DISTRESS OF HAND-LOOM WEAVERS 795 
this trade was the more remarkable as linen weaving was AD 
exceedingly heavy work, in which women did not compete, 
i. The condition of the silk-weavers is not exactly and in the 
similar to that.of men engaged on other fabrics, as this had ** *% 
always been an exotic trade; from the time of the repeal of 
the protective legislation in 1824, they had been in great 
difficulties. Their business was not at all hard to learn, and 
this manufacture also was overcrowded, as linen-weaving was 
overcrowded, by men who had drifted into it from a similar 
calling. When the cloth manufacture migrated? from Essex 
and Suffolk and Norfolk to Yorkshire, the Eastern County 
weavers took up the silk trade®; but even in the best days 
they had to work at lower prices than the weavers in Spital- 
fields In this case they had suffered from every kind of 
competition ; that of women’s work, of those who picked up 
the trade hastily, of foreign weavers, and of the power-loom. 
There was violent resistance to the introduction of the power- 
loom at Coventry in 1831%; but the trade, as taken up and im- 
proved in Manchester and Macclesfield®, completely undersold 
the efforts of the Spitalfields and Eastern Counties weavers, 
among whom, apparently, the feeling against machinery was 
so strong that no one attempted to introduce it. In the 
a 
Pp 
8 
rate the power-loom ought to pay as much as the hand-loom weaver pays, and 
then we should have some chance of competing with them. Besides the many 
indirect taxes that we have to pay to the Government, we have other taxes of 
a still more grievous nature, and, it is said by many writers, of far greater amount. 
These taxes cut like a two-edged sword; it is not only the great amount that we 
have to pay, but at the same time it greatly injures our trade. This tax is what 
they call ¢ protecting duties’ fo the great landed property men of this country, not 
only the heavy duty on corn, but on every necessary of life, even to an egg.” 
Reports, 1840, xx111. 335. 
1 Reports, 1840, xx. 191. 
? The migration of the cloth manufacture from the Eastern Counties to York- 
shire received a considerable impetus during the long war. The flying shuttle and 
mill yarn were used in Yorkshire about 1800 (Reports, 1840, xx1r1. 417), and wages 
there were “comparatively high” (7%. 899), while all machinery appears to have 
been tabooed in the Eastern Counties (Ib. 147), unless in some newly introduced 
trades (7b. 175). The last remnants of the Eastern Counties’ cloth manufacture 
were the camlets which were made for the China market as long as the East India 
Company had the monopoly, but when the trade was thrown open in 1833 the 
Yorkshiremen undersold them in this article also (Reports, 1840, xxmr. 142). 
The West of England manufacture of serges suffered in a similar fashion (I3. 250). 
3 Ib, 129. é Ib. 1235. 8 1b. 1833, xx. 899. 
3 Ib. 1840, xx1v, 653.