The last, but in many respects one of the most useful of public works to which a large amount of capital has been devoted, is the construction of sewers in our cities and towns. Popular intelligence and official power have been very slowly awakened to the performance of this duty. And yet the consequences of neglect have been felt for centuries. In 1290 the monks of White Friars and of Black Friars in London, complained to the king that the exhalations from the Fleet River overcame the pleasant odor of the frankincense which burned on their altars, and occasioned the deaths of the brethren. This was the polluted stream that in time came to be known as Fleet Ditch, which Pope described as "The king of dykes, than whom no sluice of mud Fleet Ditch became such a nuisance that it was partly filled up by act of parliament soon after these lines were written. The Londoners had then their reservoirs of filth, called laystalls, in various parts near the river; and the pestilent accumulations spread disease all over the city. The system of sewers was begun in 1756, and from that time to the present several hundreds of miles of sewers have been constructed in London. At the present time every large town or city properly organized, has its system of sewerage. Public opinion in this matter, has gone so strongly in the direction of a thorough reformation, that these arrangements, so essential to health and cleanliness, can no longer be neglected. Experience has taught us by bitter and expensive lessons that every dollar of public capital so expended is a certain addition to the total amount of national wealth. Apart, however, from mere temporal or pecuniary consideration, every thing connected with those departments of sanitary reform which have for their object the removal of filth, or impurity, or the abatement of nuisances, has special claims upon our attention, and should be regarded as duties which we have no right to ignore, or neglect, since as John Wesley remarked, "cleanliness is second only to godliness." "When the missionary Van der Kemp, was setting out for Africa, passing one of the brick-yards of London, he thought it would be such a boon to the Hottentots if he could improve their dwellings, that he offered himself as a servant to the brick-maker, and spent some weeks in learning the business. And he was right. It is not easy to live godly and righteously amid filth and darkness; and although the Gospel will not refuse to enter a Hottentot hut, or an Irish cabin, when once it is admitted, its tendency is to improve that cabin, or hut into a cottage with tiles on the floor, and glass in the windows." CHAPTER XVIII. EARLY INTERCOURSE WITH FOREIGN NATIONS.-PROGRESS OF THE COTTON MANUFAOTURE.-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 Continent 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. 284 COTTON MANUFACTURE. 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 COTTON MANUFACTURE. 285 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 stuff's 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 |