Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/320

306 Go to Troy. One man invented nearly all the machinery on which the laundry-work is established, and all the laundries are called "Troy laundries." Then, since the laundry is the necessary adjunct of the shirt-factory, Troy and its neighborhood have become the center of the shirt, collar, and cuff manufacture. In this art the cutting and making of the shirt have been so perfected that it costs less to make the shirt than it does to do the laundry work upon it and get it ready for sale; while the women who operate the sewing and ironing machinery earn higher wages than even your best weavers, because they make the shirts at the lowest cost. It is only the woman who sews poorly who is a poor sewing-woman.

Go to Foxborough, Mass.—the whole population makes straw hats; over at Taunton and in that neighborhood, tacks and brads; down in Connecticut, around Meriden and Waterbury, all the brass-work of special kinds. Go to Leicester Hill, the important occupation is making cards for your factories, with some offshoots in Worcester. Even a single art divides up. Lynn makes fine boots and shoes for women; Brockton, common boots for men; Spencer, heavy boots for men.

The Dundee orange marmalade is another instance. Why should orange marmalade be made in Scotland, and not in Spain, where the oranges grow? I think the immediate benefit to the people in Florida, Louisiana, and Georgia might be greater in the introduction of the marmalade manufacture rather than in that of the cotton fabrics. The capital of a single cotton-mill would establish a great many marmalade-factories, and, like the eggs, there might be no end to the consumption.

Now, for one reason or another, the art of spinning cotton centered in Lancashire, England, first starting in and around Manchester. It stays in Lancashire. Manchester remains the center of the trade, but the trend of the spindles is away from Manchester proper. The spinners have for some years built nearly all the new mills at Oldham and other towns, seven or eight hundred feet above the sea-level, on the crest of the ridge beyond which the moors stretch away to Scotland. They may not have known why they went there, but it is the point where the relative humidity of the atmosphere is most constant. The rainfall is only about half what it is in Massachusetts, but the relative humidity of the atmosphere is very high, and you are always looking out for a shower. The dry, bad days for spinning are when the wind is from the east—that is, the dry wind in England coming over the land.

They are building a ship-canal to Manchester at an enormous expense, estimated at ten million pounds, or fifty million dollars, in order to save the railway freight on cotton from Liverpool to