LAISSEZ FAIRE
favourable impression he had expected. There was henceforth
 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districts before it was superseded?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 invention
 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.