ntegration of modern industry.[69]

Sec. 5. In observing the order of inventions applied to textile
industries, the first point of significance is that cotton, a small
industry confined to a part of Lancashire, and up to 1768 dependent
upon linen in order to furnish a complete cloth, should take the lead.

The woollen trades, in the first half of the eighteenth century, as
we saw, engaged the attention of a vastly larger number of persons,
and played a much more important part in our commerce. The silk trade
had received new life from the flow of intelligent French workers, and
the first modern factory with elaborate machinery was that set up for
silk throwing by Lombe. Yet by far the larger number of the important
textile inventions of the eighteenth century were either applied in
the first instance to the cotton manufacture and transferred,
sometimes after a lapse of many years, to the woollen, worsted, and
other textile trades, or being invented for woollen trades, proved
unsuccessful until applied to cotton.[70]

Although the origin and application of inventive genius is largely
independent of known laws, and may provisionally be relegated to the
domain of "accident," there are certain reasons which favoured the
cotton industry in the industrial race. Its concentration in South
Lancashire and Staffordshire, as compared with the wide diffusion of
the woollen industries, facilitated the rapid acceptance of new
methods and discoveries. Moreover, the cotton industry being of later
origin, and settling itself in unimportant villages and towns, had
escaped the influence of official regulations and customs which
prevailed in the woollen centres and proved serious obstacles to the
introduction of new industrial methods.[71] Even in Lancashire itself
official inspectors regulated the woollen trade at Manchester,
Rochdale, Blackburn, and Bury.[72]

The cotton industry had from the beginning been free from all these
fetters. The shrewd, practical business character which marks
Lancashire to-day is probably a cause as well as a result of the great
industrial development of the last hundred years.

Moreover, it was recognised, even before the birth of the great
inventions, that cotton goods, when brought into free competition with
woollen goods, could easily undersell them and supplant them in
popular consumption. This knowledge held out a prospect of untold
fortune to inventors who should, by the application of machinery,