Page:The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous substances 2.djvu/389

 that it was not merely injurious to the woollen and silk manufactures, a but also a national evil,. In his Weekly Review, which contains so many opinions on trade, credit, and currency far beyond the age, he thus laments the large importations of Indian goods.

"The general fancy of the people runs upon East India goods to that degree, that the chintz and painted calicoes, which before were only made use of for carpets, quilts, &c., and to clothe children and ordinary people, become now the dress of our ladies; and such is the power of a mode as we saw our persons of quality dressed in stuffs which but a few years before their chambermaids would have thought too ordinary for them: the chintz was advanced from lying upon their floors to their backs, from the foot-cloth to the petticoat; and even the queen herself at this time was pleased to appear in China silks and calico. Nor was this all, but it crept into our houses, closets, and bed-chambers; curtains, cushions, chairs, and at last beds themselves, were nothing but calicoes or Indian stuffs; and in short, almost everything that used to be made of wool or silk, relating either to the dress of the women or the furniture of our houses, was supplied by the Indian trade."

"Above half of the (woollen) manufacture was entirely lost, half of the people scattered and ruined, and all this by the intercourse of the East India trade."—Weekly Review, January 31st, 1708.

However exaggerated and absurd De Foe's estimate of the injury caused to the woollen manufacture, as manifested by the small value of the whole importations of Indian fabrics, at that time, as well as (much more decisively) by the experience of recent times, when the woollen manufacture has sustained the incomparably more formidable competition of the English cotton manufacture, it is evident from his testimony, and that of other writers, that Indian calicoes, muslins, and chintzes, had become common in England at the close of the seventeenth century. De Foe's complaint was not of an evil existing in 1708, when he wrote, but of one a few years earlier; for he says in another place, that the "" had "