GOSSYPIUM 



ADULTERATION 



THE COTTON PLANT 



Little 



Encouragement 

 to Improve. 



Cotton Frauds 

 Act of 1863. 



Adulteration. 



Legislation 



deemed 



Undesirable. 



/. ADULTERATION AND DETERIORATION. Milburn (Or. Comm., 

 1813, 279-80) urged that it was impossible to be too attentive to the 

 shippirig of perfectly clean cotton. The adulteration and deterioration of 

 Indian cotton has thus engaged attention for fully a century. St. George 

 Tucker (to whom reference has been made above) wrote in 1830 a report 

 On the Supply of Cotton from British India (cf Reports on Cotton, 

 Silk, and Indigo published by the Company in 1836, 152-75) in order 

 to account for its depression in price and deterioration in quality. He 

 gives ten reasons. Royle (Cult, and Comm. of Cotton in Ind., 1851, 

 551) deals frequently and effectively with this question. " When the 

 cotton," he says, which the Native grows, " is intended for sale, the ryots 

 have little enough encouragement to bestow more care, either in growing 

 or in picking their cotton, for they usually get no better price for a good 

 and clean, than they do for an indifferent article." So again, " Indian 

 cotton is, however, from the shortness of staple, not well suited for all the 

 purposes of the English manufacturer ; but it is much more depreciated 

 than it need be from the dirty and adulterated state in which it is sent 

 to market." Mention has been made that (about the time of the great 

 cotton famine, 1861-5) notice was forcibly directed to India as a future 

 country of supply for England. An outcry was shortly after made against 

 the adulteration and mixing of inferior with superior grade staples. This 

 led to the passing of the Cotton Frauds Act (IX. of 1863, and the Amend- 

 ment of 1878, Act VII.). 



W. B. Wishart (Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce of Upper 

 India) published in 1891 a Note on the Adulteration of Cotton in which he 

 shows that the subject had agitated the minds of the cotton merchants of 

 India for many years. He points out that a report issued in 1845, for 

 example, gave details of the deterioration and decrease in outturn even then 

 observed. Wishart then remarks : " There is now no bona fide market for 

 our inferior cotton. Native hand-weavers cannot work it ; the Chinese 

 found out, some years ago, that it did not pay them to use it, and now our 

 Continental customers can and do buy an article that suits them equally 

 well at a proportionately lower price. There is, therefore, no outlet for 

 such cottons, and Native growers and buyers have naturally taken to 

 assisting each other by bulking the inferior and better stuff produced in 

 each district, the mixture constituting a quality just a little below that 

 which spinners want." 



In August 1891 a conference was held in the office of the Director of 

 Land Records and Agriculture, Poona, at which proposals were made with 

 a view to preserve and improve the quality of Indian cotton. In the same 

 year Sir E. M. James (at that time Commissioner in Sind) drew up a 

 Memorandum on Cotton. This was widely circulated by the Bombay 

 Government, and elicited many valuable opinions and reports. The 

 Chamber of Commerce of Bombay, for example, issued a very powerful 

 reply, dated November 11, which fully expressed the opinion ultimately 

 upheld by the Government, namely that while there was much need for 

 effort at improving the stock, penal legislation was undesirable. Ten 

 years later (Feb. 1901) the Hon. Mr. Bomanjee Petit (himself a prominent 

 mill owner) pressed on the attention, both of the Bombay Government and 

 the Mill Owners' Association, the serious consequences of the deterioration 

 of the Indian cotton staple. It has now actually come about that both 

 China and Japan have begun to produce coarse yarns of their own, and 



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