Irish Linen and some Features of its Production. 17 



there were restrictions. For instance, Acts of Parliament prescribed 

 the width and length of e-ich quality, and that linens could not be 

 bought and re-sold in the same market or day, nor exposed for sale 

 if stained. Parliament also established a board of trustees of the 

 linen manufacturers of Ireland to look after the carrying out of 

 these laws, and inspectors were appointed by the Board, one or two 

 in each county. It so happened that the more honest the people 

 became the less need was there for an in'=pector. One of them in 

 County Down reported that in 18 16 he travelled 1,654 Irish miles 

 — one-third of the distance on foot — and received four penalties, 

 jQi6 OS 6d. making his income ;^55 os 6d. The bounties con- 

 tinued the lecturer, began to diminish from 5th January, 1825, and 

 were entirely withdrawn in 1829. About the year 1830 a great 

 transformation in flax spinning took place in Ireland. In the year 

 1828 Messrs. Mulholland's cotton mill was burned to the ground. 

 They at once decided to rebuild it as a flax spinning mill. That 

 mill started work in 1830 in Henry Street, Belfast, and part of the 

 buildings still contained the offices of the York Street Flax Spinning 

 Company, Ltd. About the same time Messrs. Murland of Castle- 

 wellan, also began flax spinning by steam-driven machinery. 

 Messrs. Hind and others in Belfast followed, and by 1850 there 

 were in Ireland 396,000 spindles producing linen yarn Although 

 Ireland, as compared with England and Scotland, was last to begin 

 the change from hand-spinning, not many years elapsed ere it was 

 abreast of those countries. In 1856 England attained its maximum 

 production with 441,000 spindles. Since that time its spindles 

 had decreased, until now the linen trade there seemed to be near 

 the vanishing-point with less than 50,000 spindles. Scotland 

 reached its maximum in 1871 with 317,000 spindles ; now it had 

 160,000, while Ireland's share had increased by a larger number 

 than the other two countries had lost. Ireland had in 1874, 906,000 

 spindles in operation. In 1888 it had 803,000, and now it had 

 946,000, belonging to some fifty different companies, seventeen of 

 them in Belfast, one in Cork, and the others scattered throughout 



