account of the early development of calico printing in this country is given in two lectures by Edmund Potter, of Manchester, vol. iii., _The Monthly Literary and Scientific Lecturer_, 1852. The trade began in the neighbourhood of London in the last years of the seventeenth century and was first established in Lancashire in 1764. Shortly afterwards the first Robert Peel became interested in it and carried it on with great vigour. “Peel was to calico printing what Arkwright was to spinning.” See also _Report of Committee on Manufactures, Commerce, and Shipping_ (1833), p. 237.] This time the opposition, which centred in Norwich, took the form of instituting prosecutions under the 1721 Act, of inserting notices in newspapers and distributing them, informing the public that the wearing or using of printed fustians was illegal. As printed fustians had been excluded from the scope of the Act, there was no illegality, but the opposition was sufficient to call forth a petition from the fustian manufacturers in Manchester and other parts of Lancashire, and in the counties of Cheshire and Derbyshire, appealing for the Act to be explained so that the question would be placed beyond doubt.[88] In the evidence on the petition[89] a strong case was presented on behalf of merchants engaged in foreign trade--particularly in the import of cotton--and of fustian manufacturers, it being stated that several thousand persons from five to seventy years of age were employed in the manufacture. One witness asserted that he and his brother employed upwards of 600 looms in the weaving of fustians, and as one weaver required four spinners to supply him with yarn, he computed that upwards of 3000 persons were dependent upon them for employment--a striking case of large-scale production, in the sense of numbers employed, nearly forty years before the appearance of the factory in the cotton industry. [Footnote 88: _J.H.C._, xxii., p. 551.] [Footnote 89: _Ibid._, pp. 566-567.]