It bore a high price, as the lace manufacturer had only to compete with hand-spun thread, and hand-made lace.”[408] [Footnote 408: Kennedy, _Brief Memoir of Samuel Crompton_, pp. 339, 344-345. Heathcote’s machine was patented about 1809 and soon afterwards he is said to have obtained five guineas a yard for lace which in 1844 could be equalled at eighteenpence a yard (Dodd, _Textile Manufactures of Great Britain_ (1844), pp. 210-211).] In this account Mr. Kennedy implies the existence of markets for fine yarns in Lancashire, at Nottingham, Glasgow, and on the Continent. To these must be added the market at Belfast, where, in 1800, in the town and within a circuit of ten miles 37,000 people were said to be employed in the cotton manufacture.[409] Glasgow was the most important market that the firm of M‘Connel & Kennedy supplied with fine yarns during Mr. Kennedy’s connection with it, which terminated in 1826, but from 1795 until that date merchants and manufacturers in Belfast and neighbourhood were among its most important customers.[410] [Footnote 409: Ure, _ibid._, p. 295.] [Footnote 410: _Economic Journal_, June, 1915.] From what has been said it will be apparent, so far as the development of the cotton industry is concerned, that the period from the introduction of the jenny and Arkwright’s machinery to the first years of the nineteenth century may be divided into two parts, with a date about 1790 marking the division. During the first part the problem of providing adequate supplies of yarn for all kinds of cotton cloth was definitely solved, and a new cotton manufacture and a new system of organisation were born. In the second part that which had been achieved during the preceding twenty years was developed and consolidated, and the cotton industry, in its spinning branch, assumed its modern form. The average import of cotton from 1776 to 1780 amounted to 6-3/4 million pounds; from 1786 to 1790 the amount reached 25-1/2 million pounds; from 1796 to 1800 it increased to 37-1/2 million pounds; and during the next five years to nearly 58-1/2 million pounds; afterwards it increased very little until the conclusion of the war.[411] During the last decades of the eighteenth century cotton, particularly of the finer kinds, had assumed a new importance, and as a direct consequence of the developments in England, the problem of its adequate supply was already being solved by our kinsmen across the Atlantic.[412] In 1790 the United States had only just commenced to send small quantities of cotton into Great Britain; fifteen years later the import was no less than 32-1/2 million pounds.[413] [Footnote 411: Baines, _ibid._, pp. 346-347.] [Footnote 412: Kennedy, _ibid._, 347.] [Footnote 413: Hammond, _The Cotton Industry_ (1897), p. 16. _Ibid._, App. I.] III