Part 13

Of course in this great mart a large variety of types is to be found and the members fall into some kind of rough grouping. Export buyers, attended by salesmen, are commonly more or less stationary and prominent; Burnley manufacturers abound in one locality and spinners of Egyptian yarns in another. The importance of the Exchange as a bargaining centre is fairly maintained, though buyers are assiduously cultivated in their own offices, and the telephone has done a good deal to abbreviate negotiation. As to the amount of business transacted on the Exchange there is no record. The market reporters make some attempt to materialize the current gossip, and doubtless catch well enough the great movements in the ebb and flow of demand, but the sum of countless obscure transactions cannot be estimated. Some few years ago an attempt was made to mark more clearly the course of business in Manchester, and a scheme was prepared for the recording of daily transactions. This could only have been a somewhat rough affair, but its originator maintained reasonably that it would be of interest if some indication of the daily movements could be obtained. For some time a memorandum of the total of daily sales reported was posted on 'Change, but the indifference of traders, together with the distrust that makes any innovation difficult, caused the scheme to be abandoned.

It would be difficult in any attempt to estimate the volume of British home trade to distinguish what may be called the effective movements of goods. There is a considerable amount of re-selling both in yarn and cloth, and, though the bulk of cotton goods finds the way through regular and normal channels to the consumer, these channels are not always direct. A good many transactions on the Manchester Exchange are intermediate, without fulfilling any useful function, and could be accomplished by the principals if they were brought together. Agents, of whom there are many, sometimes occupy a precarious position, but they are protected in some degree by law as well as by the custom of the trade and the point of honour. Points of honour in the Manchester business may seem to be arbitrarily selected, but they are an important part of the scheme. An immense amount of business is done without any apparent check against repudiation. It is, of course, the verbal bargain that binds, and large transactions are commonly completed without witnesses, though before the contract or memorandum of sale passes the fluctuations of the market may have made the bargain, to one side or the other, a very bad one. (A. N. M.)

FOOTNOTES:

[1] It is related that in the year 1784 William Rathbone, an American merchant resident in Liverpool, received from one of his correspondents in the southern states a consignment of eight bags of cotton, which on its arrival in Liverpool was seized by the custom-house officers, on the allegation that it could not have been grown in the United States, and that it was liable to seizure under the Shipping Acts, as not being imported in a vessel belonging to the country of its growth. When afterwards released, it lay for many months unsold, in consequence of the spinners doubting whether it could be profitably worked up.

[2] Taken with some modifications from the _Agricultural News_ (1907), vi. p. 38.

[3] Cotton Production 1906, _U.S.A. Bureau of the Census_, Bulletin No. 76.

[4] _Cotton Culture and the Cotton Trade_, p. 298.

[5] _The Cotton Trade of Great Britain_, by Thomas Ellison, p. 186.

[6] See article on "Dealings in Futures in the Cotton Market," in the _Journal of the Royal Statistical Society_, vol. lxix, p. 325.

[7] Journal of the Statistical Society, 1906.

[8] See paper in the Journal of the Statistical Society for June 1906.

[9] Attempts to explain them were made in an article in the _Economic Journal_ in December 1904, and in the paper already referred to read to the Royal Statistical Society.

[10] See the paper already mentioned in the _Journal of the Royal Statistical Society_ for June 1906, where the several points noticed briefly above are fully discussed.

[11] The Association published a weekly paper known as The Cotton Supply Reporter.

COTTON MANUFACTURE. The antiquity of the cotton industry has hitherto proved unfathomable, as can readily be understood from the difficulty of proving a universal negative, especially from such scanty material as we possess of remote ages. That in the 5th century B.C. cotton fabrics were unknown or quite uncommon in Europe may be inferred from Herodotus' mention of the cotton clothing of the Indians. Ultimately the cotton industry was imported into Europe, and by the middle of the 13th century we find it flourishing in Spain. In the New World it would seem to have originated spontaneously, since on the discovery of America the wearing apparel in use included cotton fabrics. After the collapse of Spanish prosperity before the Moors in the 14th century the Netherlands assumed a leadership in this branch of the textile industries as they did also in other branches. It has been surmised that the cotton manufacture was carried from the Netherlands to England by refugees during the Spanish persecution of the second half of the 16th century; but no absolute proof of this statement has been forthcoming, and although workers in cotton may have been among the Flemish weavers who fled to England about that time, and some of whom are said to have settled in and about Manchester, it is quite conceivable that cotton fabrics were made on an insignificant scale in England years before, and there is some evidence to show that the industry was not noticeable till many years later. If England did derive her cotton manufacture from the Netherlands she was unwillingly compelled to repay the loan with interest more than two hundred years later when the machine industry was conveyed to the continent through the ingenuity of Lievin Bauwens, despite the precautions taken to preserve it for the British Isles. About the same time English colonists transported it to the United States. Since, as transformed in England, the cotton industry, particularly spinning, has spread throughout the civilized and semi-civilized world, though its most important seat still remains the land of its greatest development.

Early history in England.

As early as the 13th century cotton-wool was used in England for candle-wicks.[1] The importation of the cotton from the Levant in the 16th century is mentioned by Hakluyt,[2] and according to Macpherson it was brought over from Antwerp in 1560. Reference to the manufacture of cottons in England long before the second half of the 16th century are numerous, but the "cottons" spoken of were not cottons proper as Defoe would seem to have mistakenly imagined. Thus, for example, there is a passage by William Camden (writing in 1590) quoted below, in which Manchester cottons are specifically described as woollens, and there is a notice in the act of 33 Henry VIII. (c. xv.) of the Manchester linen and woollen industries, and of cottons--which are clearly woollens since their "dressyng and frisyng" is noted, and the latter process, which consists in raising and curling the nap, was not applicable to cotton textiles. John Leland, after his visit to Manchester about 1538, used these words--"Bolton-upon-Moore market standeth most by cottons; divers villages in the Moores about Bolton do make cottons." Leland, it is true, might conceivably be referring to manufactures from the vegetable fibre, but it is exceedingly unlikely, since the term "cottons" would seem to have been current with a perfectly definite meaning. The goods were probably an English imitation in wool of continental cotton fustians--which would explain the name. Again we may quote from the act of 5 and 6 Edward VI., "all the cottons called _Manchester_, Lancashire and Cheshire _cottons_, full wrought to the sale, shall be in length twenty-two yards and contain in breadth three-quarters of a yard in the water and shall weigh thirty pounds in the piece at least"; and from the

## act 8 Elizabeth c. xi., "every of the said cottons being sufficiently

milled or thicked, clean scoured, well-wrought and full-dried, shall weigh 21 lb. at the least."[3] These are evidently the weights of woollen goods: further, it may be observed that milling is not applicable to cotton goods. The earliest reference to a cotton manufacture in England which may reasonably be regarded as pointing to the fabrication of textiles from cotton proper, is in the will of James Billston (a not un-English name), who is described as a "cotton manufacturer," proved at Chester in 1578.[4] It may plausibly be contended that James Billston was a worker in the vegetable fibre, since otherwise "manufacturer of cottons" would have been a more natural designation. But the proof of the will of one cotton manufacturer establishes very little.

The next earliest known reference to the cotton industry proper occurs in a petition to the earl of Salisbury, made presumably in 1610, asking for the continuance of a grant for reforming frauds committed in the manufacture of "bambazine cotton such as groweth in the land of Persia being no kind of wool."[5] But a far more valuable piece of evidence, discovered by W. H. Price, is a petition of "Merchants and citizens of London that use buying and selling of fustians made in England, as of the makers of the same fustians."[6] Its probable date is 1621, and it contains the following important passages:--

"About twenty years past, divers people in this kingdom, but chiefly in the county of Lancaster, have found out the trade of making of other fustians, made of a kind of bombast or down, being a fruit of the earth growing upon little shrubs or bushes, brought into this kingdom by the Turkey merchants, from Smyrna, Cyprus, Acra and Sydon, but commonly called cotton wool; and also of linen yarn most part brought out of Scotland, and othersome made in England, and no part of the same fustians of any wool at all, for which said bombast and yarn imported, his majesty has a great yearly sum of money for the custom and subsidy thereof.

"There is at the least 40 thousand pieces of fustian of this kind yearly made in England, the subsidy to his majesty of the materials for making of every piece coming to between 8d. and 10d. the piece; and thousands of poor people set on working of these fustians.

"The right honourable duke of Lennox in 11 of Jacobus 1613 procured a patent from his majesty, of alnager of new draperies for 60 years, upon pretence that wool was converted into other sorts of commodities to the loss of customs and subsidies for wool transported beyond seas; and therein is inserted into his patent, searching and sealing; and subsidy for 80 several stuffs; and among the rest these fustians or other stuffs of this kind of cotton wool, and subsidy and a fee for the same, and forfeiture of 20s. for putting any to sale unsealed, the moiety of the same forfeiture to the said duke, and power thereby given to the duke or his deputies, to enter any man's house to search for any such stuffs, and seize them till the forfeiture be paid; and if any resist such search, to forfeit L10 and power thereby given to the lord treasurer or chancellor of the exchequer, to make new ordinances or grant commissions for the aid of the duke and his officers in execution of their office."

Here the date of the appearance of the cotton industry on an appreciable scale--it is questionable whether any importance should be attached to the expression "found out"--is given by those who would be speaking of facts within the memory of themselves or their friends as "about twenty years past" from 1621, and the annual output of the industry in 1621 is mentioned. Moreover, it is established by this document that for a time at least the cotton manufacture was "regulated" like the other textile trades. The date assigned by the petitioners for the first attraction of attention by the English cotton industry may be supported on negative grounds.

Baines assures us that William Camden, who wrote in 1590, devoted not a sentence to the cotton industry, though Manchester figures among his descriptions: "This town," he says, "excels the towns immediately around it in handsomeness, populousness, woollen manufacture, market place, church and college; but did much more excel them in the last age, as well by the glory of its woollen cloths (_laneorum pannorum honore_), which they call Manchester cottons, as by the privilege of sanctuary, which the authority of parliament under Henry VIII. transferred to Chester."[7] It is significant too that in the Elizabethan poor law of 1601 (43 Elizabeth), neither cotton-wool nor yarn is included among the fabrics to be provided by the overseers to set the poor to work upon; though, of course, it might be argued that so short-stapled a fibre needed for its working, when machinery was rough, a skill in the operative which would be above that of the average person unable to find employment. However, a proposal was made in 1626 to employ the poor in the spinning of cotton and weaving wool.[8]

Prior to Mr Price's discovery of the petition mentioned above, the earliest known notice of the existence in England of a cotton industry of any magnitude was the oft-quoted passage from Lewes Roberts's _Treasure of Traffic_ (1641), which runs: "The town of Manchester, in Lancashire, must be also herein remembered, and worthily for their encouragement commended, who buy the yarne of the Irish in great quantity, and weaving it, return the same again into Ireland to sell: Neither doth their industry rest here, for they buy cotton-wool in London that comes first from Cyprus and Smyrna, and at home work the same, and perfect it into fustians, vermillions, dimities and other such stuffs, and then return it to London, where the same is vented and sold, and not seldom sent into foreign parts."[9]

Despite Lewes Roberts's flattering reference, the trade of Manchester about that time consisted chiefly in woollen frizes, fustians, sackcloths, mingled stuffs, caps, inkles, tapes, points, &c., according to "A Description of the Towns of Manchester and Salford," 1650,[10] and woollens for a long time held the first place. But before another century had run its course cottons proper had pushed into the first rank, though the woollen industry continued to be of unquestionable importance. In 1727 Daniel Defoe could write, "the grand manufacture which has so much raised this town is that of cotton in all its varieties,"[11] and he did not mean the woollen "cottons," as he made plain by other references to the industry in the same connexion; but it was not until some fifty years later that the ousting of the woollen industry from what is now peculiarly the cotton district became unmistakable.[12] As a rule the woollen weavers were driven farther and farther east--Bury lay just outside the cotton area when Defoe wrote--and finally many of them settled in the West Riding. Edwin Butterworth even tells of woollen weavers who migrated from Oldham to the distant town of Bradford in Wiltshire because of the decline of their trade before the victorious cotton industry. Much the same fate was being shared by the linen industry in Lancashire, which was forced out of the county westwards and northwards. The explanation of the three centralizations, namely of the woollen industry, the cotton industry and the linen industry, is not far to seek. The popularity of the fabrics produced by the rising cotton industry enabled it to pay high wages, which, indeed, were essential to bring about its expansion. This a priori diagnosis is supported by contemporary analysis: thus "the rapid progress of that business (cotton spinning) and the higher wages which it afford, have so far distressed the makers of worsted goods in that county (Lancashire), that they have found themselves obliged to offer their few remaining spinners larger premiums than the state of their trade would allow."[13] The best operatives of Lancashire were attracted sooner or later to assist the triumphs of art over the vegetable wool. At the same time the scattered woollen and linen workers of Lancashire were suffering from the competition of rivals enjoying elsewhere the economies of some centralization, and the demand for woollen and linen warps in the cotton industry ceased after the introduction of Arkwright's water-twist. When the factory became common the economies of centralization (which arise from the wide range of specialism laid open to a large local industry) increased; moreover they were reinforced by the diminution of social friction and the intensification of business sensitiveness which marked the development of the 19th century. Once begun, the centralizing movement proceeded naturally with accelerating speed. The contrast beneath is an instructive statistical comment:--

_Distribution of Cotton Operatives in 1838 and 1898-1899 (from Returns of Factory Inspectors)._

+--------------------------+--------------+---------------+ | | 1838. | 1898-1899. | +--------------------------+--------------+---------------+ | Cheshire | 36,400 | 34,300 | | Cumberland | 2,000 | 700 | | Derbyshire | 10,500 | 10,500 | | Lancashire | 152,200 | 398,100 | | Nottinghamshire | 1,500 | 1,600 | | Staffordshire | 2,000 | 2,300 | | Yorkshire | 12,400 | 35,200 | | +--------------+---------------+ | England and Wales[14] | 219,100 | 496,200 | | Scotland | 35,600 | 29,000 | | Ireland | 4,600 | 800 | | +--------------+---------------+ | United Kingdom | 259,300 | 526,000 | +--------------------------+--------------+---------------+

The distribution of the industry has varied greatly in the two periods. If it had remained constant Lancashire would only have contained 300,000 operatives in 1899, instead of the actual 400,000. Scotland, on the other hand, only contained 30,000 instead of 70,000, and in Ireland the numbers were one-tenth of what they should have been. The percentage of operatives in Lancashire in 1838 was 58.5, but this increased to 75.7 in 1898.

Lancashire advantages.

Why, we may naturally inquire, did not the cotton industry localize in the West Riding or Cheshire and the woollen industry maintain its position in Lancashire? Accident no doubt partly explains why the cotton industry is carried on where it is in the various parts of the globe, but apart from accident, as regards Lancashire, it is sufficient answer to point to the peculiarly suitable congeries of conditions to be found there. There is firstly the climate, which for the purpose of cotton spinning is unsurpassed elsewhere, and which became of the first order of importance when fine spinning was developed. In the Lancashire atmosphere in certain districts just about the right humidity is contained on a great number of days for spinning to be done with the least degree of difficulty. Some dampness is essential to make the fibres cling, but excessive moisture is a disadvantage. Over the county of Lancashire the prevailing west wind carries comparatively continuous currents of humidified air. These currents vary in temperature according to their elevation. Hot and cold layers mix when they reach the hills, and the mixture of the two is nearer to the saturation point than either of its components. The degree of moisture is measured by the ratio of the actual amount of moisture to the moisture of the saturation point for that particular temperature. Owing to the sudden elevation the air is rarefied, its temperature being thereby lowered, and in consequence condensation tends to be produced. In several places in England and abroad, where there is a scarcity of moisture, artificial humidifiers have been tried, but no cheap and satisfactory one has hitherto been discovered. To the advantages of the Lancashire climate for cotton spinning must be added--especially as regards the early days of the cotton industry--its disadvantages for other callings. The unpleasantness of the weather renders an indoor occupation desirable, and the scanty sunshine, combined with the unfruitful nature of much of the soil, prevents the absorption of the population in agricultural pursuits. In later years the port of Liverpool and the presence of coal supplemented the attractions which were holding the cotton industry in Lancashire. All the raw material must come from abroad, and an enormous proportion of English cotton products figures as exports. The proximity of Liverpool has aided materially in making the cotton industry a great exporting industry.

Early system of manufacture and organisation.