Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/477

Rh art. But the industry, there and elsewhere, was essentially of the home, and never went far beyond it, notwithstanding the pains which the General Court of Massachusetts took in 1656 to foster spinning by penalties. "Fearing that it will not be so easy to import clothes as it was in past years, thereby necessitating more home manufacture," the General Court ordered the selectmen in every town to turn the women, girls, and boys to spinning and weaving, each family to be assessed for one or more spinner, or fractional part, according' to its size, and "that every one thus assessed do after this present year, 1656, spin for thirty weeks every year three pounds per week of linen, cotton, or wooling, and so proportionately for halfe or one quarter spinners, under the penalty of twelve shillings for every pound short." Legislation of this character shows how promptly the colonists recognized the advantage that must accrue to them from independence of the mother-country in their clothing supply. It also shows them apt pupils of the English system of stimulating special industries by patriarchal legislation. The stimulation thus effected was not without its results. The increasing production of home-made fabrics, while it still supplied hardly a twentieth of the needs of the colonists, nevertheless alarmed the home Government toward the close of the century. In 1699 a stringent decree was laid upon the movement of all woven fabrics within or without the plantations. The manufacture was not prohibited, but nothing was left undone to embarrass and check colonial enterprise in the pet British industry of wool manufacture. This prohibition extended to "wool, woolfells, shortlings, morlings, worsted, bay or woollen yarn, cloath, serge, bays, kerseys, says, frizes, druggets, shalloons, or any other drapery, stuffs, or woollen manufactures." This enumeration reveals something of the character of the goods the colonists were then making around their firesides, and of the names then applied to them.

Following the industry down through the eighteenth century, we find little or no modification of the primitive conditions indicated above. At the anniversary of the Boston Society for the Promotion of Industry and Frugality, August 8, 1753, three hundred "young female spinsters" spun at their wheels on the Common, and the movement for popularizing the home industry went so far as to be nicknamed "the spinning craze." In 1766 Governor Moore reported that there were two kinds of woolen made in the province of New York; "one coarse, of all wool, the other linsey-woolsey, of linen in the warp and wool in the weft." The Stamp Act troubles afforded a distinct stimulus to the industry, and appeals to patriotic pride in the weaving of home-made clothing were common. The president and first graduating class at Rhode Island College are immortalized in history by their