The invention of Arkwright—the substitution of rollers for fingers—changed the commerce of the world. The machinery by which a man, or woman, or even child, could produce two hundred threads where one was produced before, caused a cheapness of production much greater than that of India, where human labour is scarcely worth anything. But the fabric of cotton was also infinitely improved by the machinery. The hand of the spinner was unequal to its operations. It sometimes produced a fine thread, and sometimes a coarse one; and therefore the quality of the cloth could not be relied upon. The yarn which is spun by machinery is sorted with the greatest exactness, and numbered according to its quality. This circumstance alone, which could only result from machinery, has a direct tendency to diminish the cost of production. Machinery not only adds to human power, and economizes human time, but it works up the most common materials into articles of value, and equalizes the use of valuable materials. Thus, in linen of which the thread is spun by the hand, a thick thread and a thin thread will be found side by side; and, therefore, not only is material wasted, but the fabric is less durable, because it wears unequally.
These circumstances—the diminished cost of cotton goods, and the added value to the quality—have rendered it impossible for the cheap labour of India to come into the market against the machinery of Europe. The trade in Indian cotton goods is gone for ever. Not even the caprices of fashion can have an excuse for purchasing the dearer commodity. We make it cheaper, and we make it better. The trade in cotton, as it exists in the present day, is the great triumph of human ingenuity. We bring the raw material from the country of the people who grow it, on the other side of our globe; we manufacture it by our machines into articles which we used to buy from them ready-made; and taking back those articles to their own markets, encumbered with the cost of transport for fourteen thousand miles, we sell the cotton to these very people cheaper than they can produce it themselves, and they buy it therefore with eagerness.
Nearly twenty years after Arkwright had begun to spin by machinery, that is in 1786, the price of a particular sort of cotton-yarn much used in the manufacture of calico was thirty-eight shillings a pound. That same yarn in 1832 was two shillings and eleven pence a pound. In 1814 the selling price of a piece of calico distinguished by the trade as 72-7/8 was twenty-eight shillings; in 1844 it was six shillings and nine pence. It is probably less at this day. If cotton goods were worn only by the few rich, as they were worn in ancient times, and even in the latter half of the last century, that difference of price would not be a great object; but the price is a very important object when every man, woman, and child in the United Kingdom has to pay it. Calico is four times as cheap as it was forty years ago. There are no very certain data for the produce of our looms, for, happily, no tax exists upon the great necessaries of life which they produce. But it has been calculated that the home consumption of cotton cloth is equal to twenty-six yards for every individual of the population; and taking the total number at twenty-seven millions, the quantity required would be seven hundred million yards. At five pence a yard, the seven hundred million yards of cloth amount to above fourteen million pounds sterling. At half-a-crown a yard, which we will take as the average price about forty years ago, they would amount to eighty-four millions of pounds sterling. At twelve or fourteen times the present price, or six shillings a yard, which proportion we get by knowing the price of yarn seventy years ago and at the present day, the cost of seven hundred million yards of cotton cloth would be one hundred and seventy-five millions of pounds sterling. It is perfectly clear that no such sum of money could be paid for cotton goods, and that in fact, instead of between fourteen and fifteen millions being spent in this article of clothing by persons of all classes, in consequence of the cheapness of the commodity, we should go back to very nearly the same consumption that existed before Arkwright's invention, that is, to the consumption of the year 1750, when the whole amount of the cotton manufacture of the kingdom did not exceed the annual value of two hundred thousand pounds. At that rate of value, the quantity of cloth manufactured could not have been equal to one five-hundredth part of that which is now manufactured for home consumption. Where one person a century ago consumed one yard, the consumption per head has risen to about twenty-six yards. This vast difference in the comforts of every family, by the ability which they now possess of easily acquiring warm and healthful clothing, is a clear gain to all society, and to every one as a portion of society. It is more especially a gain to the females and the children of families, whose condition is always degraded when clothing is scanty. The power of procuring cheap clothing for themselves, and for their children, has a tendency to raise the condition of females more than any other addition to their stock of comfort. It cultivates habits of cleanliness and decency; and those are little acquainted with the human character who can doubt whether cleanliness and decency are not only great aids to virtue, but virtues themselves. John Wesley said that cleanliness was next to godliness. There is little self-respect amidst dirt and rags, and without self-respect there can be no foundation for those qualities which most contribute to the good of society. The power of procuring useful clothing at a cheap price has raised the condition of women amongst us, and the influence of the condition of women upon the welfare of a community can never be too highly estimated.
That the manufacture of cotton by machinery has produced one of the great results for which machinery is to be desired, namely, cheapness of production, cannot, we think, be doubted. If increased employment of human labour has gone along with that cheapness of production, even the most prejudiced can have no doubt of the advantages of this machinery to all classes of the community.
At the time that Arkwright commenced his machinery, a man named Hargreave, who had set up a less perfect invention, was driven out of Lancashire, at the peril of his life, by a combination of the old spinners by the wheel. In 1789, when the spinning machinery was introduced into Normandy, the hand-spinners there also destroyed the mills, and put down the manufacture for a time. Lancashire and Normandy are now, in England and France, the great seats of the cotton manufacture. The people of Lancashire and Normandy had not formerly the means, as we have now, of knowing that cheap production produces increased employment. There were many examples of this principle formerly to be found in arts and manufactures; but the people were badly educated upon such subjects, principally because studious and inquiring men had thought such matters beneath their attention. We live in times more favourable for these researches. The people of Lancashire and Normandy, at the period we mention, being ignorant of what would conduce to their real welfare, put down the machines. In both countries they were a very small portion of the community that attempted such an illegal act. The weavers were interested in getting cotton yarn cheap, so the combination was opposed to their interests; and the spinners were chiefly old women and girls, very few in number, and of little influence. Yet they and their friends, both in England and France, made a violent clamour; and but for the protection of the laws, the manufactories in each country would never have been set up. What was the effect upon the condition of this very population? M. Say, in his 'Complete Course of Political Economy,' states, upon the authority of an English manufacturer of fifty years' experience, that, in ten years after the introduction of the machines, the people employed in the trade, spinners and weavers, were more than forty times as many as when the spinning was done by hand. The spinning machinery of Lancashire alone now produces as much yarn as would require more than the entire population of the United Kingdom to produce with the distaff and spindle. This immense power might be supposed to have superseded human labour altogether in the production of cotton yarn. It did no such thing. It gave a now direction to the labour that was formerly employed at the distaff and spindle; but it increased the quantity of labour altogether employed in the manufacture of cotton, at least a hundred fold. It increased it too where an increase of labour was most desirable. It gave constant, easy, and not unpleasant occupation to women and children. In all the departments of cotton spinning, and in many of those of weaving by the power-loom, women and children are employed. There are degrees, of course, in the agreeable nature of the employment, particularly as to its being more or less cleanly. But there are extensive apartments in large cotton-factories, where great numbers of females are daily engaged in processes which would not soil the nicest fingers, dressed with the greatest neatness, and clothed in materials (as all women are now clothed) that were set apart for the highest in the land a century ago. And yet there are some who regret that the aged crones no longer sit in the cottage chimney, earning a few pence daily by their rude industry at the wheel!
Hindoo weaver at work in a field.
The creation of employment amongst ourselves by the cheapness of cotton goods produced by machinery, is not to be considered as a mere change from the labour of India to the labour of England. It is a creation of employment, operating just in the same manner as the machinery did for printing books. The Indian, it is true, no longer sends us his [calicoes] and his coloured stuffs; we make them ourselves. But he sends us fifty times the amount of raw cotton that he sent when the machinery was first set up. The workman on the banks of the Ganges is no longer weaving [calicoes] for us, in his loom of reeds under the shadow of a palm-tree; but he is gathering for us fifty times as much cotton as he gathered before, and making fifty times as much indigo for us to colour it with.