which he had admired abroad. Within less than two years the resolution has been crowned with complete success; his establishment has achieved several entirely new dress fabrics, made wholly of native fibre, such as had never been attempted in England, and at least three thousand pounds of American merino clothing wool are consumed per week in this new fabrication. This achievement I regard as the event in this year's history of the woollen industry of the United States. Perhaps I may be excused for recalling in this connection an intimation which I made in a published address five years ago: "The true value of the fleece of the American merino is for combing purposes, for which it has a remarkable analogy with that of France. This country will never know the inestimable treasure which it has in its fleeces until American manufacturers appropriate them to fabricate the soft tissues of merinos, thibets, and cashmeres, to which France owes the splendor of the industries of combing wool at Paris, Rheims, and Roubaix."

The relations of our industry with agriculture are so fascinating that they have too long detained me from the most important branch of my subject, the relations of the wool manufacture to the higher arts and the other mechanical industries. As the oldest of textile arts, the woollen industry has filled the pages of history with illustrations of its civilizing influences. Passing by the voyage of the Argonauts for the golden fleece, and the fruits of that expedition, the birth of the arts of navigation and the origin of Phoenician letters, — a fable, indeed, but one teaching the same lesson which I would inculcate; passing by Tyre, enriched by the commerce of its murex-dyed tissues and fleeces; the Italian States, Florence, Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, which were the first in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to appropriate the arts which the Crusaders brought back from Asia, and who found in the woollen manufacture the source of the wealth whose fruits survive in the "stones of Venice," and the wonders of Florentine art, for Michel Angelo's great statue of David was paid for by the wool-weavers' guild; passing by Flanders, where the growth of the wool manufacture and of Flemish art were contemporaneous, and which subsequently became the cen

tre from which the art of fabricating woollens spread into England, France, and Germany,-turning aside from these brilliant examples, I would point you to a homely and familiar illustration at our own doors of the indirect influence of the woollen industry upon the sister arts.

Mr. Benton has pointed out with singular felicity the successive events which mark out the routes of the great railroad lines across the continent; first the path of the buffalo, then the Indian's, then the trapper's trail, then the emigrant's wagon and dawning civilization, and finally the railroad train, and civilization accomplished. Manufacturing industry has been established by a similar succession.

Settlements are made in the beginning upon our water courses. Water power is first applied to the saw-mill; then comes the grist-mill; then follows the woollen-mill: in old times it was the fulling-mill. The fulling-mill was, and the woollen-mill now is, to a matured industry, what the emigrant's wagon is to the great interior, the dawn of manufacturing enterprise, as that is of permanent settlement. The cotton, the machinery, the iron, the silk, the paper manufactures follow and build up our Lowells, Patersons, and Manchesters. This is no fancy sketch. I remember the time when the Salmon Falls River, watering a district which was occupied by one of the earliest and most important settlements in New England, dating back to 1632, had no other manufacturing establishments than a saw-mill, a grist-mill, and a fulling-mill. The latter disappeared, and was succeeded in 1828 by a well-appointed woollen factory. Afterwards came the cotton-mills of Great Falls; and the Salmon Falls River moves now one hundred and thirty-two thousand cotton spindles and fourteen sets of woollen machinery. This is but a type of the march of manufactures everywhere in this country. The first textile manufacturing establishment in Massachusetts was a fulling-mill, built at Rowley, near Ipswich, in 1643. This was the pioneer of a textile industry in Massachusetts, which, according to the Commonwealth returns in 1865, amounted to $144,730,679. The woollen-mills in the North-west, California, and Oregon, are in their turn the pioneers of a diversified in

dustry in the newly settled States. The erection of a woollen mill of two or four sets seems to us at the East but a trifling affair, but to the new States it is an epoch, the dawn of manufactures, which all experience tells us will expand into a largely diversified industry and its attendant results, a superior civilization. The historian, Thiers, chronicles a more insignificant event than the building of a four-set mill, as an epoch in history. The introduction of a little manufacture of cloths, at Abbeville in France, by Colbert, is recorded as a more important conquest than that of his master, Louis XIV., who struck down the Spanish power. I have mentioned the fulling-mill as really the pioneer of the textile industry in this country. Few have a conception of the very brief period within which the woollen industry has attained its present development.

A hundred

years ago in England, and fifty years ago in this country, the woollen manufacture, as it now is, had hardly an existence. The spinning and weaving of wool was simply a domestic industry, power being used only in the fulling-mills. Dyer, despised by Dr. Johnson as poet, because his subject, the Fleece, partook of "the meanness naturally adhering to trade and manufactures," but now regarded as a better poet than the great critic, and also as the best annalist of the industry of his time, describes the manner in which the products of the woollen industry were collected, a century or more ago, for British commerce:

"From little tenements by wood or croft,

Through many a slender path, how sedulous,
As rills to river broad, they speed their way
To public roads.

And thence explore,

Through every navigable wave, the sea,
That leaps the green earth 'round."

Some of our leading living wool manufacturers were apprenticed in their youth to clothiers, or the workers of the old fulling-mill; and one so apprenticed, from whom I recently sought reminiscences of the early manufacture, well remembers the farmers of Connecticut trudging miles through the woods with rolls of cloth

upon their shoulders, to be felted and dressed in the fulling-mill. We sometimes regret the Arcadian days, when

"Maids at the wheel, the weaver at the loom,

Sat blithe and happy."

But considering the matter more practically, how vast an improvement upon this toilful and unproductive industry is that of the present time, when a single establishment, such as the Washington Mills, of Lawrence, Massachusetts, with its hundred sets, was capable, according to the statement of its late lamented treasurer, Mr. Stetson, by working day and night, to produce all the woollen clothing for an army of a million men.

Let me give the relations of the woollen manufacture to particular textile arts, and first to the cotton manufacture. The cotton manufacture of Great Britain, the most stupendous phenomenon of modern industry, was the natural offshoot of the woollen manufacture. Through the woollen trade, mainly, England had become a nation of spinners and weavers, or of artisans subsidiary to them. A national taste and skill had been developed in the textile arts by the manipulation of wool, which was readily applicable to a kindred fibre. Many of the inventions upon which the cotton manufacture is dependent, such as the invention of the fly-shuttle, which doubled the power of the weaver and made necessary the subsequent inventions which increased the spinning power, were contributed directly from the seats of the woollen manufacture. What was scarcely less important, the commercial connections established by the woollen trade gave to the cotton manufacture, when completely inaugurated by the inventions of Hargreaves, Arkwright, and Compton, a command of foreign markets for unlimited exports of the new British textile. The British cotton manufacture is as truly the offspring of the woollen industry as New England is of Old England. This may be called the most important incident of the woollen industry; for in giving birth to that of cotton, it secured to England, from the fabrication of that textile, a profit in fifty years of one thousand million pounds sterling. Pursue these

consequences still further, and we have the cotton gin in America, the growth of the slave power, its aggressions, the war of the rebellion, and emancipation!

The cotton manufacture, reaching maturity, discharged its filial debt by giving an unexpected and singular development to the woollen industry.

Between 1830 and 1840, cotton became an important auxiliary to wool, through its use in warps for woollen or worsted filling in the fabrication of tissues for female wear. Many varieties of these union fabrics are classed under the generic name of cotton delaines. This fabric was first introduced into France in 1833, and into England in 1834. It is practically the same as a woollen fabric, the warps being so covered with wool that the presence of cotton can be observed only by the closest inspection. Its cheapness, durability, and sightliness, when printed, make its introduction an invaluable boon to women of moderate means. Not less than sixty thousand yards are annually manufactured in this country, and the cheapness and excellence of the American fabric practically excludes its foreign rivals. The cotton warps are now used as vehicles to extend the surface of wool and worsted mohair and alpaca in a countless variety of dress fabrics. The wool of a single sheep may be extended by the cotton warp so as to fabricate 672 yards of so-called alpaca fabrics, enough for fifty-six dresses. All the cheaper fabrics are made by this wholly modern alliance of wool and cotton, and the great manufacturing cities of Bradford, in England, and Roubaix, in France, are chiefly occupied in the fabrication of these cheap tissues, whose undoubted fragility is rendered less objectionable by the fickleness of female fashion.

An establishment producing fabrics of this class will give us the best illustration of the manifold and important relations of the woollen industry of the present period. I select the establishment known as the Pacific Mills, located at Lawrence, Massachusetts, because it is the oldest and largest of its class. This establishment turns out an annual product of printed delaines and calicoes, principally the former, valued at not less than $7,500,000. In the production of its union fabrics the mill works