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 labor 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. 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, and encumbered also with the taxes which the State has laid upon it in many various ways, we sell it to these very people cheaper than they can produce it themselves, and they buy it therefore with eagerness.

I

CHAPTER X.

Ir is just possible that some of you will say it matters not to us, the working men of England, whether the people of India sell us raw cotton or piece goods; or whether the trade in cotton amounts to one million a year or thirty-six millions. You may want to know how you individually, whether laborers or mechanics, are benefited by these changes, which look so large in figures. We will endeavor to tell you how you are benefited.

Of the cotton cloth made in England, three hundred and sixty million yards are exported, and three hundred and ninety-nine million yards are retained for home consumption. This was the state of the trade upon an average of years from 1824 to 1828. You are, doubtless, benefited very greatly, though indirectly, by the cotton cloth and the cotton yarn which goes out of the country. The difference in the value between the raw cotton and the cotton yarn or cloth, is the price of your industry, and of the profits of capital which sets your industry in motion. At that price you buy foreign produce, by which purchase you bring many articles of necessity and luxury within your reach. But this, you say, is a doubtful good. The good is not doubtful; but the objects which produce the good are spread over a large surface. We shall confine your attention therefore to one object.

Nearly twenty years after Arkwright had begun to spin by machinery, 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 is now sold for between three and four shillings, or one-twelfth of its price forty years ago. 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. The four hundred million yards of cloth which are annually retained for home consumption, distributed amongst twenty-five millions of population, allows sixteen yards every year for each individual. We will suppose that no individual would buy these sixteen yards of cloth unless he or she wanted them; that this plenty of cloth is a desirable thing; that it is conducive to warmth and cleanliness, and therefore to health; that it would be a great privation to go without the cloth. At six-pence a yard, the four hundred million yards of cloth amount to ten million pounds sterling. At half-a-crown a yard, which we will take as the average price about five-and-twenty years ago, they would amount to fifty millions of pounds sterling-an amount equal to all the taxes annually paid in Great Britain and Ireland. At twelve times the present price, or six shillings a yard, which proportion we get by knowing

the price of yarn forty years ago and at the present day, the cost of four hundred million yards of cotton cloth would be one hundred and twenty 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 ten 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 Ark. wright'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. So that thirty-one people each now consume sixteen yards of cotton cloth, where one person, eighty years ago, consumed one yard. We ask you, therefore, if this vast difference in the comforts of every family, by the ability which they now possess of easily acquiring warm and healthful clothing, is not a clear gain to all society, and to every one of you as a portion of society? It is more especially a gain to the females and the children of your 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 labor 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 Hargrave, 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,