Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

COTTON AT PORT, IN a twelve-mile radius of Man- V V ehester there is a population nearly as great as that of London, and the thronging people are engaged in every variety of industry. But the notion obtains that Lancashire stretching far north of the Mersey has one trade—that it deals only with cotton. Nor is, this deduction altogether foolish. Though the County Palatine makes every- thing, from ponderous machinery to exquisite art furniture and quaintly decorated clogs, the importation, sale, carriage, unpacking, spinning, weaving, sizing, dyeing, bleaching, printing, packing, and exportation of cotton gives the widest range of employment to its busy workers. India, now one of England’s chief markets for cotton goods, was, singularly enough, not only a pioneer in steel-making, but the birth- place of the cotton industry. The trend eastward of that industry was slow. Egypt, which has, since the British occupation, developed a profitable cotton-growing in the Delta that extends, roughly, from Alexandria to Cairo and Port Said, was formerly dependent upon India for its MILL, AND ON ’CHANGE. manufactured goods. How the crafts of spinning and weaving were introduced into Great Britain is a mystery. Possibly, like the “ Moonstone ” in Wilkie Collins’s story, they were brought stealthily, and safeguarded as great secrets. The earliest operatives were of Flemish origin, and they combed wool before they dabbled in cotton. Lanca- shiie, chiefly because of the humidity of its atmosphere, became the great spinning and weaving ground, and as far back as the seventeenth century Manchester wove linen yarn shipped from Ireland, and worked cotton wool, bought in London, into fustians and dimities. India, meantime, aroused the bitterest jealousy of the home mill-workers by its importation of cotton fabrics ; and the gentlemen of that period were taunted with flaunting in calico shirts and silk stockings from Moorshedabad! The strife between the woollen and cotton manufacturers reached the House of Commons, and the wearing of cotton garments was prohibited by enactment; yet the ladies, with charming inconsequence, delighted to walk abroad in painted calicoes ! The perversity of fashion really led to the