The exact period at which the manufacture of cotton was begun in England is not known with absolute certainty. But as we have said, the first authentic mention of it occurs in 1641; and it is in a book called _Treasure of Traffic_, by Lewis Roberts. The passage runs thus: 'The town of Manchester, in Lancashire, must be also herein remembered, and worthily for their encouragement commended, who buy the yarne of the Irish in great quantity, and weaving it, returne the same again into Ireland to sell. Neither doth their industry rest here; for they buy _cotton-wool_ in London that comes first from Cyprus and Smyrna, and at home worke the same, and perfect it into fustians, vermilions, dimities, and other such stuffs; and then return it to London, where the same is vended and sold, and not seldom sent into foreign parts, who have means, at far easier terms, to provide themselves of the said first materials.' But here it should be explained that from the first introduction of the cotton fibre into this country, and until about the year 1773, in the manufacture of cloth it was only the weft that was of cotton. Down to about 1773, the warp was invariably of linen yarn, brought from Ireland and Germany. The Manchester merchants began in 1760 to employ the hand-loom weavers in the surrounding villages to make cloth according to prescribed patterns, and with the yarns supplied by the buyers. Thus they sent linen yarn for warp, and raw cotton--which the weaver had first to card and spin on a common distaff--for weft. Such was the practice when, in 1767, James Hargreaves of Blackburn inaugurated the textile revolution by inventing the spinning-jenny, which, from small beginnings, was soon made to spin thirty threads as easily as one. The thread thus spun, however, was still only available for weft, as the jenny could not turn out the yarn hard and firm enough for warp. The next stage, therefore, was the invention of a machine to give the requisite quality and tenuity to the threads spun from the raw cotton. This was the spinning-frame of Richard Arkwright, the story of which every schoolboy is supposed to know. Here, then, we reach another point in our romance. The manufacture of cotton cloths in England from raw cotton is older than the cotton culture of North America. It is, in fact, only about one hundred years since we began to draw supplies of raw cotton from the Southern States, which, previous to 1784, did not export a single pound, and produced only a small quantity for domestic consumption. The story of the development of cotton-growing in America is quite as marvellous as the story of the expansion of cotton-manufacturing in England. In both cases the most stupendous extension ever reached by any single industry in the history of the world has been reached in less than a hundred years.