Baines's History of the Cotton Manufacture.

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the solution of which may determine whether European civilisation shall advance in a course of peaceful and steady progression, or whether its onward march shall be arrested by the jealousy of a despotic government, and its path be crossed with blood.

The savage declarations of the Czar have been received with a hoarse murmur, which has borne into the recesses of his court the deep indignation he has excited in civilised Europe. Should those feelings, acting upon the constitutional governments of the West, produce a hostile collision, we believe the contest would terminate in a war of a few months, and that long before that short period elapsed, the Autocrat would be girdled by a belt of insurrectionary nations, from Poland to his Persian frontiers. Whether this collision will take place immediately or not may be doubted, but that the crisis is approaching, will not be questioned by any one who has observed the march of events. When it shall arrive, let it not find us asleep at our posts. Let us prepare for the coming struggle. In the words of a distinguished Polish officer, let our rallying word henceforth be," the union of civilised com"munities against the barbarous Muscovite*."

ARTICLE IV.

History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain; with a Notice of its early History in the East, and in all the quarters of the Globe; a Description of the great Mechanical Inventions which have caused its unexampled extension in Britain; and a View of the present State of the Manufacture, and the Condition of the Classes engaged in its several Departments. By EDWARD BAINES, Jun., Esq. London: 1835.

It is no new thing that countries should rise, by means of trade and manufactures, into great wealth and power; and thus acquire an ascendancy in the world, which the small extent of their territory and their natural disadvantages might

Speech of General Soltyk at the Polish Meeting in Paris, on the 29th November, 1835.

have seemed wholly to forbid. Civil and commercial freedom has furnished a genial soil for industry, even amidst bogs and lagunes, on rocky islands, and among the sands of the desert. Splendid fabrics of prosperity have been built upon narrow foundations; and their durability, no less than their magnificence, has excited the astonishment of mankind.

The commercial aggrandizement of England, has however, surpassed all precedent. Great as was the traffic of the Low Countries, and of the Italian republics, by sea and land, it was still on a scale far inferior to that of England in the present day. British commerce is literally universal-it is not confined to Europe and to a few colonies-it animates the industry of all countries-it crowds the ports and rivers of both hemispheres― it conveys the productions of British workshops to every nation, savage and civilised-and it brings back into the Thames, the Mersey, the Severn, the Clyde, and the Humber, the most valuable freights that ever crossed the ocean.

Increased wealth has of course given increased power to Great Britain. A war of twenty years against the most powerful confederacies, animated by the energy of a mastermind, exhibited the resources of this country beyond all the expectations either of friends or foes. The drain of money, occasioned by the subsidizing of so many governments, and the maintaining of so many armaments, naval and military, would have ruined any other country long before the close of the war. The effect upon England was no doubt severe, but it never amounted to exhaustion; on the contrary, industry flourished amidst the most trying efforts of the government. Though such prodigious draughts were made on the capital of the nation, enough remained to answer the demands of an extending trade and improving agriculture. Foreign trade enlarged in the face of the prohibitions of the whole European continent, and our goods forced their way through all the barriers that political and commercial hostility could raise against them. Since the peace, commerce has advanced with still accelerated speed. The great evil of a depreciated currency has been corrected; not indeed without ruin to many individuals, and extreme pressure to those who were under engagements made during the period of depreciation, but still without crippling any important interest. Manufactures have

gone on rapidly increasing; employing continually new hands, though their processes are continually improving, so that less labour is required to produce the same results; and at this very time, every branch of manufactures enjoys high prosperity. Our commerce has triumphed over the rivalry of peace, as it did over the proscriptions of war-it has gone on, widening and strengthening, in defiance of jealous tariff's and of the rapid progress of foreign manufactures. The means of employment and support keep pace with the increase of population; and the large manufacturing towns are not only giving employment to their own inhabitants, but also to numbers removed from the agricultural districts. The revenue is such as to satisfy the demands of the public creditor and the public service, after the reduction of many millions of taxation. And the nations of Europe have lately witnessed with astonishment a great operation of finance in Englandthe raising of twenty millions sterling, and the perfect ease with which that sum was furnished.

The rapid growth and robust constitution of British commerce, during the last half-century, evidently bespeak some new principle of commercial prosperity. What that principle is, may be conjectured from observing the peculiar nature of our commerce. It does not consist, like that of Holland and Venice, mainly in the interchange of commodities brought from many foreign countries; neither is it founded on the exportation of agricultural produce, like that of Russia, France, and the United States. England is indeed a great commercial entrepôt, especially for colonial produce; but her commerce is based almost wholly on her manufactures, with which she supplies all foreign markets, and by means of which she purchases the productions of every country. Out of 41,286,5944., the real or declared value of British produce and manufactures exported in the year 1834, only 1,470,7931. was the produce of our soil, mines, and fisheries (and that not entirely in the raw state), whilst the remaining 39,815,8017. consisted of the productions of our mills and workshops. Of the latter sum, no less than 20,492,5097., or upwards of onehalf, was made up by the varied productions of the cotton manufacture, 5,734,0177. by woollens, 2,501,292. by linens, and 1,484,6817. by hardware and cutlery.

When we take the largest item of this great aggregate of exports, that of the cotton manufactures, and find that, in the year 1780, the value of this branch of exports did not exceed 355,0601., or less than one fifty-seventh part of its present amount, we are led directly to the cause of the extraordinary increase in our trade, and to the subject of the volume which is placed at the head of this article.

It appears, then, that the cause of our extended trade and accumulated wealth is an internal cause,-not the adventures of our merchants in foreign lands-not the success of our navigators in carrying and interchanging the productions of other countries-but the industry of our manufacturers and artisans at home, aided by our natural advantages, producing goods which, by their excellence or their cheapness, command a decided preference in the markets of the world.

The commercial phenomenon of the rise of the British cotton manufacture is, as Mr. Baines observes, " unparalleled "in the annals of industry."

Sixty years since," says he, our manufacturers consumed little more than three million pounds of raw cotton annually; the annual consumption is now two hundred and eighty million pounds. In 1750, the county of Lancaster, the chief seat of the trade, had a population of only 297,400; in 1831, the number of its inhabitants had swelled to 1,336,854. A similar increase has taken place in Lanarkshire, the principal seat of the manufacture in Scotland. The families supported by this branch of industry, are estimated to comprise a million and a half of individuals; and the goods produced, not only furnish a large part of the clothing consumed in this kingdom, but supply nearly one-half of the immense export trade of Britain, find their way into all the markets of the world, and are even destroying in the Indian market the competition of the ancient manufacture of India itself, the native country of the raw material, and the earliest seat of the art."-(Preface.)

The advantages of England as a seat of manufactures, had been proved by the prosperity of the woollen manufacture, which has flourished for five centuries in this island; but the progress of that branch of industry had been gradual, and it affords no parallel, either in its rise or in its extent, to the almost magical growth of the manufacture of cotton. This latter trade has itself existed in England more than two centuries, but its progress was comparatively insignificant till after the year 1770. What cause, then, gave it so extraordinary an impulse, and raised it in a few years to be the largest manufacture ever known? The spring of this great movement

was mechanical invention, rendered peculiarly efficacious by the natural advantages of the country for making and working machinery.

A brilliant series of inventions, constituting an era in the mechanical arts, effected suddenly a complete change in the modes of manufacturing, which had existed with little variation in all civilised countries from time immemorial. The revolution, which the new machines produced in manufactures, is compared by Mr. Baines to that which the art of printing produced in literature. The improvements were so great, and they followed each other so rapidly, that the mechanical genius of the last age is not unworthy to be compared with the literary genius of the age of Elizabeth. Notwithstanding the pertinacity with which manufacturers usually cling to the processes which habit has made easy, the old processes were in this case abandoned, almost without a struggle. The opposition of the scribes to the printing press was not more obviously hopeless, than that of the spinners with the one-thread wheel, to the introduction of the jenny, the water-frame, and the mule. Implements of classical antiquity were thrown aside as lumber, and the hundredhanded spinning machines were set up as fast as the mechanics could make them. Every branch of the manufacture produced, almost contemporaneously, improvements corresponding with those in the mode of spinning. All that had formerly been done, in minute and slow detail, with simple tools, was now done by wholesale, with machines of astonishing efficacy, and moved by a new and gigantic power, that of steam. From the cleaning of the cotton-wool, after it is plucked, and the separation of the seeds-a process formerly of much difficulty, -through all the operations of preparing and spinning it, and of weaving, bleaching, printing, and finishing the cloth, every one of the numerous stages through which the material passes, witnessed remarkable improvements, which, in their combination, are absolutely wonderful. Centuries had passed with scarcely a single invention worthy of record: and now inventions which might have seemed sufficient for centuries were crowded into one generation.

The main, though by no means the only object of Mr.