Early intercourse with foreign nations—Progress of the cotton manufacture—Hand-spinning—Arkwright—Crompton—Power-loom—Cartwright—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. We first gave an impulse to our woollen trade, which for several centuries was the great staple of the country; by procuring foreign workmen to teach our people their craft. Before that period the nations on the Continent had a proverb against us. They said, "the stranger buys of the Englishman the skin of the fox for a groat, and sells him the tail again for a shilling." The proverb meant that we had not skill to convert the raw material into an article of use, and that we paid a large price for the labour and ingenuity which made our native material available to ourselves.

But still our intercourse, such as it was then, with "the stranger" was better than no intercourse. We gave the rough and stinking fox's skin for a groat, and we got the nicely dressed tippet for a shilling. The next best thing to dressing the skin ourselves was to pay other people for dressing it. Without foreign communication we should 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, amongst 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 immemorial in Hindustan, 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 durable quality, under every disadvantage of land-carriage, even from the time of the ancient Greeks. Before the discovery, however, of the passage to 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 coloured 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 amongst 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 we learned the manufacture. The same act of despotism, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, caused the settlement of silk-manufacturers in Spitalfields. We did not make any considerable progress in the art, nor did we 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 we could not twist it hard enough by hand to serve both purposes. 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. Our manufacture, in spite of all these disadvantages, continued to increase; so that about 1760, although there were fifty thousand spindles at work in 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 afterwards 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 spinsters of India. In the middle of the last century, according to Mr. Guest, a writer on the cotton-manufacture, very few 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 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 honourable to the industry of our 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 labour 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. We still, received the calicoes and printed cottons from India.

In a country like ours, where men have learned to think, and where ingenuity therefore is at work, a deficiency in material or in labour to meet the demand of a market is sure to call forth invention. It is a century ago since it was perceived that spinning by machinery might give the supply which human labour was inadequate to produce, because, doubtless, the remuneration for that labour was very small. The work of the distaff, as it was carried on at that period, in districts partly agricultural and partly commercial, was, generally, an employment for the spare hours of the young women, and the easy industry of the old. It was a labour that was to assist in maintaining the family,—not a complete means for their maintenance. The supply of yarn was therefore insufficient, and ingenious men applied themselves to remedy that insufficiency. Spinning-mills were built at Northampton in 1733, in which, it is said, although we have no precise account of it, that an apparatus for spinning was erected. A Mr. Lawrence Earnshaw, of Mottram, in Cheshire, is recorded to have invented a machine, in 1753, to spin and reel cotton at one operation; which he showed to his neighbours and then destroyed it, through the generous apprehension that he might deprive the poor of bread. We must admire the motive of this good man, although we are now enabled to show that his judgment was mistaken. Richard Arkwright, a barber of Preston, invented, in 1769, the principal part of the machinery for spinning cotton, and by so doing he gave bread to about two millions of people instead of fifty thousand; and, assisted by subsequent inventions, raised the importation of cotton-wool from less than two million pounds per annum to a thousand million pounds; has enabled us to supply other nations with cotton manufactures to the enormous amount of thirty-three million pounds sterling, in one year, 1853; has raised the annual produce of the manufacture from two hundred thousand pounds sterling to at least sixty million pounds sterling; and has given direct employment to half a million of men, women, and young persons.

And how did Arkwright effect this great revolution? He asked himself whether it was not possible, instead of a wheel which spins a single thread of cotton at a time, and by means of which the spinner could obtain in twenty-four hours about two ounces of thread,—whether it might not be possible to spin the same material upon a great number of wheels, from which many hundreds of threads might issue at the same moment. The difficulty was in giving to these numerous wheels, spinning so many threads, the peculiar action of two hands when they pinch, at a little distance from each other, a lock of cotton, rendering it finer as it is drawn out. It was necessary, also, at the same time, to imitate the action of the spindle, which twisted together the filaments at the moment they had attained the necessary degree of fineness. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to give an adequate idea, by words, of the complex machinery by which Arkwright accomplished his object. Since Arkwright's time prodigious improvements have been made in the machinery for cotton-spinning; but the principle remains the same, namely, to enable rollers to do the work of human fingers, with much greater precision, and incomparably cheaper. We will attempt briefly to describe this chief portion of the great invention.

We must suppose that, by the previous operation of carding, the cotton-wool has been so combed and prepared as to be formed into a long untwisted line of about the thickness of a man's finger. This line so formed (after it has been introduced into the spinning-machine) is called a roving, the old name in hand-spinning.

In order to convert this roving into a thread, it is necessary that the fibres, which are for the most part curled up, and which lie in all directions, should be stretched out and laid lengthwise, side by side; that they should be pressed together so as to give them a more compact form; and that they should be twisted, so as to unite them all firmly together. In the original method of spinning by the distaff, those operations were performed by the finger and thumb, and they were afterwards effected with greater rapidity, but less perfectly, by means of the long wheel and spindle. For the same purpose, Arkwright employed two pairs of small rollers, the one pair being placed at a little distance in front of the other. The lower roller in each pair is furrowed or fluted lengthwise, and the upper one is covered with leather; so that, as they revolve in contact with each other, they take fast hold of the cotton which passes between them. Both pairs of rollers are turned by machinery, which is so contrived that the second pair shall turn round with much more swiftness than the first. Now suppose that a roving is put between the first pair of rollers. The immediate effect is merely to press it together into a more compact form. But the roving has but just passed through the first pair of rollers, when it is received between the second pair; and as the rollers of the second pair revolve with greater velocity than those of the first, they draw the roving forwards with greater rapidity than it is given out by the first pair. Consequently, the roving will be lengthened in passing from one pair to the other; and the fibres of which it is composed will be drawn out and laid lengthwise side by side. The increase of length will be exactly in proportion to the increased velocity of the second pair of rollers.

Two or more rovings are generally united in this operation. Thus, suppose that two rovings are introduced together between the first pair of rollers, and that the second pair of rollers moves with twice the velocity of the first. The new roving thus formed by the union of the two will then be of exactly twice the length of either of the original ones. It will therefore contain exactly the same quantity of cotton per yard. But its parts will be very differently arranged, and its fibres will be drawn out longitudinally, and will be thus much better fitted for forming a thread. This operation of doubling and drawing is repeated as often as is found necessary, and the requisite degree of twist is given by a machine similar to the spindle and fly of the common flax-wheel.

The spinning-mule, invented by Samuel Crompton, carried the mechanism of the cotton-factory many steps in advance. Long after Crompton, came the self-acting mule. It is a carriage some twenty or thirty feet long, travelling to and fro, and drawing out the most delicate threads through hundreds of spindles, whirling at a rate which scarcely permits the eye to trace their motion. Mr. Whitworth says,—"So great are the improvements effected in spinning machinery, that one man can attend to a mule containing 1088 spindles, each spinning 3 hanks, or 3264 hanks in the aggregate per day. In Hindustan, where they still spin by hand, it would be extravagant to expect a spinner to accomplish one hank per day; so that in the United States [and in Great Britain also] we find the same amount of manual labour, by improved machinery, doing more than 3000 times the work."

Of the rapidity with which some portions of the machinery operate, we may form an idea from the fact that the very finest thread which is used in making lace is passed through the strong flame of a lamp, which burns off the fibres without burning the thread itself. The velocity with which the thread moves is so great, that we cannot perceive any motion at all. The line of thread, passing off a wheel through the flame, looks as if were perfectly at rest; and it appears a miracle that it is not burnt.

The invention of Arkwright—the substitution of rollers for fingers—changed the commerce of the world. The machinery by which a man, or woman, or even child, could produce two hundred threads where one was produced before, caused a cheapness of production much greater than that of India, where human labour is scarcely worth anything. But the fabric of cotton was also infinitely improved by the machinery. The hand of the spinner was unequal to its operations. It sometimes produced a fine thread, and sometimes a coarse one; and therefore the quality of the cloth could not be relied upon. The yarn which is spun by machinery is sorted with the greatest exactness, and numbered according to its quality. This circumstance alone, which could only result from machinery, has a direct tendency to diminish the cost of production. Machinery not only adds to human power, and economizes human time, but it works up the most common materials into articles of value, and equalizes the use of valuable materials. Thus, in linen of which the thread is spun by the hand, a thick thread and a thin thread will be found side by side; and, therefore, not only is material wasted, but the fabric is less durable, because it wears unequally.

These circumstances—the diminished cost of cotton goods, and the added value to the quality—have rendered it impossible for the cheap labour of India to come into the market against the machinery of Europe. The trade in Indian cotton goods is gone for ever. Not even the caprices of fashion can have an excuse for purchasing the dearer commodity. We make it cheaper, and we make it better. The trade in cotton, as it exists in the present day, is the great triumph of human ingenuity. We bring the raw material from the country of the people who grow it, on the other side of our globe; we manufacture it by our machines into articles which we used to buy from them ready-made; and taking back those articles to their own markets, encumbered with the cost of transport for fourteen thousand miles, we sell the cotton to these very people cheaper than they can produce it themselves, and they buy it therefore with eagerness.

Nearly twenty years after Arkwright had begun to spin by machinery, that is in 1786, the price of a particular sort of cotton-yarn much used in the manufacture of calico was thirty-eight shillings a pound. That same yarn in 1832 was two shillings and eleven pence a pound. In 1814 the selling price of a piece of calico distinguished by the trade as 72-7/8 was twenty-eight shillings; in 1844 it was six shillings and nine pence. It is probably less at this day. If cotton goods were worn only by the few rich, as they were worn in ancient times, and even in the latter half of the last century, that difference of price would not be a great object; but the price is a very important object when every man, woman, and child in the United Kingdom has to pay it. Calico is four times as cheap as it was forty years ago. There are no very certain data for the produce of our looms, for, happily, no tax exists upon the great necessaries of life which they produce. But it has been calculated that the home consumption of cotton cloth is equal to twenty-six yards for every individual of the population; and taking the total number at twenty-seven millions, the quantity required would be seven hundred million yards. At five pence a yard, the seven hundred million yards of cloth amount to above fourteen million pounds sterling. At half-a-crown a yard, which we will take as the average price about forty years ago, they would amount to eighty-four millions of pounds sterling. At twelve or fourteen times the present price, or six shillings a yard, which proportion we get by knowing the price of yarn seventy years ago and at the present day, the cost of seven hundred million yards of cotton cloth would be one hundred and seventy-five millions of pounds sterling. It is perfectly clear that no such sum of money could be paid for cotton goods, and that in fact, instead of between fourteen and fifteen millions being spent in this article of clothing by persons of all classes, in consequence of the cheapness of the commodity, we should go back to very nearly the same consumption that existed before Arkwright's invention, that is, to the consumption of the year 1750, when the whole amount of the cotton manufacture of the kingdom did not exceed the annual value of two hundred thousand pounds. At that rate of value, the quantity of cloth manufactured could not have been equal to one five-hundredth 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 women upon the welfare of a community can never be too highly estimated.

That the manufacture of cotton by machinery has produced one of the great results for which machinery is to be desired, namely, cheapness of production, cannot, we think, be doubted. If increased employment of human labour has gone along with that cheapness of production, even the most prejudiced can have no doubt of the advantages of this machinery to all classes of the community.

At the time that Arkwright commenced his machinery, a man named Hargreave, who had set up a less perfect invention, was driven out of Lancashire, at the peril of his life, by a combination of the old spinners by the wheel. In 1789, when the spinning machinery was introduced into Normandy, the hand-spinners there also destroyed the mills, and put down the manufacture for a time. Lancashire and Normandy are now, in England and France, the great seats of the cotton manufacture. The people of Lancashire and Normandy had not formerly the means, as we have now, of knowing that cheap production produces increased employment. There were many examples of this principle formerly to be found in arts and manufactures; but the people were badly educated upon such subjects, principally because studious and inquiring men had thought such matters beneath their attention. We live in times more favourable for these researches. The people of Lancashire and Normandy, at the period we mention, being ignorant of what would conduce to their real welfare, put down the machines. In both countries they were a very small portion of the community that attempted such an illegal act. The weavers were interested in getting cotton yarn cheap, so the combination was opposed to their interests; and the spinners were chiefly old women and girls, very few in number, and of little influence. Yet they and their friends, both in England and France, made a violent clamour; and but for the protection of the laws, the manufactories in each country would never have been set up. What was the effect upon the condition of this very population? M. Say, in his 'Complete Course of Political Economy,' states, upon the authority of an English manufacturer of fifty years' experience, that, in ten years after the introduction of the machines, the people employed in the trade, spinners and weavers, were more than forty times as many as when the spinning was done by hand. The spinning machinery of Lancashire alone now produces as much yarn as would require more than the entire population of the United Kingdom to produce with the distaff and spindle. This immense power might be supposed to have superseded human labour altogether in the production of cotton yarn. It did no such thing. It gave a now direction to the labour that was formerly employed at the distaff and spindle; but it increased the quantity of labour altogether employed in the manufacture of cotton, at least a hundred fold. It increased it too where an increase of labour was most desirable. It gave constant, easy, and not unpleasant occupation to women and children. In all the departments of cotton spinning, and in many of those of weaving by the power-loom, women and children are employed. There are degrees, of course, in the agreeable nature of the employment, particularly as to its being more or less cleanly. But there are extensive apartments in large cotton-factories, where great numbers of females are daily engaged in processes which would not soil the nicest fingers, dressed with the greatest neatness, and clothed in materials (as all women are now clothed) that were set apart for the highest in the land a century ago. And yet there are some who regret that the aged crones no longer sit in the cottage chimney, earning a few pence daily by their rude industry at the wheel!

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 sends us fifty times the amount of raw cotton that he sent when the machinery was first set up. 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 gathering for us fifty times as much cotton as he gathered before, and making fifty times as much indigo for us to colour it with.

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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 hand-loom 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 to 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."[22] This answer was decisive. The hand-loom weavers 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 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 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 we should have been foolish enough to reject. Thirty years ago America 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 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 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 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 diminished the price of clothing.

[22] See p. 107.