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.
[Illustration: Cotton; showing a pod bursting.]
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."
[Illustration: Distaff.]
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.
[Illustration: A Hindoo woman spinning Cotton.]
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.
[Illustration: Sir Richard Arkwright.]
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.
[Illustration: Arkwright's original spinning-machine.]
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."
[Illustration: Samuel Crompton, inventor of the spinning-mule.]
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.
[Illustration: Cotton Mule-spinning.]
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!
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: Power-looms.]
[Illustration: 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 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.
[Illustration: 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--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.