Now let us see what our witchcraft does for
the Hindoo consumer of cotton goods.

The cotton cloths in chief demand throughout
British India are of a most simple kind,
requiring no artistic effort in their production,
likely to be advantageously made by the
simple means of the Hindoo weaver, little
likely to tempt science and capital in their
production, and assuredly for the same reason
little able to bear a large charge for transport.
Our Lancashire Witchcraft fetches raw cotton
from Central India, as already shown, over
a distance of eighteen thousand miles. This
cotton is carded, spun, woven, dressed,
pressed, packed, marked, and shipped once
more to Liverpool, where ships are always
ready to sail to all parts of the world.
There are some for India; on board of these
the bales of Indian-grown cotton cloth are
shipped; another eighteen thousand miles of
voyage are performed, rivers are again
navigated, mountain passes are again traversed,
plains and valleys are again travelled over,
and at length the bales of Lancashire Witchcraft
behold the very village of Central India
in the gardens of which their contents first
saw the light of tropical day; the ryot who
grew it is still there, sowing the same patch
of ground with more seed; his wife is still
at the threshold of their little hut busily
occupied in weaving some of the selfsame
cotton crop which has made so long a
double journey, which has seen so many
wondrous witcheries in British lands, which
has found its weary way back in clean white
folds. And why is it brought thus far?
Why does the weary dealer at the village
bazaar welcome these many yards of steam-spun,
steam-wove cloth? Simply because
in spite of the journey, the voyage, the river,
the ocean, the railroad, and the custom-house,
our Lancashire Witchcraft can afford to sell
goods cheaper than the simple Hindoo weaver
can, though his cloth never left his native
village, and was woven beneath the shade of
palm trees to the song of the nightingale,
instead of within a Manchester factory to the
rattle of a thousand power-looms. And this
is the universal tale of intellect applied to
industry—the legend of modern scientific
witchcraft.

How many thousand slaves, and ryots, and
coolies, are toiling at this one production of
the earth to keep our mills at work? How
many busy factors and dealers, planters and
brokers and middlemen, are straining every
nerve, lest a single factory fire in England
should die out? How many deeply-laden
ships are buffeting the angry seas, and beating
round the dreaded Cape of Storms, to keep the
Liverpool and Manchester railway occupied,
and the cotton brokers in good feather? At
the great cotton mart of Britain—Liverpool—
the landings of this article during the past
year have averaged a thousand tons a day.
But a trifling portion of this enormous bulk
leaves the country in an unmanufactured
state; nine-tenths of it go to feed the hungry
mills of Lancashire.

The actual wealth of our cotton nobility
would be hard to estimate. How much has
been realised and invested in other property,
or how much sunk in new factories and
machinery, who can say? Yet some
approach to the truth may be made, and the
figures are startling. Within the limits of
Lancashire there are not fewer than a
thousand factories, in whose direct employ there
are about three hundred thousand people,
men, women, and children; but by far the
greater portion are women. This is, however,
a small portion of the actual strength
employed in working up cotton, for the steam
and water power applied to machinery for
this purpose is equivalent to nearly ninety
thousand horses. What the conjoint capacity
of all this strength amounts to, may be
imagined from the fact of its putting in
motion and controlling a quarter of a million
of power-looms and more than twenty million
spindles. Of this large number
eighteen-twentieths are to be found within a circle of
not more than thirty miles round Manchester.

By the united efforts of all this steam and
water, and human power, and the added
elements of skill and design, we find that the
United Kingdom produces cotton goods to
the yearly value of more than sixty millions
sterling, of which about one half is consumed
at home, and the remainder shipped to foreign
and colonial customers. Thus, there are being
turned out a daily aggregate of nearly a quarter
of a million sterling, or about twenty thousand
pounds' worth of cotton goods every hour.

Before cotton threads are spun in the
loom, they require to be lightly steeped in a
glutinous liquor composed of wheaten flour,
and sometimes rice flour, and water, in order
to impart a degree of tenacity to them. This
practice is incidentally alluded to in a Hindoo
work of high antiquity, showing how old
was the custom of employing a starch solution
in weaving. We mention it, in order to
fumish another illustration of the enormous
magnitude of the cotton industry of this
country. The weekly consumption of flour
for this simple but necessary process is not
less than five thousand barrels.

In strict keeping with the growing extent of
the manufacture, has been the constant lowering
of the cost of production by means chiefly
of improved machinery, and partly by lower
wages. In short, taking the average market
value of all kinds of cotton goods, we may state
that they have, during the last twenty years,
been reduced from sevenpence-halfpenny the
yard to threepence-halfpenny, or rather more
than one half. That this must be so will be seen
by a reference to the quantities and values of
the cotton exports for the years eighteen
hundred and thirty, and eighteen hundred and
fifly. In the former year they stood at four
hundred millions of yards, valued at fourteen
millions steriing; in the latter year they had