MONTHLY 



JOURNAL or AGRICULTURE. 



VOL. III. JUNE, 1848. WO. 12. 



ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF OUR COTTON MANUFACTURES. 



LIFE OF S. SLATER. 



If, as we maintain, the welfare of society plainly suggests that he most de- 

 serves the public esteem and the rewards of a free Government, whose genius 

 devises new and productive employments for labor, then should grateful testi- 

 monials be bestowed on such men as he whose life is briefly sketched in the 

 following pages. The trio of great men to whom our country is indebted for 

 countless millions of wealth, and very much of that development and growth 

 which is without parallel elsewhere in the world, may be said, as far as these 

 have resulted from manufacturing power, to consist of Eli Whitney, Cart- 

 wright, and Slater, the subject of the following notice. It gives us pleasure 

 to preserve memoirs of such men, as well from an impulse of unaffected grati- 

 tude, as because Ave deem them entertaining and suitable reading for the sons 

 of our friends in the country. And why not for their fathers ? says the reader. 

 Only because, for our life, we cannot divest ourselves of the idea, more than 

 half the time, that we are writing for young people. Why, we hardly know ; 

 but so it is. We deem our space very precious, and endeavor so to fill it with 

 useful things that we sometimes apprehend our pages may wear a sombre cast 

 that may be almost forbidding. We shall take room for no farther preface than 

 to ask the reader who here sees the rise and progress of the Cotton Manufacture 

 in the United States, beginning at so late a period, to bear in mind that, for the 

 number of spindles, the United States is already the third country in the world, 

 England being the first and France the second. Of the 27,585,000 spindles of 

 which we have accounts from all countries, England drives a 634-lOOOlh part ot 

 them ; the remainder of Europe 272-lOOOth parts, and the United States 

 91-lOOOths. In 1846 the net gain to the labor of England, on her Cotton Manu- 

 facture, was about $70,000,000. We were going to ask if the same weight of 

 Cotton were manufactured in this country, under free and easy associations of 

 small capitalists, as in INew-England, where the operative is often a stockholder 

 of the establishment in which he works, how much more of these net profits 

 would remain to the laborer, and how many of these seventy millions would be 

 divided among our own cultivators of butter, and cheese, and milk, and onions, 

 and apples, and potatoes, and beef, and mutton, and eggs, and chickens, and 

 cabbages 1 But we have not space here to push these reliectious. Yet, is it not 



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