se business. Yet I could not understand why people
in those distant sections did not establish manufactories of their own.
They had quite as much capital, and could procure machines as readily,
while the population to be supplied was immediately at their doors.

I had always heard that the South and West had never at any time
manufactured their own clothing. I knew that the Southern women,
particularly, were so ignorant and helpless that they had always been
dependent on the North for almost everything they wore, from the most
elaborate bonnet down to a pocket pin-cushion, and that the supplying of
their wardrobes, by the men-milliners of this section, was a highly
lucrative employment. As it is a difficult matter to divert any business
from a channel in which it has long flowed, I concluded that our
Northern dealers, having always commanded these distant markets, would
easily retain them by adapting their business to the change of
circumstances. They had the trade already, and could keep it flowing in
its old channels by promptly availing themselves of the new invention.

They did so without hesitation,--indeed, the great struggle was as to
who should be first to do it,--and not only kept their business, but
obtained for it an unprecedented increase. In doing this they must have
displaced thousands of sewing-women all over the country, as their
cheaper fabrics enabled them to undersell the latter everywhere. I know
that this was the first effect here, and it is difficult to understand
how in other places it should have been otherwise. These sewing-women
must have been deprived of work, or the consumers of clothing must have
immediately begun to purchase and wear double or treble as much as they
had been accustomed to. I do not doubt that the consumption increased
from the mere fact of increased cheapness. I believe it is an invariable
law of trade, that consumption increases as price diminishes. If silks
were to fall to a shilling a yard, everybody would turn away from cotton
shirts. As it was, shirts were made without collars, and the collars
were produced in great manufactories by steam. They were made by
millions, and by millions they were consumed. They were sold in boxes of
a dozen or a hundred, at two or three cents apiece, according to the
wants of the buyer. He could appear once or twice a day in all the glory
of an apparently clean shirt, according to his ambition to shine in a
character which might be a very