Fabrics composed wholly of cotton do not appear to have been made in Lancashire before the time of George II., Bolton leading the way with cotton velvets about 1756. The cotton weft was spun by the people in their own cottages, chiefly by the women, literally the "spinsters" of the family, representative eighteen centuries afterwards, of the good housewife of the Æneid and of the still older one in the Book of Proverbs, though as the years rolled on so greatly did the demand increase that every child had work of one kind or another. Thus began "infant labour," afterwards so much abused. The employment of children over thirteen in the modern factory is quite a different thing. Placed under legal restrictions, it is a blessing alike to themselves and to their parents, since if not there, the children now earning their bread would be idling, and probably in mischief. Those, it has been well said, who have to live by labour should early be trained to labour. Diligent as they were, the spinsters could not produce weft fast enough for the weavers. Sitting at their looms, which were also in the cottages, thoughtful men pondered the possibilities of quicker methods. Presently the dream took shape, and from the successive inventions of Whyatt, Kay, Highs, and Hargreaves, emerged the famous "spinning-jenny,"[16] a machine which did as much work in the same time as a dozen pair of hands. Abreast of it came the warping-mill, the carding-engine, and the roving-frame: the latter particularly opportune, since the difficulty had always been to disentangle the fibres of the cotton prior to twisting, and to lay them exactly parallel. Arkwright now came on the scene. He himself never invented anything; but he had marvellous powers of combination, such as enabled him to assimilate all that was good in the ideas of other men, and to give them unity and new vitality. The result was machinery that gave exquisite evenness and attenuation to the "rovings," and a patent having been granted 15th July 1769, Arkwright is properly regarded as the founder of the modern modes of manufacture. Arkwright possessed, in addition, a thoroughly feminine capacity for good management and perseverance, with that most excellent adjunct, the art of obtaining ascendancy over capitalists. Among the immediate results were the disuse of linen warp, the new frames enabling cotton warp to be made strong enough; and the concentration of all the early processes, spinning included, in special buildings, with employment of horse or water-power. The weaving, however, long remained with the cottagers, and survives to a slight extent even to the present day. The Lancashire cotton manufacture, strictly so called, is thus very little more than a century old. No further back than in 1774, fabrics made wholly of cotton were declared by statute to have been "lately introduced," and a "lawful and laudable manufacture."
THE DINNER HOUR
The following year, 1775, saw the perfecting of Crompton's celebrated "mule," which produced, at less expense, a much finer and softer yarn than Arkwright's machine. It was specially suitable for muslins; and from this date most assuredly should be reckoned the elevation of the manufacture to its highest platform. Like the jenny, it was used at first in private houses, but a nobler application was close at hand—a new revolution—the superseding of hand, and horse, and water power, all at one moment, by steam. Had the former remained the only artificial sources of help—even supposing rivers and brooks not subject to negation by drought, the cotton manufacture must needs have been confined within narrow limits, and the greatest conceivable supply of the raw material would not have altered the case. Steam, which, like Lord Chatham, "tramples upon impossibilities," at once gave absolute freedom; and manufacturing, in the space of thirty years, eclipsed its history during 3000. The "mule" was now transferred to the mill, and the factory system became complete. Power-looms were first employed in Manchester in 1806. Stockport followed, and by degrees they became general, improvements going on up till as late as 1830, when the crowning triumph of cotton machinery was patented as the "self-acting mule." The pride of Lancashire, it must be remembered, consists, after all, not in the delicacy and the beauty of its cottons, for in these respects India has not yet been out-run; but in the rapidity, the cheapness, and the boundless potentialities of the manufacture, which enable it to meet, if called upon, the requirements of every nation in the world. While any human creature remains imperfectly clad, Lancashire still has its work to do. To be entrusted with this great business is a privilege, and in the honourable execution consists its true and essential glory. "Over-production," while any are naked, is a phrase without meaning. That which wants correcting is deficient absorption.
PAY-DAY IN A COTTON MILL
Reviewing the whole matter, the specially interesting point—rendered so through inciting to profoundest reflection—is that those poor and unlettered men—Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, and the others—were the instruments, under Providence (for such things do not happen fortuitously), by which the world became possessed of an entirely new industrial power, fraught with infinite capacities for promoting human welfare; and which, in its application, introduced quite new styles of thinking and reasoning, and gave new bias to the policy of a great nation. Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, had no prescience of what would come of their efforts. In no part of the transformation was there any precedent or example; it had neither lineage nor inheritance; it was anticipated in momentousness only by the inventions of Caxton and Gioia;[17] and if in our own day the electric telegraph and the telephone reveal natural laws scarcely distinguishable from those of miracle, it may still be questioned if these latter discoveries surpass in intrinsic value the three or four that gave life to the modern cotton manufacture.
The interior of a great cotton factory, when at work, presents a spectacle altogether unimaginable. The vast area of the rooms, or "flats," filled in every part with machinery, admits of no comparison with anything else in England, being found in the factory alone. A thousand great iron frames, exquisitely composite, and kept fastidiously clean, some by self-acting dusters, are in simultaneous movement, the arms of some rising and falling, while parts of others march in and out, and to and fro, giving perfect illustrations of order, reciprocal adaptation, and interdependence, and seeming not only alive, but conscious. Nothing is more striking, perhaps, than to watch the shuttles as they dart alternately right and left, every movement meaning an added thread to the beautiful offspring. The poets are supposed by some to concern themselves only with fiction. Men and women who write verses are poets only when they deal with truth, though presented in the garb of fable; and assuredly, for a poet's theme, there is nothing to excel a skilfully conducted human manufacture. Erasmus Darwin, it will be remembered, describes the whole series of processes in connection with cotton as observed by him in Arkwright's original factory upon the Derwent.
A common practice is to have the looms in a "shed" upon the surface of the ground. To be as near the earth as possible is a desire no less with the spinner, who, like the weaver, finds the lower atmospheric conditions much more favourable to his work than the upper. In any case, where the power-looms are, long lines of slender pillars support the roof, presenting an unbroken and almost endless perspective; and between the machinery and the ceiling, connected with the horizontal shafts which revolve just below it, are innumerable strong brown leather straps that quiver as they run their courses. According to the department we may be in, either threads or coils of cotton whiter than pearl, and of infinite number, give occupation to those thousand obedient and tireless slaves—not of the ring or the lamp, but of the mighty engine that invisibly is governing the whole; and in attendance are men and women, boys and girls, again beyond the counting. Their occupations are in no degree laborious: all the heavy work is done by the steam-engine; muscular power is not wanted so much as delicacy and readiness of hand and finger. Hence in the factory and the cotton-mill there is opportunity for those who are too weak for other vocations. Machinery in all cases has the merit of at once increasing the workman's wages and lessening his fatigue. The precision in the working of the machinery enforces upon those who attend to it a corresponding regularity of action. There is no re-twisting or re-weaving; everything, if done at all, must be done properly and at the proper moment. Apart from its being a place wherein to earn creditably the daily bread, if there be anything in the world which conduces pre-eminently to the acquisition of habits such as lie at the foundation of good morals,—order, care, cleanliness, punctuality, industry, early rising,—assuredly it is the wholesome discipline of the well-ordered cotton factory. Whatever may befall outside, there is nothing deleterious inside; the personal intercourse of the people employed is itself reduced to a minimum; if they corrupt one another, it is as people not in factories do. In the rooms and "sheds" devoted to weaving, the rattle of the machinery forbids even conversation, except when the voice is adjusted to it. In the quieter parts the girls show their contentedness not infrequently by singing—