When a boy who keeps silk-worms upon mulberry leaves, puts a spinning-worm into a little paper bag, and finally obtains an oval ball of silk,—he does, upon a small scale, what is done in the silk-growing countries upon a large scale. When he winds off his cocoon of silk upon a little reel, he is engaged in the first process of silk making. There must be myriads of silk-worms reared to produce the seven million pounds of raw silk that Great Britain manufactures. The school-boy, from three or four silk-worms, can obtain a little skein of silk, which he carefully puts between the leaves of a book, and looks at it again and again, in delight at its glossy beauty. Perhaps he does not take the trouble to think how many such skeins would be required to produce a pair of silk stockings. As the school-boy puts his skein into a book, so the silk-producers of India, Italy, Persia, and Turkey, send us their hanks of silk, which we call by various names, made up as shown in the opposite page. In Egypt, a silk-producing country, a woman has a simple machine for preparing the hanks of silk for the purposes ofcommerce. She winds the silk upon a reel. She has no moving power but that of her hand and arm. In England a woman also attends to a winding-machine, by which the silk is transferred to bobbins, for the purpose of being spun to various degrees of fineness. She has no labour to perform, beyond providing a supply of material to be wound, removing a bobbin when it is filled, placing an empty one in its place, and occasionally piecing a broken thread. She is doing what the machine cannot do—adjusting her operations to many varying circumstances. The machine is moved by the steam-engine; but the steam-engine, the reels, and the bobbins would work unavailingly, without the guidance of the mind that waits upon and watches them.
Silk winding-machine.
The peculiarity in the manufacture of silk-twist, or thread, as distinguished from that of cotton, or flax, or wool, is that it is produced naturally in one uninterrupted length. The object of the machinery of a silk-mill is, not to combine short fibres in a continuous thread by spinning, but to wind and twist, so as to unite many slight threads already formed into one thread of sufficient strength for the purpose of weaving, or of sewing. The subsequent processes are the same as with the fibrous substances. The machinery by which these processes are carried on has been improved, by successive degrees, since Thomas Lombe erected the first silk-mill at Derby, in the beginning of the 18th century. He obtained a patent which expired in 1732; and parliament, refusing to renew his patent, granted him a compensation, upon the condition that he should deposit an exact model of his machinery in the Tower of London. That model was shown to the visitors of the Tower in the present century; and, by comparison with the vast array of spindles in a modern silk-mill, would seem as inefficient as the flail compared with the thrashing-machine.
Ribbon-weaving is a branch of the silk manufacture, in which our country is rapidly attaining an excellence as regards beauty of design, which may fairly compete with the best productions of the French looms.
Thomas Firmin, a philanthropic writer, who published 'Proposals for the Employment of the Poor,' in 1681, says, "It is a thing greatly to be wished that we could make linen cloth here as cheap as they send it us from abroad." He thought the poor might then be employed; but he despairingly adds, "if that cannot be done, nor any other way found out to employ our poor people, we had much better lose something by the labour of our poor, than lose all their labour;" and so he proposes to give those who were idle flax and hemp to spin in spacious workhouses. The notion was a benevolent one; and it was the favourite scheme, for half a century, to destroy idleness and beggary in England, by setting up manufactories at the public cost. Defoe saw the fallacy of the principle, and resisted it with his strong common sense: "Suppose now a workhouse for the employment of poor children sets them to spinning of worsted. For every skein of worsted these poor children spin, there must be a skein the less spun by some poor person or family that spun it before." Defoe saw that there could be no profitable increase of labour without increase of consumption; and he argues that if the Czar of Muscovy would order his people to wear stockings, and we could supply them, the poor might then be set to work. The increase of consumption, all over the world, is produced by the inventions which diminish the cost of production. We now make linen cloth here cheaper than it is sent to us from abroad; and the result is that in 1853 we exported our linen manufactures to the extent of six million pounds sterling; and employed a hundred thousand persons in the manufacture. In the flax-mill of Messrs. Marshall, at Leeds, where all the operations of spinning are carried on in one enormous room, five times as large as Westminster-hall, seventy thousand lbs. of flax are worked up weekly into yarn. The question of flax-cultivation in these kingdoms has been agitated of late years; and the course of political events has rendered the consideration of an increased home supply, a matter of pressing importance. It is not an easy matter to provide for the demand. The great flax-mill at Leeds would require the flax-cultivation of six thousand acres, to keep its spindles at work for one year.
