HKB
was officially prescribed for each dealer. The dealer had to dispose of his wares to the weaver, because the latter had guaranteed to him a monopoly of the export trade."[91]
Under such conditions the new machine-industry could make little advance. Excepting in the case of the woollen industries, England had for the most part already shaken off the old regulations before 1770. In particular, the cotton trade, which was in the vanguard of the movement, being of recent growth and settling outside the guild towns, had never known such restrictions, and therefore lent itself to the new order with a far greater facility than the older trades. Moreover, England was free from the innumerable and vexatious local taxes and restrictions prevalent in France and in the petty governments of Germany. Although the major part of these foolish and pernicious regulations has been long swept away from Germany and other continental nations, the retarding influence they exercised, in common with the wider national system of protection which still survives, kept back the cotton industry, so that in Germany it still stands half a century behind its place in England.[92]
The following figures show how substantial was the lead held by England in the cotton manufacture a little before the middle of the century.
NUMBER OF SPINDLES WORKING IN COTTON MILLS IN 1846.[93]
Spindles. England and Wales 15,554,619 Scotland 1,727,871 Ireland 215,503 Austria and Italy 1,500,000 France 3,500,000 Belgium 420,000 Switzerland 650,000 Russia 7,585,000 United States 3,500,000 States of the Zollverein 815,000 ---------- 35,467,993
The development of the cotton industry in 1888 in the chief industrial countries, as indicated by the consumption of raw cotton, is expressed in the accompanying diagram.