WOOL INDUSTRY. 199 



factures and fisheries in 1875 was $596,415,866; while those of 

 agriculture and mining were but $43,461,599. The prosperity of 

 the city of Boston is due to the fact that it is the centre of distri- 

 bution of the raw material and finished products of those manu- 

 factures. One of her own satirists first ironically called this city 

 the Hub, — a phrase sometimes amusingly applied by strangers as 

 an expression of her own conceit. But Boston, almost without 

 metaphor, might be called the hub — of a vast factory wheel. 



But our theme is the relations of but one branch of the textile 

 industry ; and the general facts first referred to have been intro- 

 duced only to give force to the first proposition which we make in 

 respect to wool manufacture. 



Pioneer of other Industries. The manufacture of wool is the 

 precursor of a general manufacture. The household fabrication of 

 wool having been in former times, in temperate climates, the most 

 extensively pursued of the household arts, the first advances from 

 the rudest instruments to the more complicated machines were 

 made in this industry, — such as the change from the distaff to the 

 spinning-wheel ; from the card to the heated iron comb of Bishop 

 Blaise ; from the fulling tub to the fulling machine moved by 

 water, — the first substitution of the mechanical forces of nature 

 for human muscles in the textile industry. In England, a protec- 

 tion of four centuries to the woollen industry had made her a 

 nation of spinners and weavers, of artisans subsidary to them. 

 Commerce and capital had become familiar with the profits of a 

 manufacturing industry ; and the cotton industries were the natu- 

 ral offshoots of the wool manufacture, and needed hardly more 

 than a hundred years to reach its present vast proportions. The 

 Edict of Nantes, at the close of the sixteenth century, which re- 

 stored to France the Protestants, who had acquired in the Low 

 Countries the arts of spinning, weaving, and dyeing woollens, 

 first planted the wool manufacture in France, out of which her 

 varied textile industry has grown. 



In this country, the woolen mill is shown to be everywhere the 

 pioneer of a diversified manufacture. As we have said elsewhere : 

 "Settlements are made in the beginning upon our watercourses. 

 Water power is first applied to the saw-mill ; then comes the grist- 

 mill ; then follows the woollen mill. In old times, it was the full- 

 ing-mill with its carding-raachine. The fulling-mill was, and the 

 woollen mill now is, to a matured industry, what the emigrant's 



