Knowledge is Power Part 11

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 circ.u.mstances--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, enc.u.mbered 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 quant.i.ty 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 cla.s.ses, 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 quant.i.ty 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 G.o.dliness. 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 cla.s.ses 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, princ.i.p.ally 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 quant.i.ty 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!

[Ill.u.s.tration: Hindoo weaver at work in a field.]

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Power-looms.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Dr. Cartwright, inventor of the power-loom.]

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 bra.s.s 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 quant.i.ty of smuggled goods that a nation living under prohibitive laws can demand. Bonaparte, in the height of his power, pa.s.sed 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Flemish weaver. From a print of 1568.]

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--pa.s.ses 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 circ.u.mference 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.

CHAPTER XVII.

The woollen manufacture--Divisions of employment--Early history--Prohibitory laws--The Jacquard loom--Middle-age legislation--Sumptuary laws--The silk manufacture-- Ribbon-weaving--The linen manufacture--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 sh.o.r.es, made from the material brought from their own sh.o.r.es, 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 amongst us who only know that the wool grows upon the sheep's back, and that it is converted into a coat by labour and machinery. They do not estimate the prodigious power of thought--the patient labour--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 labour. Further, their knowledge of history may have been confined to learning by rote the dates when kings began to reign, with the names of the battles they fought or the rebels they executed. Of the progress of commerce and the arts they may have been taught little. The records of wool const.i.tute a real part of the history of England; and form, in our opinion, a subject of far more permanent importance than the scandalous annals of the wives of Henry VIII., or the mistresses of Charles II.

Let us first take a broad view of the more prominent facts that belong to our woollen manufacture; and then proceed to notice those of other textile fabrics.

The reader will remember that when the fur-traders refused to advance to John Tanner a supply of blankets for his winter consumption, he applied himself to make garments out of moose-skins. The skin was ready manufactured to his hands when he had killed and stripped the moose; but still the blanket brought from England across the Atlantic was to him a cheaper and a better article of clothing than the moose-skin which he had at hand; and he felt it a privation when the trader refused it to him upon the accustomed credit. It never occurred to him to think of manufacturing a blanket; although he was in some respects a manufacturer. He was a manufacturer of sugar, amongst the various trades which he followed. He used to travel about the country till he had found a grove of maple-trees; and here he would sit down for a month or two till he had extracted sugar from the maples. Why did he not attempt to make blankets? He had not that Acc.u.mulated Knowledge, and he did not work with that _Division of Labour_, which are essential to the manufacture of blankets--both of which principles are carried to their highest perfection when capital enables the manufacture of woollen cloth, or any other article, to be carried forward upon a large scale.

We will endeavour to trace what acc.u.mulations of skill, and what divisions of employment, were necessary to enable Tanner to clothe himself with a piece of woollen cloth. We shall not stop to inquire whether the skill has produced the division of employment, or the division of employment has produced the skill. It is sufficient for us to show, that the two principles are in joint operation, unitedly carrying forward the business of production in the most profitable manner. It is enough for us to know, that where there is no skill there is no division of employment, and where there is no division of employment there is no skill. Skill and division of employment are inseparably wedded. If they could be separated, they would in their separation cease to work profitably. They are kept together by the constant energy of capital, devising the most profitable direction for labour.

Before a blanket can be made, we must have the material for making a blanket. Tanner had not the material, because he was not a cultivator.

Before wool can be grown there must be, as we have shown, appropriation of land. When this appropriation takes place, the owner of the land either cultivates it himself, which is the earliest stage in the division of agricultural employment,--or he obtains a portion of the produce in the shape of corn or cattle, or in a money payment. Hence a tenantry. But the tenant, to manufacture wool at the greatest advantage, must possess capital, and carry forward the principle of the division of employment by hiring labourers. We use the word _manufacture_ of wool advisedly; for all farming processes are manufacturing processes, and invariably reduce themselves to change of form, as all commercial processes reduce themselves to change of place. If the capital of the farmer is sufficient to enable him to farm upon a large scale, he divides his labourers; and one becomes a shepherd, one a ploughman,--one sows the ground, and one washes and shears the sheep, more skilfully than another. If he has a considerable farm, he divides his land, also, upon the same principle, and has pasture, and arable, and rotation of crops. By these divisions he is enabled to manufacture wool cheaper than the farmer upon a small scale, who employs one man to do everything, and has not a proper proportion of pasture and arable, or a due rotation of crops. At every division of employment skill must be called forth in a higher perfection than when two or more employments were joined together; and the chief director of the skill, the capitalist himself, or farmer, must require more skill to make all the parts which compose his manufactury work together harmoniously.

But we have new divisions of employment to trace before the wool can be got to the manufacturer. These employments are created by what may be called the _local_ division of labour. It is convenient to rear the sheep upon the mountains of Wales, because there the short and thymy pastures are fitted for the growth of wool. It is convenient to manufacture the wool into cloth at Leeds, because coals are there at hand to give power to the steam-engines, with which the manufacture is carried on. The farmer in Wales, and the manufacturer of cloth at Leeds, must be brought into connection. In the infancy of commerce one or both of them would make a journey to establish this connection; but the cost of that journey would add to the cost of the wool, and therefore lessen the consumption of woollen cloth. The division of employment goes on to the creation of a wool-factor, or dealer in wool, who either purchases directly from the grower, or sells to the manufacturer for a commission from the grower. The grower, therefore, sends the wool direct to the factor, whose business it is to find out what manufacturer is in want of wool. If the factor did not exist, the manufacturer would have to find out, by a great deal of personal exertion, what farmer had wool to sell; or the farmer would have to find out, with the same exertion, what manufacturer wanted to buy wool. The factor receives a commission, which the seller and buyer ultimately unite in paying. They co-operate to establish a wool-factor, just as we all co-operate to establish a postman; and just as the postman, who delivers a number of letters to a great many individuals, does that service at little more cost to all, than each individual would pay for the delivery of a single letter, so does the wool-factor exchange the wool between the grower and the manufacturer, at little more cost to a large number of the growers who employ him, than each would be obliged to pay in expenses and loss of time to travel from Wales to Leeds to sell his wool.

We have, however, a great many more divisions of employment to follow out before the wool is conveyed from Wales to Leeds or Bradford. If the packs are taken on shipboard, and carried down the Mersey to Liverpool, we have all the variety of occupations, involving different degrees of skill, which make up the life of a mariner; if they go forward upon the railroad to Manchester, we have all the higher degrees of skill involved in their transport which belong to the business of an engineer; or if they finally reach their destination by ca.n.a.l, we have another division of labour that adjusts itself to the management of boats in ca.n.a.ls. But the ship, the railroad, the ca.n.a.l, which are created by the necessity of transporting commodities from place to place, have been formed after the most laborious exercise of the highest science, working with the greatest mechanical skill; and they exist only through the energy of prodigious acc.u.mulations of capital, the growth of centuries of patient and painful labour and economy.

We have at length the wool in a manufactury at Leeds or Bradford. The first cla.s.s of persons who prepare the wool, are the sorters and pickers. It is their business to separate the fine from the coa.r.s.e locks, so that each may be suited to different fabrics. There is judgment required, which could not exist without division of labour; and the business, too, must be done rapidly, or the cost of sorting and picking would outweigh the advantage. The second princ.i.p.al operation is scouring. Here the men are constantly employed in washing the wool, to free it from all impurities. It is evident that the same man could not profitably pa.s.s from the business of sorting to that of scouring, and back again,--from dry work to wet, and from wet to dry. When the wool is out of the hands of the scourers it comes into those of the dyers, who colour it with the various chemical agents applied to the manufacture.

The carders next receive it, who tear it with machines till it attains the requisite fineness. From the carders it pa.s.ses to the slubbers, who form it into tough loose threads; and thence to spinners, who make the threads finer and stronger. There are subdivisions of employment which are not essential for us to notice, to give an idea of the great division of employment, and the consequent acc.u.mulation of peculiar skill, required to prepare wool to be made into yarn, to be made into woollen cloth.

The next stages in the manufacture are the spinning, the warping, the sizing, and the weaving. These are all distinct operations, and are all carried forward with the most elaborate machinery, adapted to the division of labour which it enforces, and by which it is enforced.

But there is a great deal still to be done before the cloth is fit to be worn. The cloth, now woven, has to be scoured as the wool was. There is a subsequent process called burling, at which females are constantly employed. The boiling and milling come next, in which the cloth is again exposed to the action of water, and beaten so as to give it toughness and consistency. Dressers, called giggers, next take it in hand, who also work with machinery upon the wet cloth. It has then to be dried in houses where the temperature is sometimes as high as 130 degrees, and where the men work almost naked. It is evident that the boilers and dressers could not profitably work in the dry-houses: and that there must be division of employment to prevent those sudden transitions which would destroy the human frame much more quickly than a regular exposure to cold or heat, to damp or dryness. The cloth must be next cropped or cut upon the face, to remove the shreds of wool which deform the surface in every direction. When cut, it has to be brushed dry by machinery, to get out the croppings which remain in its texture. This done, it is dyed in the shape of cloth, as it was formerly dyed in the shape of wool.

Then come a variety of processes, to increase the delicacy of the fabric:--singeing, by pa.s.sing the cloth within a burning distance of red-hot cylinders; frizing, to raise a nap upon the cloth; glossing, by carrying over it heavy heated plates of iron; pressing, in which operation of the press red-hot plates are also employed; and drawing, in which men, with fine needles, draw up minute holes in the cloth when it has pa.s.sed through the last operation. Then comes the packing; and after all these processes it must be bought by a wholesale dealer, and again by a retailer, before it reaches the consumer. Between the growth of the fleece of wool, and the completion of a coat by a skilful tailor,--who, it is affirmed, puts five-and-twenty thousand st.i.tches into it,--what an infinite division of employments! what inventions of science! what exercises of ingenuity! what unwearied application! what painful, and too often unhealthy labour! And yet if men are to be clothed well and cheaply, all these manifold processes are not in vain; and the individual injury in some branches of the employ is not to be compared to the suffering that would ensue if cloth were not made at all, or if it were made at such a cost that the most wealthy only could afford to wear it. But for the acc.u.mulation of knowledge, and the division of employments, engaged in the manufacture of cloth, and set in operation by large capital, we should each be obliged to be contented with a blanket such as John Tanner desired, and very few indeed would even obtain that blanket: for if skill and division of labour were, not to go on in one branch, they would not go on in another, and then we should have nothing to give in exchange for the blanket. The individual injury to health, also, produced by the division of labour, is not so great, upon the average, as if there were no division. All the returns of human life in this country show an extremely little difference in the effect upon life, even of what we consider the most unhealthy trades; and this proceeds from that extraordinary power of the human body to adapt itself to a habit, however apparently injurious, which is one of the most beautiful evidences of the compensating principle which prevails throughout the moral world.

The wool manufacture of Great Britain employs very nearly three hundred thousand persons; in the various processes connected with the production of cloth, worsted, flannel, blankets, and carpets. What a contrast to all this variety of labour is the history of the earlier stages of the manufacture of woollen cloth. It is unnecessary to go back to the time of Henry III., when the production of wool was in such an imperfect state through flocks of sheep being scattered over immense tracts of waste land, that a manor in Surrey was held under the crown by the tenure of gathering wool for the Queen. According to the record, Peter de Baldewyn was to gather the wool from the thorns that had torn it from the sheep's back; and if he did not choose to gather it he was to forfeit twenty shillings.[23] In the time of Edward III., according to Fuller, in his 'Church History,' the English clothiers were wholly unskilful; "knowing no more what to do with their wool than the sheep which wear it, as to any artificial and curious drapery, their best cloth being no better than frieze, such their coa.r.s.eness for want of skill in the making." When the Flemish clothiers came into England, the manufacture improved; in spite of the regulating power of the state, which was perpetually interfering with material, quality, and wages. In time wool became the chief commodity of England. The woolsack of the House of Lords was typical of this staple industry; and of the mode also in which the majesty of legislation sat heavy upon the produce. To encourage the manufacture nothing was to be woven but wool. From the cradle to the grave all were to be wrapt in wool. The genius of prohibition prevented the exchange of wool with other manufactured commodities; and, therefore, to keep up rents, Narcissa was "odious in woollen," and a Holland shirt--for British linen did not exist--was a rare commodity, cheap at "eight shillings an ell," as in the days of Dame Quickly.

This was the state of things at the end of the 17th century, and somewhat later. The manufacturers clamoured against the exportation of wool; and the agriculturists at the same time resisted the importation of Irish and Scotch cattle. The parliament listened to both sets of clamourers. It said to the people:--You of trade shall not be ruined by the land selling wool to foreigners--there shall be no compet.i.tion; you shall buy the wool at the lowest price. And then parliament turned round to the complaining grazier, and said,--the cloth-maker and his men shall not ruin you by buying meat cheap--no Irish cattle or Scotch sheep shall come here to lower your prices. From 1664 to 1824 the exportation of wool was strictly prohibited. The importation was sometimes prevented by high duties--sometimes encouraged by low. The manufacture was constantly struggling with these attempts of the state to hold a balance between what were so universally considered as conflicting interests. In 1844 the whole system was abandoned. In 1853, we imported one hundred and seventeen million lbs. of sheep and lamb's wool--of which three-fifths came from Australia--and two million of alpaca and llama wool. The wool-growers at home still found a ready market; the great body of the population had good coats and flannels and blankets; and, in addition, we exported ten million pounds sterling of woollen manufactures.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Jacquard Power-looms: Stuff-manufacture.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Mechanism of power-loom.]

The employment of wool in the manufacture of broadcloth and flannel was, a few years ago, almost the entire business of the woollen factories.

The novel uses to which wool is now applied, and the almost innumerable varieties of articles of clothing which are produced from long wool and short wool--from combinations of alpaca wool and coa.r.s.e wool, of wool with cotton, of wool with silk--together with the introduction of brilliant dyes and tasteful designs, formerly unknown--have established vast seats of manufacture which are almost peculiar to our country, and have converted, in a few years, humble villages into great cities. The finest Paisley shawls rival the elaborate handicraft of Hindustan; and, what is of more importance, the humblest female may purchase a tasteful article of dress at a price which a few years ago would have been thought fabulous. The wonderful variety of patterns which we see in these and other productions of modern skill are effected by the Jacquard apparatus, in which the pattern depends upon the disposition of holes pierced in separate bits of pasteboard. In common weaving, the weft threads pa.s.s alternately under and over the entire warp threads, which are lifted up to allow the weft in the shuttle to traverse from one side to the other. The Jacquard apparatus determines, by the number and arrangement of the holes in the cards, which of the separate warp threads shall be so lifted; for at every throw of the shuttle the blank part of each card moves a series of levers which raise certain warp threads; while other levers, pa.s.sing into the holes in the card, do not affect the other warp threads. In this way, patterns of the greatest complexity are woven in cotton, and worsted, and silk; so that even a minute work of art, such as a portrait or a landscape, may be produced from the loom. Every pattern requires a separate set of cards. We do not expect this brief notice to be readily understood. Those who would comprehend the extent of ingenuity involved in the principle of this invention, and the beautiful results of which it is capable, should witness its operation in a Halifax power-loom. In a bobbin-net machine the cards are connected with a revolving pentagonal bar, each side of which is pierced with holes, corresponding with the pins or levers above. When a card comes over the topmost side of the pentagon the levers drop; but those pins only which enter through the holes in the card affect the pattern which is being worked. Any one who views this complicated arrangement in a Nottingham lace-machine, requires no small amount of attention to comprehend its mysterious movements; and when the connection is perceived between that chain of dropping cards, and the flower that is being worked in the lace, a vague sense of the manifold power of invention comes over the mind--we had almost said an awful sense.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Jacquard cards.]

If there be one thing more remarkable than another in the visible condition of the people of Great Britain, it is the universality of useful, elegant, and cheap clothing. There is very small distinction in the ordinary coat and trowsers of the peer and the best dress of the artisan; and not a great deal more in the gown and shawl of the high-born lady and those of the handmaid of her toilet. Perhaps the absence of mere finery, and the taste which is an accompaniment of superior education, const.i.tute the chief difference in the dress of various ranks. This feature of the present times is a part of our social history.

For several centuries the domestic trade of the country was hemmed round and fettered by laws against extravagance in dress, which had always been a favourite subject for the experimentalizing of barbarous legislation. An act of 1463, recites that the Commons pray their lord the king to remember that in the times of his n.o.ble progenitors, ordinances and statutes were made for the apparel and array of the commons, as well of men as of women, so that none of them should use or wear any inordinate or excessive apparel, but only according to their degrees. However, we find that all these ordinances had been utterly fruitless. The parliament makes new ordinances. The n.o.bles, according to these, may wear whatever they please; knights and their wives were to wear no cloth of gold, or fur of sables; no person under the state of a lord to wear any purple silk; no esquires or gentlemen and their wives any silk at all; no persons not having possessions of the yearly value of forty pounds, any fur; and, what is cruel indeed, no widow but such as hath possessions of the value of forty pounds, shall wear any fur, any gold or silver girdle, or any kerchief that had cost more than three shillings and four-pence; persons not having forty shillings a-year were denied the enjoyment of fustian and scarlet cloth; the yeoman was to have no stuffing in his doublet; nor servants in husbandry, broadcloth of a higher price than two shillings a yard. The length of gowns, jackets, and cloaks, was prescribed by the same statute; and the unhappy tailor who exceeded the length by the breadth of his nail, was to be mulcted in the same penalties as those who flaunted in skirts of more than needful longitude. The men and women of the mystery and workmanship of silk prefer their piteous complaint to parliament, that silk-work ready wrought is brought into the realm. If it had occurred to them to pet.i.tion that the gentlemen and their wives might be permitted to wear satin, as well as the lords, their piteous complaint of want of occupation might have been more easily redressed than by foreign prohibition. Sumptuary laws have long been abolished; but to them succeeded the laws of custom, which prescribed one sort of dress to one condition of people, and another to another. We cannot doubt which state gives most employment to manufacturers, the law of exclusiveness or the law of universality. If the labourer and artificer were still restricted, by enactment or by custom, to the wearing of cloth of a certain price per yard, we may be quite sure that the manufacture of the finer cloths would be in no flourishing condition; and if the servant-maid could not put on her Sunday gown of silk, we may be equally clear that the silk-trade would continue to be the small thing that it was half a century ago, when it had the full benefit of restriction, instead of being, as it is now, one of the great staple trades of the country.

When the frame-work knitters of silk stockings pet.i.tioned Oliver Cromwell for a charter, they said, "the Englishman buys silk of the stranger for twenty marks, and sells him the same again for one hundred pounds." The higher pride of the present day is that we buy seven million pounds of raw silk from the stranger, employ a hundred and fourteen thousand of our own people in the manufacture of it by the aid of machinery, and sell it to the stranger, and our own people, at a price as low as that of the calico of half a century ago. In 1853 the exports of silk manufactures, including those of silk mixed with other materials, silk-yarn and silk-twist, amounted to the enormous sum of two millions sterling, having doubled since 1849. In 1826, when the ruin of our silk-trade was boldly prophesied as the sure result of the reduction of the prohibitive duties on foreign silk, the exports of our silk manufactures did not reach two hundred thousand pounds. William Huskisson, the great statesman who produced this mighty change, was then denounced in parliament as "an insensible and hard-hearted metaphysician."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Hanks of silk. _a_, Bengal; _b_, Italian; _c_, Persian; _d_, Broussa.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Egyptian winding-reel.]

When a boy who keeps silk-worms upon mulberry leaves, puts a spinning-worm into a little paper bag, and finally obtains an oval ball of silk,--he does, upon a small scale, what is done in the silk-growing countries upon a large scale. When he winds off his coc.o.o.n of silk upon a little reel, he is engaged in the first process of silk making. There must be myriads of silk-worms reared to produce the seven million pounds of raw silk that Great Britain manufactures. The school-boy, from three or four silk-worms, can obtain a little skein of silk, which he carefully puts between the leaves of a book, and looks at it again and again, in delight at its glossy beauty. Perhaps he does not take the trouble to think how many such skeins would be required to produce a pair of silk stockings. As the school-boy puts his skein into a book, so the silk-producers of India, Italy, Persia, and Turkey, send us their hanks of silk, which we call by various names, made up as shown in the opposite page. In Egypt, a silk-producing country, a woman has a simple machine for preparing the hanks of silk for the purposes of commerce.

She winds the silk upon a reel. She has no moving power but that of her hand and arm. In England a woman also attends to a winding-machine, by which the silk is transferred to bobbins, for the purpose of being spun to various degrees of fineness. She has no labour to perform, beyond providing a supply of material to be wound, removing a bobbin when it is filled, placing an empty one in its place, and occasionally piecing a broken thread. She is doing what the machine cannot do--adjusting her operations to many varying circ.u.mstances. The machine is moved by the steam-engine; but the steam-engine, the reels, and the bobbins would work unavailingly, without the guidance of the mind that waits upon and watches them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Silk winding-machine.]

The peculiarity in the manufacture of silk-twist, or thread, as distinguished from that of cotton, or flax, or wool, is that it is produced naturally in one uninterrupted length. The object of the machinery of a silk-mill is, not to combine short fibres in a continuous thread by spinning, but to wind and twist, so as to unite many slight threads already formed into one thread of sufficient strength for the purpose of weaving, or of sewing. The subsequent processes are the same as with the fibrous substances. The machinery by which these processes are carried on has been improved, by successive degrees, since Thomas Lombe erected the first silk-mill at Derby, in the beginning of the 18th century. He obtained a patent which expired in 1732; and parliament, refusing to renew his patent, granted him a compensation, upon the condition that he should deposit an exact model of his machinery in the Tower of London. That model was shown to the visitors of the Tower in the present century; and, by comparison with the vast array of spindles in a modern silk-mill, would seem as inefficient as the flail compared with the thrashing-machine.

Ribbon-weaving is a branch of the silk manufacture, in which our country is rapidly attaining an excellence as regards beauty of design, which may fairly compete with the best productions of the French looms.

Thomas Firmin, a philanthropic writer, who published 'Proposals for the Employment of the Poor,' in 1681, says, "It is a thing greatly to be wished that we could make linen cloth here as cheap as they send it us from abroad." He thought the poor might then be employed; but he despairingly adds, "if that cannot be done, nor any other way found out to employ our poor people, we had much better lose something by the labour of our poor, than lose all their labour;" and so he proposes to give those who were idle flax and hemp to spin in s.p.a.cious workhouses.

The notion was a benevolent one; and it was the favourite scheme, for half a century, to destroy idleness and beggary in England, by setting up manufactories at the public cost. Defoe saw the fallacy of the principle, and resisted it with his strong common sense: "Suppose now a workhouse for the employment of poor children sets them to spinning of worsted. For every skein of worsted these poor children spin, there must be a skein the less spun by some poor person or family that spun it before." Defoe saw that there could be no profitable increase of labour without increase of consumption; and he argues that if the Czar of Muscovy would order his people to wear stockings, and we could supply them, the poor might then be set to work. The increase of consumption, all over the world, is produced by the inventions which diminish the cost of production. We now make linen cloth here cheaper than it is sent to us from abroad; and the result is that in 1853 we exported our linen manufactures to the extent of six million pounds sterling; and employed a hundred thousand persons in the manufacture. In the flax-mill of Messrs. Marshall, at Leeds, where all the operations of spinning are carried on in one enormous room, five times as large as Westminster-hall, seventy thousand lbs. of flax are worked up weekly into yarn. The question of flax-cultivation in these kingdoms has been agitated of late years; and the course of political events has rendered the consideration of an increased home supply, a matter of pressing importance. It is not an easy matter to provide for the demand. The great flax-mill at Leeds would require the flax-cultivation of six thousand acres, to keep its spindles at work for one year.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Interior of Marshall's Flax-Mill, Leeds.]