hants began to furnish the weavers
in the neighboring villages with linen yarn and raw cotton and to pay a
fixed price for the perfected web, thus relieving the weavers of the
necessity of providing themselves with material and seeking a market for
their cloth, and enabling them to prosecute their employment with
greater regularity.

It was also about that time that England began to export her cotton
goods, for until then her weavers had not been able to do more than
supply the home demand. This foreign trade at once increased the demand
for cotton goods, and the increased demand presented a problem which the
manufacturers at first found difficult of solution. The procuring of
supplies of linen yarn needed for the warp of these textiles was not
difficult, but where was the cotton yarn to come from? The spinners were
producing already as much as their rude machines would permit, and
additional spinners were not to be had. The demand for cotton thread
exceeded the supply; the price of yarn rose with the demands of trade
and the extension of the manufacture and operated as a check to the
further increase of the exports. The trade had reached the point where
hand carders, single-thread spinning-wheels, and the hand-loom,
requiring a man to each machine, were clearly inadequate to the
service, and the cotton trade of Great Britain in the middle of the
eighteenth century seemed to have reached its limit. About this time
Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, Cartwright, and Watt, men either
directly or indirectly engaged in and familiar with the needs of the
cotton manufacture, invented machines which raised the trade from an
experimental or at least a struggling industry into the most important
manufacture of the world. The carding-engine, the spinning-jenny, the
spinning-frame, the stocking-frame, the power-loom, and the adaptation
of the steam-engine to the propulsion of these machines, at once
supplied the means of producing an immense amount of yarn and cloth.
These inventions, it is true, were not in themselves perfect, but the
principles on which they were built are those on which the most
complicated textile machines of this day are based.

The supply of raw material to meet the demands of the trade was limited.
The West Indies, the Levant, and India were the countries from which
this supply was drawn, but they were unable to furnish enough raw cotton
to keep the new machines in operation, and it was necessary to look
els