Soluble cellulose may enable us in time to dispense with the weaver as well as the silkworm.  It may by one operation give us fabrics instead of threads.  A machine has been invented for manufacturing net and lace, the liquid material being poured on one side of a roller and the fabric being reeled off on the other side.  The process seems capable of indefinite extension and application to various sorts of woven, knit and reticulated goods.  The raw material is cotton waste and the finished fabric is a good substitute for silk.  As in the process of making artificial silk the cellulose is dissolved in a cupro-ammoniacal solution, but instead of being forced out through minute openings to form threads, as in that process, the paste is allowed to flow upon a revolving cylinder which is engraved with the pattern of the desired textile.  A scraper removes the excess and the turning of the cylinder brings the paste in the engraved lines down into a bath which solidifies it.

Tulle or net is now what is chiefly being turned out, but the engraved design may be as elaborate and artistic as desired, and various materials can be used.  Since the threads wherever they cross are united, the fabric is naturally stronger than the ordinary.  It is all of a piece and not composed of parts.  In short, we seem to be on the eve of a revolution in textiles that is the same as that taking place in building materials.  Our concrete structures, however great, are all one stone.  They are not built up out of blocks, but cast as a whole.

Lace has always been the aristocrat among textiles.  It has maintained its exclusiveness hitherto by being based upon hand labor.  In no other way could one get so much painful, patient toil put into such a light and portable form.  A filmy thing twined about a neck or dropping from a wrist represented years of work by poor peasant girls or pallid, unpaid nuns.  A visit to a lace factory, even to the public rooms where the wornout women were not to be seen, is enough to make one resolve never to purchase any such thing made by hand again.  But our good resolutions do not last long and in time we forget the strained eyes and bowed backs, or, what is worse, value our bit of lace all the more because it means that some poor woman has put her life and health into it, netting and weaving, purling and knotting, twining and twisting, throwing and drawing, thread by thread, day after day, until her eyes can no longer see and her fingers have become stiffened.

But man is not naturally cruel.  He does not really enjoy being a slave driver, either of human or animal slaves, although he can be hardened to it with shocking ease if there seems no other way of getting what he wants.  So he usually welcomes that Great Liberator, the Machine.  He prefers to drive the tireless engine than to whip the straining horses.  He had rather see the farmer riding at ease in a mowing machine than bending his back over a scythe.