DR. URE'S COTTON MANUFACTURE OF GREAT BRITAIN.

THE systematic investigation and illustration of the Cotton Ma- nufacture contained in these volumes, is a continuation of the same writer's Philosophy of Manufactures,* and displays similar qualities to those exhibited in that work. A minute, and, in a certain sense, a practical acquaintance with the subject, as well as a disposition to exaggerate its importance, which reminds one of Barrisseav's reply that " rivers were made to feed navigable canals." In manner the Doctor has not much changed ; having still something both of a pedantic and partisan-like air, v hilst be is as deficient as before in grasp and comprehensiveness. His composition, however, is improved. The style is neater, and hence clearer; and in the more popular parts there is a plain fitness which closely approaches to a kind of elegance.

The essential points of Dr. ITaa's volumes are four in number.

• Reviewed to the Spectator, No. 368; 18th July 1835.

1st, The present condition and future prospects of the cotton trade abroad and at home, both absolutely and comparatively. 2d, The history of the trade as regards the manufacture of the commodity and its modes of transport and sale, as well as its value and sta- tistics. 3d, The natural characters and culture of the cotton plant. 4th, The processes and means by which the raw material is con- verted into the finished article, with incidental notices of the per- sons who by their mechanical genius have distinguished them- selves in the annals of the manufacture. As it would be utterly impossible to exhaust any one of these classes, or even to touch upon their leading points, we merely mention them as a kind of key to our extracts, or comments, which will follow promiscuously, without regard to method, although relating to one or the other of these heads.

One point which Dr. URE proves beyond all question, is the great progressive advance which America and the Continent have made in the manufacture of cotton goods within these last few years. The inference to which he would seem to lead his reader is, that the supremacy of Great Britain in her staple trade is threatened : he expressly maintains that even the trivial tax on raw cotton is mischievous; as well as the increased price of flour caused by the Corn-laws, not only by raising wages, (which is obvious enough,) but by the additional cost of starch used in the manufacture. The facts in proof of his assertions are too clear to be gainsaid. The number of persons employed, and the quantity of cotton consumed, show that France and the United States, as well as Germany, are advancing with gigantic strides : but Dr. URE seems to have forgotten this important element, that the consumption of the commodity may have (and it doubtless has) increased in a greater ratio. Be this as it may, however, these facts arc curious in themselves, and important in their deductions.

COST OF WEAVING, IN THE UNITED STATES, SWITZERLAND, AND ENGLAND.

United States. England.

Interest on dressing-machines £2 11 .£1 12 Interest on 12 power-looms 8 6 4 10 Cost per annum of one horse. power 3 10 12 10 Cost of dressing 3756 pieces 23 9 46 18 Cost of weaving 125 4 156 10

.£163 0 £222 0 American 101d. per piece; English, Is. 2W. .

l'rocesses. Manchester. d. Switzerland. d.

Preparation, &c. .713 .664 Spinning 1'855 1.236 Reeling and Bundling '755 .51:3 Contingent expenses 1.071 1.041 Interest of capital .812 1.012

5.206 4.466

EXTRA COST OF FLOUR IN THE COTTON TRADE.

The flour used in the processes of weaving and bleaching forms an item in the cost of cotton goods of much more consequence than even at first sight might be supposed. The quantity of flour used upon each piece of cloth is propor- tioned to the weight of cotton which it contains ; so that the extra British cost arising from this source is greatest in those heavy fabrics in which foreign corn. petition is most formidable, and in which the tax on cotton wool, and other causes of its enhancement, are most severely felt. Mr. Graham says that he lids paid in duty on flour from 6d01. to 700/. annually, on an average of several years.

An item which, in the aggregate, is estimated to cost 174,0411. to the British manufacturer above the foreign.

The following facts, however, seem to show, that slight differ- ences, (and all the drawbacks Dr. URE adduces are comparatively slight) cannot successfully rival a long-established manufacture. The hereditary principle seems better in mechanical than mental pursuits ; but then, the weavers are trained to their tasks.

The chief seats of our muslin manufacture are Paisley, Glasgow, and Bolton; each place producing an article in some respects peculiar. The variety called jaconcts, both coarse and fine, but always stout, as well as checked and striped muslin. and other articles of the heavier sort, are Made in Bolton and its neigh- bourhood. Book.muslins, as also those called mull and line, of lighter fabric than the Lancashire, are made at Glasgow. Paisley is celebrated fur its sewed and tamboured nursling, which give domestic employment to great numbers of young women in the West of Scotland. Mechanical tambouring was attempted nearly thirty years ago at Glasgow, by means of a most ingenious machine in- vented by Mr. John -Duncan ; but it has never been found so profitable as to be pushed to any considerable extent, owing to the abundance and dexterity of the hand-tambourers.

Figured muslins, called fancy goods, were first' woven M the loom at Paisley ;11/4 which having been previously the chief seat of the silk-gauze manufacture, bad trained a race of most ingenious artisans, distinguished for a spirit of study and research which would have done honour to men in the most exalted stations. They immediately transferred to cottons the elegant patterns which they had been accustomed to give to silks, and thus rendered their native town for many years the sole possessor of this beautiful branch of the trade. And even at the present day, though many of the principal manufacturers of Paisley have re- moved their warehouses to the more general emporium of Glasgow, yet they continue to draw their supply of goods from their former townsmen. This fact, joined to the circumstance of the fine muslin yarn being chiefly brought from Manchester to Paisley, shows how a manufacture which depends on the skill of a colony of workmen, gets fixed and rooted, as it were, among them, in spite of many moliveS and efforts to transplant it. Thus also the Manchester spinners of high numbers have never been rivalled by those of Glasgow, what- ever pains the proprietors of the mills in the latter place may have bestowed in getting their machines made in the best manner and after the most improved patterns.

The thicker cotton goods have also their favourite localities. Dimities con- tinue to be exclusively manufactured in the North of England, though they have been often attempted, but in vain, by the Scotch. The finer qualities of these goods are made at Warrington, the coarser in the West Riding of York- shire. Preston and Chorley still retain Balasore handkerchiefs to themselves. Ginghams, however, which were long monopolized by Lancashire, have for

several years been partially extended to Glasgow. On the other hand, Pullicat handkerchiefs—a style of goods first introduced at Glasgow in 1785, and manu- factured exclusively there to a great extent for tnany years—were eventually introduced into Lancashire, but have never attained the same magnitude as in their birth.place.

Like silk and grapes, the cotton plant, cheap as it is and com- mon as it seems, can only be raised with the greatest care, and even after all is subject to tremendous risks. A single night's frost will destroy the germinating seeds ; a north-east wind will blight the young plants in a few hours ; or the cutworm will destroy them. These escaped, there comes the labour of thinning the plants, which must be successively performed ; and at each thin- ning the soil must be gathered round the remaining plants to sup- port them against the wind, by which they are easily bent over, on account of their short slender stems; and as the fields should be entirely shaded from the sun when the bread leaves of the cotton shrubs are fully developed, the distance between their roots must be adapted to this circumstance. The next source of solicitude to the cotton-planter is the heavy rains of August; as they fre- quently cause the plant to part with its fruit, and even its leaves.

The August full moon is likewise the time when the caterpillar makes its ap- pearance. It is the offspring of a small brown moth, resembling the candle moth, which deposits its eggs upon the leaf of the gossypiunt always a night or two before the full or new moon. They hatch a few hours after they are de- posited, and arc so small at first as to be hardly discernible by the naked eye. They do little or no damage during the first nine or ten days of their life, like the silkworms, eating little in their infancy ; but a few days before they com- plete their growth, they become so excessively voracious as to destroy an entire plantation in a few hours. Mr. Spalding has seen four hundred :toes of cotton of a promising aspect, which four days thereafter did not possess a green leaf or scarcely a solitary pod upon a plant.

Experience has led to the belief that these caterpillar ravages maybe expected once in the space of seven years.

When cotton fields have escaped injury from rains, winds, and worms, they display as beautiful a scene as the admirer of vegetable nature could desire to behold : wide waving groups of vine foliage blended with three-coloured blos- soms of brilliant hues, and pods of darker shades in various states of ripeness. When the flower conies forth, it has a fine yellow colour, which it retains during the first day; the influence of the night it changes to a red or crimson hue; in the tird day it darkens into a chocolate brown ; and then falls to the ground, leaving a pod already half an inch in diameter. The interval between the appearance of the blossom and the maturation of the fruit is very variable, being altogether dependent on the season. Mr. Spalding has at one time ob- served hundreds of flowers which afforded perfectly ripe fruit in the space of twenty-one days, and at another he has seen six weeks required for the same effect; but such delays are always hurtful. The cotton pods begin to open about the 1st of August ; from which time to the let of December the whole attention of the cultivator is directed to the picking in of the cotton as the pods daily open. During the autumnal season in Georgia and South Carolina, upon the sea-coast, the winds are violent and the rains heavy, so that the picking is a tedious thought not a laborious opera- tion ; and the persons (slaves) employed may be expected to gather from the fields twenty-five pounds a :lay when the weather permits them to work. In the more favourable times, fifty pounds is a good daily average picking of seed cotton; but latterly ten pounds may be a day's work. Taking the mean product of cotton plantations, Mr. Spalding considers that four acres will not yield more than five hundredweight of clean cotton sepa- rated front the seeds by the gin, of which four hundredweight is white, and one hundredweight coloured or stained cotton wool. These five hundredweights of cotton wool have averaged to the planter for the last fifteen years twenty cents. (about 10t1.) per pound for the white, and ten cents for the st tined, fetching in American money ninety dollars to the husbandman. Mr. Spalding justly-- remarks, that this is a small remuneration, not calculated to excite the envy or hostility of those engaged in other productive occupations.

Upon the early history of the cotton trade, little, if any, new light can now be thrown ; and its facts are too scanty, and of too purely commercial a nature, to allow of much interest being imparted to them by the art of the writer. Of the general steps of the manufacture we have given an outline in a review of Mr. BAINES'S able History of the Cotton Manufacture; and the account of mechanical processes are unintelligible without engravings, and not very attractive with. Neither has Dr. I.Jas imparted much novelty to the lives of the great mechanical discoverers,— except in a defence, which seems to us convincing, of ARK- WRIGHT' S originality in the invention of his celebrated machine. In his zeal, too, for the elevation of his hero, the author throws a suggestive light upon ARKWRIGHT'S early career ; and rescues him, in imagination, from the character of a mere barber, whilst he has probably hit upon the way in which the great inventor's mind was formed and his qualities developed. Reason readily concedes, that when surgery was united with the trade of a barber, and " much profit" was derived from " the making of wigs then worn by all people of condition," the vocation was more respected than at present. Authorities prove that ARKWRIGHT was " no mean practitioner of his art ; for he became skilled in a superior process for dying hair, still one of the nicest operations of chemistry ;" and, according to the testimony of one of his cus- tomers, " the hair furnished by ARKWRIGHT was esteemed the best in the country." In the purchase and sale of this commodity, he had to travel a great deal ; and fancy can conceive the future Sir RICHARD turning every opportunity to account, and sucking heads whilst he seemed only to be thinking of hair. Did he measure a master manufacturer for a wig, who so fitting to hear of all his difficulties in completing his orders from the non- punctuality of the weavers, as the newsmonger and confidant of the district ? Had he any dealings with the little masters, into his sympathizing ear would naturally be poured an account of the troubles undergone by the weavers in collecting yarn from the old women, who could not or would not spin it fast enough. And when led into the cottages of the spinners, either to buy the hair of the family, or to exercise his art upon their heads, we can readily imagine the wary inventor losing no opportunity of seeing how the process was managed, or of extracting from his gossiping

audience all the particulars of the art. Whilst the accomplish- ments of pliability of manner and facility of talk, so necessary to his profession, sufficed to give the future projector the plausibi- lity, clack, and confidence essential to success.