LAISSEZ FAIRE 
A.D. 1776 a large scale, and the trade suffered from overstocking with 
apprentices. 
Calico printing is one of the arts which the Huguenots 
introduced into this country after the Revocation of the 
Edict of Nantes’, This was the period when, under Whig 
tutelage, strenuous efforts were being made to protect native 
industries, and Indian prints had been prohibited in order to 
benefit the English woollen workers. This told in favour of 
the newly planted printing trade for a time?, since there was no 
competition to be feared from Indian painted goods, while the 
calico printers were able to get plenty of Indian white calico 
to work on. At the close of the eighteenth century, the print- 
ing trade was still carried on in the neighbourhood of London, 
where the finest work continued to be done’; it had also been 
introduced into Lancashire about 1764, by Mr Robert Peel, 
the father of the first baronet of that name, and it developed 
rapidly with the growth of the cotton manufacture. Hand 
printing was effected by means of engraved blocks ten inches 
long and five wide; these could of course only print in one 
colour at a time, and great care had to be used in adjusting 
them®, so as to render the pattern continuous. The printing 
of a piece of calico twenty-eight yards long in a single colour 
involved 448 separate applications of the block, and the intro- 
duction of a second colour would have required a repetition 
of the same work® This laborious process was superseded 
about 1785 by the invention of cylinder printing; the cloth 
was passed over engraved cylinders, so that two or more 
colours could be printed at the same operation, and only a 
hundredth part of the labour previously needed was now 
led to the Tequisite to produce the same result”. Under the new condi- 
nas A tions boys could be employed in what had been hitherto the 
formen. work of men; so that on the introduction of the machinery, 
complaints began to be made by the journeymen as to the 
undue multiplication of apprentices. There was one shop in 
Lancashire where fifty-five apprentices had been working at 
1 See above, p. 329. 
2 The legislature subsequently interfered to check the trade; see above, p. 517. 
8 Baines, op. cit. 265. 4 Ih. 262. 
5 Tn 1782, when the trade as carried on by hand labour had reached a high 
degree of excellence, there was legislation against enticing operatives abroad or 
axporting blocks. 22 Geo. III. ec. 60. 6 Baines, op. cit. 266. 7 Ib. 266. 
340