COTTON MANUFACTURE. 181 



The importance of the British cotton manufacture is wholly con- 

 sequent on the mechanical ingenuity that has been applied to it. 

 Nature gave the manufacture to the heated Indian :* art has trans- 

 planted it to the temperate climate of Europe. That labour which 

 is performed by the Indian with a delicacy of manipulation wholly 

 unattainable by Europeans is here performed by automata which 

 merely require human guidance and supervision ; and this labour 

 they perform too on such a scale as to throw all the skill and 

 manual dexterity of a manufacturing population twenty times that of 

 ours quite into the shade. A century ago our clothing manufac- 

 turers were complaining of the injury caused to their trade by the 

 importation of Indian fabrics, and the same fear almost entirely shut 

 them out of the continental markets. But how great is the change 

 when we are at present able to send back to the country of its growth 

 manufactured cotton at a lower price and of better texture than the 

 native can make it, and in such quantities also as to induce the native 

 weavers to petition the Privy Council to take off the duties on their 

 own silk and cotton goods, so that they may again compete with us 

 in the market from which our own low prices had obliged them to 

 retire ! Well then may England be called the second birth-place of 

 the cotton manufacture ! 



The art of spinning and weaving cotton spread from India east- 

 ward to China, and westward to Persia and Syria ; but it lingered 

 for more than fifteen centuries on the western coasts of Asia before it 

 was introduced into Europe. We were at length indebted for its in- 

 troduction to the Moorish conquerors of Spain, who brought it, along 

 with other eastern accomplishments, to that country in the tenth cen- 

 tury. The Spaniards, three centuries afterwards, were celebrated 

 all over Europe for their fustaneros, or fustians. The Venetians, the 

 great purveyors of the middle ages, and the pioneers of modern ci- 

 vilization, introduced cotton into Italy in the fourteenth century, and 

 through them its use as a textile material became to a certain extent 

 known to the inhabitants of the western side of the European conti- 

 nent. Among Englishmen, however, the manufacture of cotton does 

 not seem to have been practised earlier than the beginning of the se- 

 venteenth century, from which period till the middle of the 

 eighteenth cotton was used as a textile material in connection with y or 

 rather as an auxiliary to, linen; for by the common spinning-wheel 

 in England no yarn could be made sufficiently tough to serve as warp- 

 thread. The weft only was of cotton, the warp was made of linen; 



* " The cause of the early perfection which the muslin manufacture attained in India 

 must be sought for in the exquisitely fine organization of the natives of that region. 

 Their temperament realizes every feature of that described under the- title nervous by 

 modern physiologists. A marked excess of sensibility in the ordinary transactions of 

 life : delicate fibres, a soft and fine skin, pliant limbs and fingers, a pathetic look, a feeling 

 of anxiety attendant upon the play of the organs, lively sensations occasioned by very 

 slight causes, are the symptoms of this temperament : they all predominate in the Hin- 

 doo constitution, and so qualified for the delicate textile manufacture of cotton, that they 

 kept, as it were, a monopoly of it for several thousand years." Dr. Ure on the Cotton 

 Manufacture* From this work, as well as from Mr. Baines's and Mr. Guest's excel- 

 lent histories of the art, the author of these observations has borrowed, without reserve, 

 when it has suited his purpose, 



M.M. No, 2. O 



