"
The efficiency of the New England mills was extraordinary. James
Montgomery, an English cotton manufacturer, visited the Lowell
mills two years before Dickens and wrote after his inspection of
them that they produced "a greater quantity of yarn and cloth
from each spindle and loom (in a given time) than was produced by
any other factories, without exception in the world." Long before
that time, of course, the basic type of loom had changed from
that originally introduced, and many New England inventors had
been busy devising improved machinery of all kinds.
Such were the beginnings of the great textile mills of New
England. The scene today is vastly changed. Productivity has been
multiplied by invention after invention, by the erection of mill
after mill, and by the employment of thousands of hands in place
of hundreds. Lowell as a textile center has long been surpassed
by other cities. The scene in Lowell itself is vastly changed. If
Charles Dickens could visit Lowell today, he would hardly
recognize in that city of modern factories, of more than a
hundred thousand people, nearly half of them foreigners, the
Utopia of 1842 which he saw and described.
The cotton plantations in the South were flourishing, and
Whitney's gins were cleaning more and more cotton; the sheep of a
thousand hills were giving wool; Arkwright's machines in England,
introduced by Slater into New England, were spinning the cotton
and wool into yarn; Cartwright's looms in England and Lowell's
improvements in New England were weaving the yarn into cloth; but
as yet no practical machine had been invented to sew the cloth
into clothes.
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