century as marking a greater advance in the textile industries than all the centuries preceding it. The range of improvement in the present century covers the whole ground of the evolution, except the bare principle of automatic or mechanical manufacture, which was still in its infancy in 1800. The nineteenth, therefore, outranks even the eighteenth century in the economic progress which distinguishes it. Of this tremendous advance the most important steps, so far as relate to machinery for expediting processes, economizing help, and performing complicated operations automatically, have occurred in the latter half of the present century.
The individual capacity of the operative, thus enormously increased by machinery, has been accompanied by an increase in the total number of persons solely occupied in the manufacture of wool. The number who were thus employed in the period of household industry can not, of course, be estimated. But a vastly larger number of persons now depend directly and solely for their livelihood upon employment in woolen-factories than was ever the case before the introduction of power machinery and the factory system, and they are able to earn quite double the wages of the hand-operative of olden times.[1] It follows that the increase in
Fig. 33.—A Garnett Machine.
the production of woolen goods to-day is very much greater than would be indicated by the fact that the labor of one operative is now equivalent to that of one hundred operatives one hundred and fifty years ago. This deduction is borne out by the extraordinary increase in the world's wool-clip. It is safe to put the annual product of wool at 2,000,000,000 pounds in the greasy state. Of this amount nearly one half comes from three countries—Australia, South America, and South Africa—whose wool-clip is a
- ↑ The hand-loom weaver in the United States never earned more than fifty cents a day, and in earning it he was compelled to exert himself physically to a degree not approximated in the management of a power-loom. Carroll D. Wright.
