"Then have they nether-stocks to these hosen, not of cloth (though never so fine), for that is thought too base, but of jarnsey, worsted, crewell, silk, thread, and such like, or else at the least of the finest yarn that can be got, and so curiously knit with open seam down the leg, with quirks and clocks about the ancles, and sometime, haply, interlaced with gold or silver threads, as is wonderful to behold. And to such impudent insolency and shameful outrage it is now grown, that every one, almost, though otherwise very poor, having scarce forty shillings of wages by the year, will not stick to have two or three pair of these silk nether-stocks, or else of the finest yarn that may be got, though the price of them be a ryall, or twenty shillings, or more, as commonly it is; for how can they be less, when as the very knitting of them is worth a noble or a ryall, and some much more? The time hath been when one might have clothed his body well for less than a pair of these nether-stocks will cost."
It is difficult to understand how those who had only forty shillings a year wages could expend twenty shillings upon a pair of knit stockings. It is quite clear they were for the rich only; and that very few persons were employed in knitting and embroidering stockings.
William Lee struggled to make stockings cheap. He made a pair of stockings by the frame, in the presence of King James I.; but such was the prejudice of those times, that he could get no encouragement for his invention. His invention was discountenanced, upon the plea that it would deprive the industrious poor of their subsistence. He went to France, where he met with no better success, and died at last of a broken heart. The great then could discountenance an invention, because its application was limited to themselves. They only wore stockings: the poor who made them had none to wear. Stockings were not cheap enough for the poor to wear, and therefore they went without. Of the millions of people now in this country, how few are without stockings! What a miserable exception to the comfort of the rest of the English people does it appear when we see a beggar in the streets without stockings! We consider such a person to be in the lowest stage of want and suffering. Two centuries ago, not one person in a thousand wore stockings;—one century ago, not one person in five hundred wore them;—now, not one person in a thousand is without them. Who made this great change in the condition of the people of England, and, indeed, of the people of almost all civilized countries? William Lee—who died at Paris of a broken heart. And why did he die of grief and penury? Because the people of his own days were too ignorant to accept the blessings he had prepared for them.
We ask with confidence, had the terror of the stocking-frame any real foundation? Were any people thrown out of employment by the stocking-frame?
"The knitters in the sun, And the free maids who weave their thread with bones,"
as Shakspere describes the country lasses of his day, had to change their employment; but there was far more employment for the makers of stockings, for then every one began to wear stockings.
The hosiery manufacture furnishes employment to many persons besides those who work at the stocking-machine. The frame-worker, in many cases, makes the knit-work in a piece adapted for a stocking, and does not make a finished stocking; the seamer makes the stocking out of the piece so produced. When we speak of the stocking-frame, we speak of a machine which knits every article of hosiery. In this manufacture there were employed, in 1851, sixty-five thousand five hundred persons, of whom thirty thousand were females.
Suppose that the ignorance and prejudice which prevailed at the time of James I. upon the subject of machinery had continued to the present day; and that not only the first stocking-frame of William Lee had never been used, but that all machines employed in the manufacture of hosiery had never been thought of; and they could not have been thought of if the first machines had been put down. The greater number of us, in that case, would have been without stockings.
But there would have been a greater evil than even this. We might all have found substitutes for stockings, or have gone without them. But the progress of ingenuity would have been stopped. The inventive principle would have been destroyed.
We have not reached the end of our career of improvement. Civilization is not destined to run a backward race. William Lee's stocking-frame worked well for two centuries and a half. One of the most beautiful contrivances of our time has now greatly superseded it. The circular hosiery machine—more properly called a machine for manufacturing "looped fabrics"—works at such a rate that one girl attending upon the revolutions of this wonderful instrument can produce in one day the material for two hundred and forty pairs of stockings. She turns a little handle, with the ease with which she would turn a barrel-organ; and, as the machine revolves, hundreds of needles catch the thread and loop it into the chain which forms the stocking-cloth, or it makes the fashioned stocking. The new hosiery-machines have doubled the employment of the stocking-makers, by enabling us to meet the competition of foreign countries. The English were working upon the old slow stocking-frame, while the French and Belgians were using the rapid circular machine. The markets of the world would have been soon closed to us if we had clung to the old machine, through the force of any popular prejudice against a new machine. There is no portion of the export trade of this country which has increased with such extraordinary rapidity within the last six years as that of hosiery. The following abstract of the declared value of stockings exported since 1848 will sufficiently indicate the effects of improved machinery in cheapening production:—