessings he had prepared for them.

We ask with confidence, had the terror of the stockingframe any real foundation? Were any people thrown out of employment by the stocking-frame?

"The knitters in the sun,

And the free maids who weave their thread with bones,"

as Shakspeare describes the country lasses of his day, had to change their employment; but there was far more employment for the makers of stockings, for then every one began to wear stockings.

The hosiery manufacture furnishes employment to many persons besides those that work at the stocking-machine. The frame-worker, in many cases, makes the knit-work in a piece adapted for a stocking, and does not make a finished stocking; the seamer makes the stocking out of the piece so produced. When we speak of the stocking-frame, we speak of a machine which knits every article of hosiery. In this manufacture there were employed, in 1851, in Great Britain, sixty-five thousand five hundred persons, of whom thirty thousand were females.

Suppose that the ignorance and prejudice which prevailed at the time of James I. upon the subject of machinery had continued to the present day; and that not only the first stocking-frame of William Lee had never been used, but that all machines employed in the manufacture of hosiery had never been thought of; and they could not have been thought of if the first machines had been put down. The greater number of us, in that case, would have been without stockings.

But there would have been a greater evil than even this. We might all have found substitutes for stockings, or have gone without them. But the progress of ingenuity would

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have been stopped. The inventive principle would have been destroyed.

We have not reached the end of our career of improvement. Civilization is not destined to run a backward race. William Lee's stocking-frame worked well for two centuries and a half. One of the most beautiful contrivances of our time has now greatly superseded it. The circular hosiery machine-more properly called a machine for manufacturing "looped fabrics"-works at such a rate that one girl attending upon the revolutions of this wonderful instrument can produce in one day the material for two hundred and forty pairs of stockings. She turns a little handle, with the ease with which she would turn a barrel-organ; and, as the machine revolves, hundreds of needles catch the thread and loop it into the chain which forms the stocking-cloth, or it makes the fashioned stocking.

As the nether-stocks of our English ancestors were for the great and wealthy, so were their hats. Old Stubbs writes, "Sometimes they use them sharp on the crown, pearking up like the spear or shaft of a steeple, standing a quarter of a yard above the crown of their heads, some more, some less, as please the fantasies of their inconstant minds. Other some be flat and broad on the crown, like the battlements of a house. Another sort have round crowns, sometimes with one kind of band, sometimes with another, now black, now white, now russet, now red, now green, now yellow, now this, now that, never content with one color or fashion two days to an end. And thus in vanity they spend the Lord his treasure, consuming their golden years and silver days in wickedness and sin. And as the fashions be rare and strange, so is the stuff whereof their hats be made divers also; for some are of silk, some of velvet, some of taffeta, some of sarsanet, some of wool, and, which is more curious, some of a certain kind of fine hair; these