Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/321

Rh Manchester; but when the cotton reaches Manchester it will be taken over upon the cars and hauled up this heavy grade. The spinners did not make this change without a reason. What was it? Can there be any reason except the climatic conditions?

Our textile factories first gathered in centers where there was water power. It happened that Samuel Slater landed in Rhode Island, midway in the section where, I think, the cotton manufacture will stay. But water power carried many mills away up into New Hampshire, down into Maine, and elsewhere. That influence has gone by. Steam has taken the place of water power.

My judgment has been for a very long time that, barring one element which I will treat later, the greater part of the cotton spinning and weaving of this country will tend to concentrate along the south shore of New England, from New Bedford by way of Fall River, Narragansett Bay, and so on along the Sound, at the points to which coal can be carried in barges at very moderate cost, to which the cotton can be brought at diminishing rates of transportation from the South, and where the conditions of life are comfortable, the supplies abundant, and where all the subsidiary arts will gather or have gathered around the factories.

It is along this shore that the Gulf Stream exerts an influence somewhat like that which affects Lancashire. Although perhaps less in degree, the humidity of the atmosphere is more constant and more nearly consistent with the best conditions for spinning and weaving than it is in any other section of this country within my knowledge. I will not speak dogmatically upon this point, because I do not think we yet know enough of atmospheric conditions to be able to determine this question. It is one of the elements of the case. As this concentration takes place, as you so well know, the relative number of spare hands and the number of repair hands in each factory will be diminished; thus the general expenses will be reduced. The draft for help will be made upon the whole population, and the work will be subdivided in the way which is most conducive to the very closest economy.

To what extent weaving will be separated from spinning we have yet to see. I think that separation will go on as the work becomes finer and more dependent upon the changing fashion and fancy of the season than upon its quality for the sale of the product. That tendency is clearly apparent in the increase of fine spinning-mills in this section, in which no weaving is done. I have called attention to these points before.

Again, I am inclined to believe that any very rapid development of Southern cotton manufacture will meet a check from the yet more rapid progress of our Southern brethren in many other apparently minor branches of industry. These minor branches,