The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous ... - Cd3wd.com

THE COTTON MANUFACTURE. 349
that it was not merely injurious to the woollen and silk manufactures,
but also a national evil, to have clothing cheap
FROM abroad rather THAN TO MANUFACTURE IT DEAR
AT HOME. In his Weekly Review, which contains so many
opinions on trade, credit, and currency far beyond the age. he
thus laments the large importations of Indian goods.
" The general fancy of the people runs upon East India goods
to that degree, that the cimitz and painted calicoes, which
before were only made use of for carpets, quilts, &c., and to
clothe children and ordinary people, become now the dress of
our ladies ; and such is the power of a mode as we saw our
persons of quahty dressed in stuffs which but a few years before
their chambermaids would have thought too ordinary for them :
the chintz was advanced from lying upon their floors to their
backs, from the foot-cloth to the petticoat ; and even the queen
herself at this time was pleased to appear in China silks and
calico. Nor was this all, but it crept into our houses, closets,
and bed-chambers ; curtains, cushions, chairs, and at last beds
themselves, were nothing but cahcoes or Indian stuffs ; and in
short, almost everything that used to be made of wool or silk,
relating eitlier to the dress of the women or the furniture of our
houses, was supplied by the Indian trade."
"Above half of the (woollen) manufacture was entirely lost,
half of the people scattered and ruined, and all this by the
intercourse of the East India trade."— Weekly Review, Janu-
ary 31st, 1708.
However exaggerated and absurd De Foe's estimate of the
injury caused to tlie woollen manufacture, as manifested by the
small value of the whole importations of Indian fabrics, at that
time, as well as (much more decisively) by the experience of
recent times, when the woollen manufacture has sustained the
incomparably more formidable competition of the English cotton
manufacture, it is evident from his testimony, and that of other
writers, that Indian calicoes, muslins, and chintzes, had become
common in England at the close of the seventeenth century.
De Foe's complaint was not of an evil existing in 1708, when
lie wrote, but of one a few years earlier ;
for he says in another
place, that the " prohibition op Indian goods" had " avert-