Principles of Political Economy

by Arthur Latham Perry

Now, this broad association as between persons and nations, instead of detracting at all from the individuality and power of each, is the very thing that brings out the individuality and intensifies the power of each; because it is only thus that full scope is given to the exercise and development of each peculiar power whether of the individual or the nation. Hence the strong tendency everywhere visible in the world of commerce towards Specialties: the old single trades and vocations and professions are constantly breaking themselves up into parts, and each man is taking up that for which he is naturally best fitted and has specially trained himself, and all to the great advantage of individuality and personal power and progress. Mr. Carey is certainly right in his principle (much insisted on in all his books), that the degree of individuality depends on the degree of association, each advancing hand in hand with the other; and he is as certainly wrong in lacking confidence in the natural forces at work tending to the highest degree of association and consequently to the highest degree of individuality. These forces are immensely strong. Men come together as it were by instinct, being conscious of individual feebleness; personal interest is soon seen to follow the bent of social attraction; a just sense of personal dignity and importance in being a substantive part in the ongoings of society enormously strengthens the impulse to association and individuality; the progress of each and all in achievement and elevation still further knits the ties of union; and lastly, a strong feeling of social justice, of what is due to others as well as to one's self,—that every man has an inalienable right to his full opportunity and all that that implies, to buy and sell and get gain, to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. When motives and powers and potencies such as these, proven to be universal by broad and constant inductions, fail as economical forces to secure association and individuality, then it will be time to look around with Mr. Carey for some inferior and factitious force.

(b) Invention. This is the second main condition in the production of commodities; because production is processes, getting something ready to sell and selling it; and Nature stands ever ready with her free agencies to facilitate these processes, just so far as the inventive brain of man can contrive to unite the two. Invention is the marriage of a gratuitous force to an onerous process, and the fruit of that union is an easier way and multiplied utilities. There are some in every considerable community, and more in every community enlarged by the natural association but just now described, who have the knack of contrivance, who find their joy in finding a new power in Nature or some new application of an old power; were it not for unhindered association and free exchange, the individuality of these would be effectually repressed, and they would have to drudge for their daily bread; but the importance of inventors is well understood in every progressive community, and under advanced exchanges their livelihood is guaranteed by those who hope to profit by its results while their work is maturing; and Production rejoices and grows strong and throws out unnumbered hands to make instant use of the new power and the easier processes, in order to multiply commodities in number and variety.

As an illustration of all this, the reader will be interested in a brief account of the series of Inventions made in Great Britain during the last third of the eighteenth century, in consequence of which the Cotton Industry was established in that country in such preëminence as has to this day baffled the attempts of all other countries even to approximate it.

We catch our first glimpse of Cotton in the pages of Herodotus, who wrote more than 400 years B.C. in relation to India as follows: "There are trees, which grow wild there, the fruit whereof is a wool exceeding in beauty and goodness that of sheep. The natives make their clothes of this tree-wool." This passage is interesting, as showing that the first comparison of cotton with wool exhibited their resemblance in whiteness and in kinkiness, which latter quality enables them both to be spun into yarn; as showing also, that the Hindoos very early both spun and wove cotton, and then made it into clothes; and as showing lastly, the appropriateness of the original name given to cotton in Europe, namely, "tree-wool," a name by which the Germans still designate it (Baumwolle). If the extreme East furnishes the first notice of cotton, the extreme West follows it next in order. When the Spaniards discovered Central and Southern America in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, they reported that they found the Mexicans clothed in cotton cloth.

But wool was the staple of England. Parliament and people were jealous of cotton, lest it might prove a rival to wool, and actually prohibited the introduction of printed calicoes (so called from Calicut in India whence they were exported). The taste, however, for calicoes increased in spite of the prohibition, which was afterwards intermitted for a revenue duty on plain cotton, which was then rudely printed on blocks in London, Manchester, and elsewhere; but the prohibition of Parliament against wearing printed calicoes was first repealed in 1736. Fifteen years later the United Kingdom imported only 2,976,610 lbs. of raw cotton, and exported only £45,986 of cotton goods; in one century the import of cotton became 500 times larger than that, and the export of cottons 1300 times larger than that; and this prodigious result was due mainly to three or four inventions occurring within short times of each other, by means of which the free forces of nature took the place of the onerous efforts of men.

John Hargreaves, a poor weaver in the neighborhood of Blackburn in Lancashire, was returning home from a long walk, in which he had been purchasing a further supply of yarn for his own loom. Spinning at that time only admitted of one thread spun at a time by one pair of hands, one of which turned the wheel and thus made the single spindle rapidly revolve, and the other hand pulled gently upon the "roving" attached to the spindle and thus drew it out to the requisite tenuity twisted into yarn. The "carding," then effected by rude instruments called hand-cards, by means of which the fibres of the cotton were disentangled and straightened and laid parallel with each other; and the "roving," a process by which the short fleecy rolls stripped off the hand-cards were applied to the spindle and made into thick threads only slightly twisted, were the two preparatory operations for the spinning. All these operations were slow and clumsy, and the consequent expensiveness of the yarn formed a great obstacle to the establishment of the cotton manufacture in England. The improvements made in the loom of that period by Kay, father and son, had shortly before doubled the power of each weaver, and the spinners could not keep up in furnishing material to the weavers.

As Hargreaves entered his cottage from this excursion to get yarn to keep his loom agoing, his wife, Jenny, accidentally upset the spindle, which, as was her wont, she was diligently using. Her husband noticed that the spindle, which was now thrown into an upright position, continued to revolve just as when horizontal, and that the thread was still spinning in his wife's hands. The idea immediately occurred to him, that it might be possible to connect a considerable number of upright spindles with the revolutions of one wheel, and thus multiply the power of each spinster. "He contrived a frame in one part of which he placed eight rovings in a row, and in another part a row of eight spindles. The rovings, when extended to the spindles, passed between two horizontal bars of wood, forming a clasp which opened and shut somewhat like a parallel ruler. When pressed together this clasp held the threads fast; a certain portion of roving being extended from the spindles to the wooden clasp, the clasp was closed, and was then drawn along the horizontal frame to a considerable distance from the spindles, by which the threads were lengthened out and reduced to the proper tenuity; this was done with the spinner's left hand, and his right hand at the same time turned a wheel which caused the spindles to revolve rapidly, and thus the roving was spun into yarn. By returning the clasp to its first situation and letting down a piercer wire the yarn was wound upon the spindle."

The powers of Hargreaves' machine soon became known among his ignorant neighbors, notwithstanding his strenuous efforts to keep his admirable invention a secret, and these neighbors naturally enough concluded that a contrivance, which enabled one spinster to do the work of eight, would throw many people out of employment. A mob broke into his house and destroyed his machine. Hargreaves retired in disgust to Nottingham, where by means of the friendly assistance of one other person he was enabled to take out a patent for his invention, which he called in compliment to his industrious wife the "Spinning-Jenny." This invention gave a new impulse to the cotton manufacture, but had it been unaccompanied by other improvements, no purely cotton goods could have been made in England; because the yarn spun by the new jenny, like that previously spun by hand, was not fine enough nor hard enough to be used as warp, and linen or woollen threads had consequently to be employed for that purpose.

In the very year, however, in which John Hargreaves, the poor weaver, migrated to Nottingham, Richard Arkwright, a poor barber's assistant, took out a patent for his still more celebrated machine for spinning by rollers. In one respect Arkwright was much worse off than Hargreaves: the latter had a helpmate meet for him, the former had a wife who is said to have destroyed the models her husband had made and to have opposed him in every step of his career. But Arkwright was not deterred from his life pursuit by the poverty of his circumstances or the scandalous conduct of his wife. After many years of intense and opposed devotion to the possible application of a simple principle he had conceived in his mind, namely, that of spinning by means of rollers revolving at varying rates of rapidity, he succeeded in contriving and patenting his memorable machine, which, more than any other one invention, localized and concentrated in England the gigantic cotton-industry of the world. Arkwright's idea and achievement was to pass the coarse thread drawn out from the rovings over two pairs of rollers in succession, the first of which revolving slowly fined the thread down evenly and gradually, and then this thread was passed over a second pair of rollers turning with a high velocity and drawing out the line into any requisite tenuity. Thus a cotton thread was spun capable of being used as warp. Cotton cloth as such could now be manufactured in England.

From the circumstance that the mill, at which Arkwright's machinery was first erected, was driven by water power, the machine received the inappropriate name of the "water-frame"; and the thread spun on these rollers was commonly called the "water-twist." The old mode of carding the cotton by hand now furnished the "rovings" too slowly to meet the wants of the new spinning-jenny and the new water-frame; and these great inventions would consequently have proven comparatively useless, had not a more efficient and rapid process of carding the cotton superseded just at the right time the old system of hand-carding. Lewis Paul introduced revolving cylinders for carding the raw cotton into rovings preparatory to spinning, in partial imitation perhaps of Arkwright's principle of spinning the rovings by the rotatory motion of rollers. Paul's machine consisted "of a horizontal cylinder, covered in its whole circumference with parallel rows of cards with intervening spaces, and turned by a handle. Under the cylinder was a concave frame, lined internally with cards exactly fitting the lower half of the cylinder, so that when the handle was turned, the cards of the cylinder and of the concave frame worked against each other and carded the wool. The cardings were of course only of the length of the cylinder, but an ingenious apparatus was attached for making them into a perpetual carding. Each length was placed on a flat broad riband, which was extended between two short cylinders, and which wound upon one cylinder as it unwound from the other."