TO REDUCE THE DUTIES ON MANUFACTURES OF COTTON. JULY 26, 1911.-Committed to the Committee of the Whole House on the state of the Union and ordered to be printed. Mr. UNDERWOOD, from the Committee on Ways and Means, submitted the following REPORT. [To accompany H. R. 12812.] The Committee on Ways and Means, to whom was referred the bill (H. R. 12812) to reduce the duties on cotton manufactures, having had the same under consideration, report it back to the House without amendment and recommend that the bill do pass. HISTORY OF COTTON MANUFACTURING. The cotton plant is the most interesting in the entire vegetable kingdom, affording as it does a well-nigh limitless variety of useful products and supplying a fiber capable of being transformed into all kinds of fabrics, invading with success the fields exclusively occupied for centuries by wool, flax, and silk. It is difficult to realize that cotton, coming last of the four chief fibers into the textile field, now bears a relation to the world's economic progress more important than that of wool, silk, and flax combined. There is no agricultural product that commands such universal attention and respect as cotton, and of all the industrial arts known to man, few, if any, have contributed more to the progress of civilization and to the welfare of the human race than the manufacture of cotton. India is generally accepted as the birthplace of cotton manufacture. The early devices for turning the yarn into cloth were very crude. The coarsest yarns were spun on a clumsy one-thread wheel, which was probably the progenitor of the domestic wheel so long used in England and America. Fine yarns for making finetexture goods were produced on a spindle. This spindle had been used for ages and was simply a straight piece of wood weighted at one end, first by a piece of clay and later on by a piece of iron. The distaff was also used to some extent. These three simple devices were the only instruments used in India for making yarns in the early attempts at cotton manufacture. The Hindoo people lacked 3535-H. Rept. 65, 62-1-1 inventive skill, and so the manufacture of cotton long remained at a standstill, spreading or improving little until in recent times. The history of the industry is closely bound up with the improvements in devices and machinery used in the manufacture, and the world is most indebted to England for the development of cotton manufacturing to its present state of perfection. The first material advance came with the invention of the domestic spinning wheel, place unknown, but the time is thought to have been about 1630. The next improvement which came near the end of that century was the Saxony, or Leipsic wheel, which, though a great advance over its predecessor, replaced it but slowly. With this wheel, as later improved by the addition of a second spindle, two threads could be spun at one time. Hence it was that this machine was called the twohanded wheel and was the climax of hand spinning. The next material advance in the manufacture of cotton occurred about the middle of the eighteenth century with the improvement of the hand loom by Kay, of Lancashire, England. He invented the picking-stick, improved the shuttle, and added boxes to the sley. This doubled the production of the loom and also made it possible for one man to operate it instead of two. Marsden, in Cotton Spinning, says: This was the beginning of the modern epoch of invention, and its first practical result." Kay's improvement created immediate demand for yarn, and yet little progress was made until 1767 in the method of providing it. In that year Hargreaves invented the "spinning jenny," with which one man could spin as much as fifteen or twenty previously. This long step forward was followed two years later (1769) by Arkwright's "water frame." These two well-known inventions form the basis of the modern system of cotton manufacture and the vast results which have sprung therefrom. Ten years later (1779) came a machine by Compton, combining principles found in the water frame and the spinning jenny, and so was called "Compton's mule." This machine superseded the spinning jenny and has proved of vast importance to the cotton industry. It was made automatic in 1835, has since been further improved, and is now one of the most complex and wonderful machines in existence. The invention of the power loom by Cartwright in 1785 "completed the group of fundamental inventions of which all modern spinning and weaving machinery is but an adaptation and a series of improvements." The same year Watt's steam engine, which had been invented in 1769, was made to furnish power in the production of yarn, and the resultant influence on the industry was inestimable. These and other inventions, with their later improvements, have made the manufacture of cotton many hundredfold more efficient, and among those which have greatly quickened the industry are: The cotton gin (1793), the scutching machine (1800), the lap machine (1814), the carding machine, and the combing machine (about 1845). So many improvements have been made since the movement of the spindle by mechanical power that it is easy to accept the assertion that "the machinery employed in cotton manufacturing is the result of more mental labor and the subject of more improvements and patents than INTRODUCTION OF COTTON MANUFACTURING INTO EUROPE. Knowledge of the cotton plant and of the uses of its fiber was many centuries in making its way from India to the southern borders of Europe, and it appears to have taken many more to introduce the culture of the plant and establish the manufacture of cloth on that continent. When the industry invaded England, the Anglo-Saxon, with his characteristic perseverance and thoroughness, soon took and has continued to hold the lead in cotton manufacturing. English cotton manufacture in the modern sense of the term may be reckoned from about 1775, when the establishment of the factory system proper began in that country. The industry took firm hold at that time and has ever since been such as to make England the greatest cotton manufacturing country in the world. The number of persons engaged in the industry in the United Kingdom increased from 40,000 in 1760 to 483,000 in 1880 and to about 525,000 at this time. The parish of Oldham is the greatest cotton-spinning center in the world, and the four districts of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cheshire, and Derbyshire contain not less than 2,500 cotton mills. A better conception of the development of the industry in the United Kingdom will be secured from the following table: TABLE 1.-Production and labor costs of cotton yarns and cloths in the United Kingdom, for specified years: 1856, 1880, 1905, and 1907. [Statistics for 1856, 1880, and 1905 compiled from "Textiles" by A. F. Barker, and those for 1907 from Reports of the British Census.] Item. 1856 1880 1905 1907 Yarn production for sale, average Raw cotton imports..........pounds.. 1,023,800,000 1,629,200,000 .do.. counts. .pounds.. Yarn exported.. .do.. 146,600,000 224,600,000 Yarn retained for consumption, average counts. pounds.. Cloth production, average width.yards.. 3,600,000,000 7,737,000,000 11,550,000,000 Cloth exported... .do.. 2,036,500,000 4,496,300,000 6,196,784,000 Number of spindles.. 28,000,000 42,000,000 50,000,000 Number of looms.. Number of operatives in weaving mills 175,000 246,000 700,000 $306,000 Number of operatives in spinning mills. 205,000 240,000 Working hours per week. 1,826,000,000 241,077,000 1,595,489,000 7,029,622,000 6,297, 708,000 50,680,000 (4) 572,869 551 Average weekly wages, 17 classes of 8 Production of yarn per operative per year. ...pounds.. Production of cloth per operative per year. vards.. Production of yarn per spindle per year, average counts. ..pounds.. Production of cloth per loom per year, average width.. ..yards.. Labor cost per pound of yarn, average counts. Labor cost per yard of cloth, average width. 1 Taking an average of 15 per cent waste. Stocks not taken into account. These figures indicate tremendous strides, nor has the progress ceased. In 1900 the number of spindles in the United Kingdom was 45,500,000, while those in continental Europe were 32,420,000, and in the United States 19,472,000. In 1910 the number of spindles in the United Kingdom was stated as 53,397,000; continental Europe, 40,700,000, and in 1909 in the United States, 29,189,000. The present general distribution of cotton manufacturing throughout the countries of Europe and the world, as well as its progress during the last decade, is shown by the following table: TABLE 2.- World's active cotton spindles and mill consumption of raw cotton: 1900 and The quantities for the United States are given in running bales, except that round bales are counted as half bales and foreign cotton has been reduced to equivalent 500-pound bales. Linters are included. For other countries the quantities are given in equivalent 500-pound bales. The statistics of spindles for 1910 in the United States relate to the calendar year 1909 and include all |