LAISSEZ FAIRE favourable impression he had expected. There was hence- forth no hindrance to the general use of power-spinning. The hand-jenny, which was improved from Highs’ invention by Hargreave of Blackburn about 1767, had met with serious opposition’, and it bad bardly been introduced in the cotton districts before it was superseded? and the work transferred to mills where water-power was available. A further in- vention in 177 by Crompton, of the Water Mule which combined the principles of the Jenny and the Water Frame, rendered it possible to obtain a much finer thread than had previously been produced by machinery, so that it became possible to develop the muslin manufacture? Through these changes the carding, roving and spinning of cotton were no longer continued as cottage employments, and weaving was the only part of the manufacture which was not concentrated in factories. The The cotton trade had a peculiar position among English weaving of manufactures ; it was not an industry for which the country nen wap was naturally adapted, for the materials were imported, and 3 during it had never enjoyed the protection bestowed on some other the . . ops exotic trades, for there was no serious French competition. The early history of the trade is very obscure; and it is rendered particularly confusing by the ambiguous use of the term cottons, which was applied in the sixteenth century to some kind of cloth manufactured from wool. There can be little doubt, however, that the trade in Manchester goods, in which Humphrey Chetham made his fortune®, included cottons 1 The fact that the hand-jennies and carding machines were destroyed in Lancashire, Nottingham, and elsewhere (Rees, Encyclopedia (1819), s.v. Cotton Manufacture) is a further indication that the cottagers who spun cotton were wage-earners. Otherwise they might, like the Yorkshire domestic clothiers (see p. 502) have welcomed the introduction of such hand-machines. They appear to have become reconciled to hand-jennies ten years later, and to have only attacked machines that went by water or horse-power in 1779 (loc. cit.). } Annals of Agriculture (1788), x. 580. 3 R. Guest, Compendious History of Cotton Manufacture, 31. ¢ Defoe among other writers appears to have been misled by this ambiguity: he speaks of the cotton manufacture as earlier than the woollen, Tour (1724) mI. Letter iii. p. 216. The tradition of the older sense of the term cotton survived in Lancashire in the nineteenth century, W. Cooke Taylor, Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire, 140. It seems probable that the same sort of confusion occurs in the use of the term ‘fustian’; cf. 11 H. VIL ec. 27. 5 He and his brothers ‘ betook themselves to the Trading of this County A.D. 1776 —-1850.