Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/490

474 enters, or goods in which the warp is made of cotton, have not the enduring quality of the fabrics woven by our ancestors. President Eliot, of Harvard University, in a recent magazine contribution, says: "The Hessian country girl proudly wears her grandmother's woolen petticoats, and they are as good and as handsome as sixty years ago. A Scotch shepherd's all-wool plaid withstands the wind and rain for a lifetime"; and he adds a eulogy of the old Swiss porter's overcoat, which had kept him warm and dry for twenty-five years. In sharp contrast with these examples the learned college president speaks contemptuously of the "all-cotton" clothing of an American rural community that costs about ten dollars a suit, fades promptly, and wears out at the slightest provocation. If President Eliot desired his readers to infer that the farmers and peasants of the foreign countries which he names are better clothed than our own farmer classes, he unconsciously permitted himself too broad a generalization from the interesting and isolated instances which he cites. The machine-made cloths of this day and generation do not last a lifetime, or sixty years, or even twenty-five years, either in the United States or in Europe. The fabrics which so excited his admiration were the homespun products of hand manufacture. It is true that they had great endurance, and this quality they secured at the sacrifice of lightness and compactness. Heavy cloths of the homespun characteristics are not now made by machinery, because the people prefer lighter fabrics, even though they wear out quickly. They are able to gratify their preference because the evolution has reduced the cost of everything in the nature of wearing apparel to a degree' only less striking than the increased productive capacity. It is equally difficult to express this gain in figures. But it is indicated by the fact that the farmer's wife can affor'd to abandon the spinning-wheel and loom and purchase the finished product of the fleece which she sends to market rather than to transform it herself into the long-lived goods which President Eliot so greatly admires.

How vaguely do the people realize the thousand-and-one comforts and conveniences and economies which have been brought into every household by the cheapening of fabrics of almost infinite variety of form and utility which the woolen manufacture has taken on! There is now no phase or form of want, of garment, of decoration, or of household economy, which can not be gratified at a reasonable cost.

The variety of the fabrics into which wool is now converted is one of the most striking features of the evolution. The carpets on our floors, the blankets that cover both our horses and ourselves, the reps and plushes that make the most durable and elegant coverings for household furniture, railroad cars, etc., the