pages 92-93

92                 Illustrations of Lancashire

interesting point - rendered so through inciting to profoundest reflection - is that those poor and unlettered men - Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, and the others - were the instruments, under Providence (for such things do not happen fortuitously), by which the world became possessed of an entirely new industrial power, fraught with infinite capacities for promoting human welfare; and which, in its application, introduced quite new styles of thinking and reasoning, and gave new bias to the policy of a great nation. Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, had no prescience of what would come of their efforts. In no part of the transformation was there any precedent or example; it had neither lineage nor inheritance; it was anticipated in momentousness only by the inventions of Caxton and Gioia:1 and if in our own day the electric telegraph and the telephone reveal natural laws scarcely distinguishable from those of miracle, it may still be questioned if these latter discoveries surpass in intrinsic value the three or four that gave life to the modern cotton manufacture.
The interior of a great cotton factory, when at work, presents a spectacle altogether unimaginable. The vast area of the rooms, or "flats," filled in every part with machinery, admits of

1. Inventor of the mariners' compass.

The Cotton District                  93

no comparison with anything else in England, being found in the factory alone. A thousand great iron frames, exquisitely composite, and kept fastidiously clean, some by self-acting dusters, are in simultaneous movement, the arms of some rising and falling, while parts of others march in and out, and to and fro, giving perfect illustrations of order, reciprocal adaptation, and interdependence, and seeming not only alive, but conscious. Nothing is more striking, perhaps, than to watch the shuttles as they dart alternately right and left, every movement meaning an added thread to the beautiful offspring. The poets are supposed by some to concern themselves only with fiction. Men and women who write verses are poets only when they deal with truth, though presented in the garb of fable; and assuredly, for a poet°s theme, there is nothing to excel a skilfully conducted human manufacture. Erasmus Darwin, it will be remembered, describes the whole series of processes in connection with cotton as observed by him in Arkwright's original factory upon the Derwent.
A common practice is to have the looms in a "shed" upon the surface of the ground. To be as near the earth as possible is a desire no less with the spinner, who, like the weaver,.