Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/312

298 export, if the fine yarns are included in their import, which can only be made for them in Lancashire. There are, as you are aware, a few cotton-factories in Russia and a few in India, but their product in ratio to the consumption of the continent of Asia is utterly insignificant.

The number of people who are at this time clothed in handspun and hand-woven fabrics is more than double the number of those who yet purchase the fabrics which are made in our factories or in those of any other nation. I made a computation a few years since, and I think the conditions have not greatly changed, to this effect: that all the cotton fabrics exported from Europe and from the United States to China would only suffice to clothe sixty to seventy millions out of a computed population of four hundred millions—even at the ratio of only two and a half pounds of cotton to the head. I consider that ratio incorrect, although it is commonly used.

A large part of China in which there is a very dense population, and to which most of our drills and sheetings are sent, is in the same latitude as the northern United States. It is not as cold, but yet it is a cold country, and the common people are clad wholly in cotton fabrics. Here are one of their coats and some of their other garments. You can judge for yourself whether or not they consume more than two and a half pounds per head. This coat alone weighs nearly four pounds.

At five pounds per head, which is a much more reasonable estimate, the factory-made fabrics of this country and of Europe would not suffice to clothe more than ten per cent of the population of China. There has been an ill-defined dread lest China should build cotton-factories and then should undertake to clothe us with the products of the cheap labor of the "heathen Chinee."

Now, entirely aside from the fact that low-priced labor is not cheap labor, and that high-priced labor is cheap because more effective in making goods at low cost, I venture to ask if any of my readers ever bought or spun any Chinese cotton? I think very few of the present generation have had any experience even with Surats or India cotton. I think those who know even what India cotton is will not dread any serious competition from that, and the very few—perhaps I am the only one who ever bought any Chinese cotton—will after that experience lay aside all fear of Chinese competition in the contest for supremacy in the cotton manufacture. It is the whitest, cleanest, and most honestly packed, but also the shortest, meanest, and most worthless cotton of which I ever attempted to draw the staple or to put through a factory.

The Appalachian chain, gathering the moisture from the Gulf