ay
when Manchester cottons could not have stood one hour's competition with
the free, or even 100 per cent taxed fabrics of India.[40] How, indeed,
could competition have been possible, with the wages of weaving and
spinning in India at three-halfpence per day, whilst for equal
quantities and qualities of workmanship, the British weaver was earning
five shillings, and the spinner ten shillings per day on the average? In
1780, Mr Samuel Crompton, the ingenious inventor of the mule frame for
spinning, such as it exists to this day, and is the vast moving machine
of cotton manufacturing greatness, stated that he obtained _fourteen_
shillings per lb. for the spinning and preparation of No. 40 yarn,
twenty-five shillings for No. 60, and two guineas for No. 80. The same
descriptions of yarns are now profitably making at prices ranging from
about tenpence to twentypence per lb. At the same period common calicoes
were saleable at about two shillings per yard, which now may be
purchased for threepence. Will it be said that the Indian spinner and
weaver by hand could not, at the same epoch, have produced their wares
at one-half the price, had not importation, with unrelenting jealousy,
been interdicted? Was the rigid prohibition of the export of machinery
no concession, all exclusively and prodigiously in the interest of the
cotton manufacture, to the zealous promotion and ascendancy of which the
mining and agricultural interests are unhesitatingly, not to say
wantonly, prejudiced, if not absolutely perilled? We say wantonly,
because the free exportation of cotton yarn, tolerated at the same
moment, was an absurd and mischievous violation of the very principle on
which the prohibited exportation of machinery was alone and could be
justified. In face of these incontrovertible facts, of which hereafter,
and now that the record of them is consigned to that wide circulation
through the world which the pages of Blackwood only can afford,
misrepresentation remains without excuse on the question of that
fostering protection to which, in a larger degree, if not exclusively,
the cotton manufacture of Great Britain is indebted for its growth to
its present colossal, mammoth-like, and almost unwieldy grandeur. We do
not, however, whilst re-establishing facts in their purity, dream the
practical impossibility of confounding and disarming the ignorance of
men unfortunately so ill educated and unread, and with intellect so
incapable, apparently