COTTON FABRICS. 



W. E. WATT, A.M. 



IT is a remarkable thing in the his- 

 tory of the United States that, 

 when the iron shackles were about 

 to fall from the bondman, he was 

 caught by a cotton fiber and held for 

 nearly a century longer. We were 

 about to emancipate the slaves a cen- 

 tury ago when Eli Whitney invented 

 the cotton gin, multiplied cotton pro- 

 duction by two hundred, and made 

 slavery profitable throughout the 

 South. The South Carolina legislature 

 gave Whitney ^50,000 and cotton be- 

 came king and controlled our com- 

 merce and politics. 



Eight bags of cotton went out of 

 Charleston for Liverpool in 1784. 

 Now about six million bales go an- 

 nually, and we keep three million bales 

 for our own use. So two-thirds of our 

 cotton goes to England. The cotton 

 we ship sells for more than all our 

 flour. Cotton is still king. 



In our civil war we came very near 

 being thrown into conflict with 

 England by an entanglement of the 

 same fiber which caught the black man. 

 One of the greatest industries of 

 England in 1861-5 was cotton manu- 

 facture, and when we, by our blockade 

 system, closed the southern ports so 

 cotton could not be carried out, we 

 nearly shut down all the works in that 

 country where cotton was made up. 

 That meant hard times to man}' towns 

 and suffering to many families. That 

 is why so many Englishmen said we 

 ought to be satisfied to cut our country 

 in two and let the people of the Con- 

 federacy have their way. 



Cotton is a world-wide product. It 

 grows in all warm countries every- 

 where, sometimes as a tree and some- 

 times as a shrub. It is usually spoken 

 of as a plant. There was cotton grown 

 in Chicago last year. Not in a hot 

 house, but in a back yard with very 

 little attention. A little girl got some 

 seed, planted it, and had some fine 

 bolls in the fall. It is a pretty plant, 

 and was cultivated in China nearly a 

 thousand years ago as a garden plant. 



Herodotus tells us that the clothing 



worn by the men in Xerxes' army was 

 made of cotton. Their cotton goods 

 attracted wide attention wherever they 

 marched. Columbus found the natives 

 of the West Indies clothed in cotton. 

 Cotton goods is not only wide spread, 

 but very ancient. Cloth was made 

 from this plant in China twenty-one 

 hundred years ago. At the coronation 

 of the emperor, 502 A.D., the robe of 

 state which he wore was made of cot- 

 ton, and all China wondered at the 

 glory of his apparel. 



More capital is used and more labor 

 employed in the manufacture and dis- 

 tribution of cotton than of any other 

 manufactured product. There is one 

 industry in Chicago which out-ranks 

 cotton. It is the live-stock business. 

 More money is spent for meat and 

 live-stock products than for cotton, 

 taking the whole country together. 

 But cotton ranks first as a manufacture. 



We spend more for meat than for 

 cotton goods, and more for cotton 

 goods than for wheat and flour. The 

 hog and cotton seed have a peculiar 

 commercial relation to each other. 

 The oils produced from them are so. 

 nearly alike that lard makers use cot- 

 ton seed oil to cheapen their output. 

 A large part of what is sold as pure 

 leaf lard comes from the cotton plant. 



A hundred years ago a good spinner 

 used to make four miles of thread in a 

 day. This was cut into eight skeins. 

 Now one man can do the work of a 

 thousand spinners because of machin- 

 ery. One gin does to-day what it took 

 a thousand workers to do then. Five 

 men are employed in the running of 

 one gin, so the gin alone makes one 

 man equal to two hundred. Because one 

 workman cleans two hundred times as 

 much cotton since Whitney's time as 

 before, cotton-raising has become a 

 broad industry. The reason more cot- 

 ton was not raised in the olden times 

 is that it could not be used. Now we 

 can use as much cotton as we can pos- 

 sibly raise. 



At first there was strong opposition 

 to these improvements in machinery 



