Art. XVII.—On the Cotton Trade of India

Extract

The great and increasing importance attaching to the question of Cotton supply renders any remarks which may throw light on the subject, of peculiar interest; the fact that the value of our cotton manufacture now exceeds sixty million pounds sterling annually— consuming therein upwards of four hundred thousand tons of the simple fibre—employing nearly one hundred million pounds sterling of capital—and giving employment directly and indirectly to about four millions of our countrymen, is alone so startling and withal so colossal as almost to defy comprehension. That a fibre so simple, and with us but a century since so little known and appreciated, should now give rise to such wealth and comfort, almost partakes of fiction; and one knows not how sufficiently to praise the ingenuity of Wyatt, Kay, Hargreaves, Arkwright, and Crompton, who led the way to raise the manufacture in little more than a century to its present prodigious proportions. But the extension, not to say the sustenance, of this trade, is primarily dependent upon the supply of the raw material: upon this, the one hundred millions of our capital, and the livelihood of near four millions of our countrymen is dependent, a matter so serious and of such magnitude, as to make the question one of the State; the appalling result only contemplated of one year's stoppage of the supply, is sufficient to force a dread of the slender basis upon which the magnificent fabric depends. Our legislators are however now fully alive to its importance, and it is pleasing to mark the attention the matter receives amid the turmoil of our immense governmental affairs.