Cotton; showing a pod bursting.
The people of the East, amongst whom a certain degree of civilization has existed from high antiquity, were not only the growers of many productions which were unsuited to the climate and soil of Europe, but they were the manufacturers also. Cotton, for instance, was cultivated from time immemorial in Hindustan, in China, in Persia, and in Egypt. Cotton was a material easily grown and collected; and the patient industry of the people by whom it was cultivated, their simple habits, and their few wants, enabled them to send into Europe their manufactured stuffs of a fine and durable quality, under every disadvantage of land-carriage, even from the time of the ancient Greeks. Before the discovery, however, of the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope, cotton goods in Europe were articles of great price and luxury. M. Say well observes that, although cotton stuffs were cheaper than silk (which was formerly sold for its weight in gold), they were still articles which could only be purchased by the most opulent; and that, if a Grecian lady could awake from her sleep of two thousand years, her astonishment would be unbounded to see a simple country girl clothed with a gown of printed cotton, a muslin kerchief, and a coloured shawl.
When India was open to the ships of Europe, the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the English sold cotton goods in every market, in considerable quantities. These stuffs bore their Indian names of calicoes and muslins; and, whether bleached or dyed, were equally valued as amongst the most useful and ornamental articles of European dress.
In the seventeenth century France began to manufacture into stuffs the raw cotton imported from India, as Italy had done a century before. A cruel act of despotism drove the best French workmen, who were Protestants, into England, and we learned the manufacture. The same act of despotism, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, caused the settlement of silk-manufacturers in Spitalfields. We did not make any considerable progress in the art, nor did we use the material of cotton exclusively in making up the goods. The warp, or longitudinal threads of the cloth, were of flax, the weft only was of cotton; for we could not twist it hard enough by hand to serve both purposes. This weft was spun entirely by hand with a distaff and spindle—the same process in which the women of England had been engaged for centuries; and which we see represented in ancient drawings. Our manufacture, in spite of all these disadvantages, continued to increase; so that about 1760, although there were fifty thousand spindles at work in Lancashire alone, the weaver found the greatest difficulty in procuring a sufficient supply of thread. Neither weaving nor spinning was then carried on in large factories. They were domestic occupations. The women of a family worked at the distaff or the hand-wheel, and there were two operations necessary in this department; roving, or coarse spinning, reduced the carded cotton to the thickness of a quill, and the spinner afterwards drew out and twisted the roving into weft fine enough for the weaver. The spinsters of England were carrying on the same operation as the spinsters of India. In the middle of the last century, according to Mr. Guest, a writer on the cotton-manufacture, very few weavers could procure weft enough to keep themselves constantly employed. "It was no uncommon thing," he says, "for a weaver to walk three or four miles in a morning, and call on five or six spinners, before he could collect weft to serve him for the remainder of the day; and when he wished to weave a piece in a shorter time than usual, a new ribbon or gown was necessary to quicken the exertions of the spinner."
Distaff.
That the manufacture should have flourished in England at all under these difficulties is honourable to the industry of our country; for the machinery used in weaving was also of the rudest sort, so that, if the web was more than three feet wide, the labour of two men was necessary to throw the shuttle. English cotton goods, of course, were very dear, and there was little variety in them. The cloth made of flax and cotton was called fustian; for which article Manchester was famous, as well as for laces. We still, received the calicoes and printed cottons from India.
