In number they exceed one million and a half. Taking into account the accessory occupations, indeed, no fewer than one million two hundred thousand are employed on one single material alone, namely cotton. For these workers, at the beginning of the century, there were imported yearly 56 millions of pounds of cotton: at present the annual importation of it exceeds 550 millions of pounds. These workers in 1820 were assisted in their operations by fourteen thousand power-looms; at present they are assisted by three hundred thousand power-looms, besides twenty-five millions of spindles;[19] while each power-loom, superintended by an adult assisted by a child, completes weekly twenty times the amount of work which the hand-loom is capable of producing. The increase of production is of course enormous, and the effect is a progressive cheapening of the articles manufactured, reducing the price of some of them tenfold, and placing them within the reach of the poorest classes:[20] articles of clothing not only conducive to health through warmth, but almost equally so through cleanliness; for they are almost all composed of such tissues and textures as favour and compel frequent washing. Footnote 19: Return to the House of Commons by the Factory Inspectors, of the Number of Cotton, Woollen, Worsted, Flax, and Silk Factories subject to the Factories Acts in the United Kingdom, page 21. Footnote 20: The cheapness of some of these ornamental as well as useful fabrics is calculated to excite astonishment. A yard of platt net is worth from 20s. to £5; a yard of plain net may be bought for one shilling. Gigantic strides have been made at the same time in another article of clothing, the basis of which is wool, and of which there were imported in 1801 seven millions of pounds; in 1844, sixty-three millions of pounds. This enormous importation of foreign wool has not only not diminished its home growth, but the increased demand for it has led to a vast multiplication of the animals that yield it, and what is of equal importance, has induced an extraordinary care in improving their breed; so that the very means which have fed the steam-engine have fed the people both with more plentiful and with better food; the steam-engine, meanwhile, applied to these and to all manufacturing processes, being as much a producer of food as the plough.[21] Footnote 21: Similar progress has been made in the manufacture of flax and silk as of cotton and wool.