always promised this accommodation, the refugees made choice of the vicinage of Bolton, where they soon fraternised with their brother craftsmen, and in requital for their hospitality, taught them much which conduced to the further prosperity of the neighbourhood. The natural advantages of the manufacturing parts of Lancashire are just what constitute the conditions of eminent success. The Mersey and the Irwell water the district abundantly, the coal found there supplies with facility the important article of fuel, and the proximity of Liverpool to the city of Manchester, which is the acknowledged central mart of the vast circle of towns and villages wholly dedicated to the spindle and the loom, affords the best means of importation and exportation which for every commercial purpose cotton in the raw state, and cotton in its transformed state could possibly have required.
The ancestors of our cotton aristocracy were in George the First’s time a very homely, sturdy, hard-working set of people. Dr. Aikin has told us how they rose at five, breakfasted off oatmeal porridge at seven, took along with them to the warehouse, the counting-house, or the mill, a long string of children and apprentices, many of whom were the younger sons of country squires, and thus fortified with the health of morning and the strength of an unluxurious diet, passed the whole day in unremitting toil at the duties of their vocation. In this age, too, the public roads, when coaches were slow, canals few, and railways not conceived even in the tales of fairy-land, were covered with their riders, carrying bags stuffed with patterns of the goods furnished by the houses they served. In due time, machinery giving to the manufacture an impetus which elevated the mill-owners several grades above their former merely successful condition, they were compelled to call in to their aid a complete apparatus of mercantile enterprise, and then commenced that era of progressive prosperity which is the leading phenomenon of commercial history. But as yet it was not so. Every votaress of the wheel and distaff sat at her cottage door, in the manner of her Hindoo sister, but less blessed with the talents which lead to eminence, and spun the slender thread for the weaver to convert by the process which was peculiarly his, into the cloths and stuffs required by trade. No marvel we did so well without the shipments from New Orleans, all of which came forth in obedience to the iron wand of mechanical invention. And let us now look a little more exactly into the supervention of these wonderful days.
Cotton of modern culture has attained incomparable pre-eminence in America, especially the Sea Island, which is the best produced. In 1840 this description obtained in Liverpool the enormous price of three shillings the pound, whereas (for there is nothing like a contrast) Surat cotton, which is the worst growth of India, has been as low as two-pence. These may be regarded, perhaps, as the two greatest extremes between which the commercial value of cotton has as a rule oscillated. Then to show more completely how considerable this variation has been, I may as well give the lowest price within late years of Sea Island cotton, namely, ninepence the pound, and the highest of Surat, which in 1850, fetched 6¾d. The old commodity “tree-wool,” which arrested the observation of Herodotus, Strabo, Arrian, and Mela, has never, you see, in modern days equalled when at its best and in the dearest market, the worth of the worst quality in the cheapest market of that improved edition of the article which the skill of Americans and the superiority of propitious local conditions have since those benighted ages contributed to create. Enlightened by these simple statistics, we now perceive how momentously the welfare of the cotton dealer is likely to be modified by any extraordinary and exceptional causes liable to augment the already excessive fluctuation upon which he must calculate in the price of his purchases. From 9d. to 3s. for the best sort is a wide range of fluctuation, and from 2d. to 6¾d. for the worst, is almost as bad. What a world of room to cramp the operations of a market, and finally to shut it up altogether. With the deficiency, the uncertainty, the inferiority consequent upon a combination of political influences added to this normal state of variation, how tremendous would be the increase of the difficulties to be met. If not for the sake of anything else, at least for the sake of Manchester and her vegetable nobility, let us do something towards the stability and extension of a market, we most of us can do so ill without. It is computed that directly and indirectly, 4,000,000 of our people are concerned in cotton industry, while the mere manufacture as carried on in Great Britain alone, employs directly according to Mr. McCulloch’s estimate, no fewer than 1,400,000 persons.
Although it is undeniable that it was in consequence of the call for cotton-wool being stimulated by the increased consumption resulting from the various inventions of mechanical genius, that the energetic and systematic cultivation of the plant in the Southern provinces of the Union began and flourished, samples of the new material were sent over to Mr. Rathbone, an American merchant residing in Liverpool, so early as 1764, when he received from his correspondent in the United States eight bags of Transatlantic growth, as a specimen of what that country could produce. This to a great extent might have been objectless and indefinite, for it was not until 1785 that the cotton husbandry of the American States commenced in right earnest, after Hargreaves and others had imparted a momentum to the trade which has been augmenting ever since. Georgia and Carolina were the two States which at this date turned their thoughts in this profitable direction. They were sufficiently acute to guess and calculate the highly remunerative character of the speculation. The seed came from the Bahamas, which in the first instance owed to the Isle of Aguilla, in the Carribean Sea, the origination of the most esteemed species. This in the language of botany is the Gossypium Barbadense, which includes every variety propagated in the United States. In commercial phraseology all the raw cottons coming from New Orleans, and called indiscriminately by the Liverpool brokers, American cottons, are classed under two comprehensive descriptions, the long stapled and the short
