1 8 Si'r miliam Crawford on 



Ulster. The average-sized flax mill might contain 20,000 spindles, 

 and a mill of that kind would give employment to about 750 persons 

 It would take about ;^i 20,000 or ;^i 60,000 to erect a mill of that 

 size The workers were employed in the proportion of two or three 

 females to one male. A few children of both sexes were engaged 

 as learners, and were known as half-timers. About jQi^ were 

 spent in turning j^roo worth of flax into yarn, another ^^75 in 

 turning that yarn into brown linen, and about ^^50 in turning that 

 brown linen into the goods readv for the market. Thus on ;^ioo 

 worth of flax about ;^2oo was spent, chiefly in wages, and the 

 finished product was worth ;^3oo. The flax used in Irish mills 

 was the produce chiefly of four countries — Ireland, Belgium, 

 Holland, and Russia. The business had come through a great 

 many fluctuations of fortune. Sometimes it had been proverbially 

 profitable and much oftener it had been quite the contrary. A 

 transformation took place from hand spinning to mill spinning. In 

 weaving they had a similar transformation. Ireland began about 

 1850, after England and Scotland, to use the power-loom for linen 

 weaving, and in this also it had outstripped them. There were in 

 Ireland 36,000 power-looms, owned by 100 companies ; 21,000 of 

 these looms were working in Belfast, 13,000 in other parts of Ulster, 

 and 2,000 scattered in small factories in Dublin, Cork, Dundalk, 

 and Drogheda. As compared with 36,000 power looms in Ireland, 

 Scotland had 17,000 and England 4,400 using linen yarn. Eight 

 weaving factories in Belfast and eight in other parts of Ireland were 

 attached to spinning mills, but that system was not growing ; the 

 growth of extension had been in factories separate from mills. 



A power-loom factory for the weaving of light and narrow linens 

 would cost ;!^4o or ^^50 a loom, and a factory for making wide 

 damask or sheetings would cost ;^ioo and up to ;^2oo a loom 

 Wages were paid by piecework, and the same scale applied to men 

 and women. The number of all persons employed in and about 

 a weaving factory was somewhere about as many as the looms 

 it contained. During the handloom period different classes 



