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Updated: June 27, 2025
As sad a sight as an old hand-loom worker in a factory attempting to make his clumsy machine compete with the flying shuttles about him, is a workingman equipped with knowledge so meagre that he can get no meaning into his life nor sequence between his acts and the far-off results.
The shops being all open in front, the entire contents can be seen by the passers-by. Many of these passages are covered over at the top by matting, which effectually excludes the sun, and, indeed, much other light, so that they often have a sombre and dreary appearance. It was interesting to watch the operation of the primitive hand-loom in which is woven the favorite Canton silk.
Snow white curtains also draped the windows; and there was a tidy and cosy air about the little bed room that told you how good a housewife Angeline was. An old-fashioned hand-loom stood in one corner of the big, square room; and a flax and a spinning-wheel had their places in another.
They complain that he still further reduces the poor wage by fines. As many of these have only a hut but no garden ground, they have nothing to fall back on. There are many suffering great want, and with inherited Scotch reticence suffering in silence. There may be some injustice and some oppression, for that is human nature, but the hand-loom weaving is doomed to disappear, I am afraid.
When iron was rolled by hand, when cloth was produced by the use of the spinning wheel and hand-loom, when fields were tilled by inexpensive plow and hoe, relatively small amounts of capital were needed by the man who started in to work. Mechanical inventions revolutionized the situation. A costly power-loom enabled its owner to eliminate handworking competitors.
The men who made the Corn Laws are totally ignorant of what it means. The agricultural laborers know something of it in some counties, and there are some hand-loom weavers in Lancashire who know what it is. I saw the other night, late at night, a light in a cottage-window, and heard the loom busily at work, the shuttle flying rapidly.
I note that the movement takes note of all indigenous industries. I beg publicly to express my gratitude to Government for helping me in my humble effort to improve the lot of the weaver. The experiment I am conducting shows that there is a vast field for work in this direction. No well-wisher of India, no patriot dare look upon the impending destruction of the hand-loom weaver with equanimity.
He would have to look after her when she did come, and there would be an end of his first freedom. And what would she find to do? Silk-weaving had been decaying year by year in Manchester, and for hand-loom weaving, at any rate, there was no opening at all. No matter! With his prosperity there came a quickening of the sense of kinship, which would not let him rest.
In style or design the sarong never changes. Like the tartan of the Highlanders, which it greatly resembles, it is invariably a check of gay colors. They are all woven of silk or cotton, or of silk and cotton mixed, by the native women, and no attap-thatched home is complete without its hand-loom.
And for this reason solely a number of kambayas of blue and white checks are made in the country by the native hand-loom, these colours being in general favourite ones of the Indians; the custom-house duty on such goods, and on other favourite colours, being 15 and 25 per cent., according to the flag of the vessel importing them; the Spaniards guarding their own shipping, and securing to it a monopoly of the carrying trade by that difference of the import duty.
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