rity of the American cotton worker; neither did the
representatives of the English cotton operatives who accompanied the
Moseley Commission. As often as not "the cotton operative in the United
States is a French Canadian, a German, an Italian, a Hungarian, an
Albanian, a Portuguese, a Russian, a Greek, or an Armenian." It is the
extensive "exploitation" of machinery seemingly, together with the speed
of work, which keep wages high, combined with the horizontal and
vertical mobility of American labour, which prevents it from
accumulating in pools, and causes streams of the best hands to be
flowing continuously to other callings and places, and no insignificant
proportion to climb the social ladder. The remainder naturally profit,
for a local or trade congestion of labour is avoided, and the voluminous
recruiting of enterprise by the intensified competition among employers
keeps the demand for labour high.

One noticeable point in the table quoted above is that until recently
cotton consumed increased much faster than the number of spindles. This
might be explained in a variety of ways. Average counts remaining
constant, the average speed of the spindle might have risen; or the
latter remaining constant, counts might have been getting finer. Speeds
have certainly gone up a good deal of late on some counts. And it is
quite likely, too, that concentration on the manufacture of coarse goods
for export, with stout warps to keep down the breakages and raise the
output per loom, may be reckoned as one cause.

Despite the recent sensational growth in the South, the New England
States still remain the most prominent seat of the American cotton
industry. They contained in 1905 about 14 million spindles as compared
with 7.7 millions in the South and West, and their relative possession
of looms approaches, though it does not quite reach, the same
proportion. The leading States in the South in order of importance are
South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia and Alabama, and in the North,
first Massachusetts with an enormous lead, then, in order, Rhode Island,
New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey.
The bulk of the cotton industry in the North is contained within a small
area. A circle around Providence, Rhode Island, of 30 m. radius
includes, according to the twelfth census, nearly 7-1/4 million
spindles,--there were only 58,500 spindles in this area in 1809. Of the
chief towns Fall River stood first in