Page:Vol 6 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/542

522 a healthful tone, and in 1843 there were 62 factories, with 106,718 spindles and 2,609 looms, in operation, making weekly 8,479 pieces of sheeting. The cotton produced being insufficient, leave was granted in May 1844 to import 100,000 quintals. Those efforts to build up the industry were abandoned in 1848. The government, on the ground that home manufactures could not compete with the foreign, discontinued the prohibitive system, and foreign fabrics were allowed to come in by paying duties. At the end of 1850 there were in operation 55 factories of cloth and twist in Coahuila, Colima, Durango, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Mexico, and the federal district, Puebla, Querétaro, and Vera Cruz, besides no less than 10,000 looms scattered throughout the country. The fabrics were plain, worked, and print, the quality gradually improving. The price had been lowered, so that poor people could be clothed seventy per cent cheaper than prior to 1831.

After the fall of the dictator Santa Anna, the new rulers were disposed to afford every possible aid to home manufactures. By the law of August 4, 1857, a tax of 37½ cents a year was set on each spindle, the states being forbidden to tax factories or their products. In 1856 there were bitter complaints, because cotton thread of low numbers and common cloths and textures were allowed to be imported at lower duties than had been intended in 1850. The factories, it was said, were losing money; at any rate, their owners clamored for a return to the prohibitive system, denying