The power-loom has recently been adapted, under Bright’s patent, to weaving carpets, which are afterwards printed.

With respect to spinning; fine yarns which cost twenty guineas a pound have been reduced to four shillings by improved machinery, and in the Great Exhibition of Industry Messrs. Houldsworth exhibited as a curiosity, a pound of cotton spun 2,000 miles in length.

Arkwright, among the early improvers, was the only one who realized a large fortune, which his patience, his energy, his skill, his judgment, his perseverance well deserved, whether he was an original inventor or not.

The large supplies of cheap coals by canal soon made Lancashire the principal seat of the manufacture.

Among the many who realized great wealth by the new manufacture, was the first Sir Robert Peel, who began life near Bolton as a labouring man, by frugality accumulated enough money to commence first with a donkey a small coal trade, and then to enter on a cotton mill, which eventually placed him in a position to become a Member of Parliament and a baronet, and to give his son that starting place in education and society of which he availed himself so wisely and so patriotically, to his own honour and the permanent benefit of his country.

There are several mills and factories in Manchester in which the most perfect productions of mechanical skill may be seen in operation; but it is a trade which will be seen under much more favourable circumstances in some of those valleys near Manchester, where the masters of the mill provide the cottages of their “hands,” or where the cottages are held in freehold by the more frugal workmen themselves, with little gardens attached, in pure air in open situations.

There are many cotton lords, and the number is increasing, who take the warmest interest in the condition of the people in their employ, and who do all they can to promote their health, their education, and their amusements.  A visit to one of these establishments, will convince those who have taken their ideas of a manufacturing population from the rabid novelettes and yet more rabid railings of the Ferrand school, that there is nothing in the factory system itself, properly conducted, opposed to the permanent welfare of the working classes.  On the contrary, in average times, the wages are sufficient to enable the operatives to live in great comfort, and to lay by more than in other trades; while between the comfort of their position and that of the agricultural labourer there is no comparison, so infinitely are the advantages on the side of the factory hand.  There have also been a series of legislative and other changes during the last twenty years, all tending to raise the condition of this class.  At the same time, it is impossible not to observe that, quite irrespective of political opinions, there is a wide gulf between the great mass of the employers and the employed.  There is dislike—­there is undefined distrust.