[Footnote 182: In Mr. Percival’s _Letter to a Friend_ the following passage appears which is none the less informative because it is satirical: “Another objection against me in common with other gentlemen, is, that we envy these check-makers; really, sir, I wonder what any country gentleman can be supposed to envy them for! Is it their houses? What country gentleman has reason to envy the possessor of a house of four, five, or six rooms of a floor with warehouses under and warping rooms over?... Is it their furniture? See one room drest out like a baby house.... Is it their equipages? Surely no, when one sees their chariots or post-chaises, with a pair of callender tits, and the callender lad for coachman, it must set any spectator a-laughing at the grotesque, did not the honest horses by hanging down their heads shew that they were ashamed of their employment. Is it their cookery? Here indeed I am almost at a stand to find a reason, which a Manchester check-maker will allow for a good one, why the country gentlemen do not envy their cookery; but on recollection I have one; they must allow it as a maxim, _that the heart grieves not at what the eye sees not_; and no country gentleman that I have ever heard of, could ever yet certify what was for dinner in the house of a Manchester check-maker. The reason their good wives believe we envy them their cookery, is, that when they move into the country for some weeks in the summer, the cook is too covetous to move his shop after them, and, as they know not how to get in their own families, anything more than plain boiled or roast, they are wise enough to believe nobody knows more, and because they are half starved whilst they are out of the town of Manchester, imagine there is no good livelihood anywhere else. Is it their fine clothes? Upon my honour I know many country gentlemen better dressed. Is it their handsome perriwigs? to comfort us country folks, I know few with worse heads ...” (pp. 9-10).] In the seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries, as at the present day, little of the raw material used in the Lancashire textile industry was produced in the county; one way in which wool reached the worsted manufacturers is given in a quotation below.[183] But more important than wool were linen-yarn and cotton. Until the West Indian colonies and South America became important sources of the supply of cotton, it was chiefly imported through London, indeed it was not until cotton-growing had developed in the United States that London lost its position to Liverpool as the chief port of entry.[184] Early in the eighteenth century, however, much was imported by Liverpool merchants, and it was also imported through Whitehaven and Lancaster, both these ports having an important trade with the West Indies in the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth.[185] [Footnote 183: _Infra_, p. 61.] [Footnote 184: _Treasure of Traffike_, p. 32. Ellison, _Cotton Trade of Great Britain_, p. 170.]