With this elaborate use of machinery and increase of cotton production, manufacture and consumption, has come great reduction in cost of production and in prices. “In the last half of the nineteenth century,” says S. N. D. North, late Director of the Census, in the Encyclopedia Americana, “there was an increase in value of textile products in the United States of about six times and not less than ten times if it were possible to measure this product by quantity instead of by value. Even the largest figures convey an inadequate idea of the relative importance of our textile mills in the industrial economy of the nation, for those mills supply the materials for a great group of subsidiary factory industries, such as the wholesale clothing manufacture, etc. When we aggregate these, and add to them the value of the products of the linen, jute, hemp, and bagging mills of the country, we find that the product of our textile mills is larger in value than that of any single line of related industries, iron and steel excepted. The decrease in the cost of goods during the last half of the century has been one of the most striking phases of the development. This decrease is due--in some measure, of course, to the decreased price of the raw materials, but in even larger measure to the remarkable advance in methods of manufacture--to the new and more perfect machinery employed, in the invention of which American mechanical genius has contributed certainly as much as that of any other people, and perhaps more. All the fundamental inventions in spinning-machinery were of English origin. The French and Germans have also done much in the invention of labor-saving textile machinery, but the American record may be shown to have surpassed them all. 261 The wool-carding machinery of all countries owes its chief improvement over the machines of a century ago to the invention of John Goulding, of Worcester, Mass. The modern cotton spindle, making 10,000 revolutions a minute, is an evolution of our own mechanics, and the saving effected by new forms of spindles invented and adopted in the United States since 1870, when 5,000 revolutions per minute was the average speed, has been more than equal to the capacity of all the warp-spinning machinery in use in this country in that year. In structural equipment, the modern American mill,” continues Mr. North, “is, in some respects, superior to the average foreign mill. It is not so massive a structure, nor so solidly built, brick being used here while the English usually use stone; and in the lightness and airiness of its rooms, in economy of arrangement and general completeness of equipment and care for the comfort and convenience of the operatives, it is usually superior. While many parts of the machinery required for the equipment of our textile mills are still necessarily imported from England because not made, or less perfectly made, in the United States, our machine manufacturers have been advancing as rapidly in recent years as the textile mills themselves, and the time cannot now be far distant when every new mill built in America will be equipped throughout with American-made machinery. The American textile mills now supply practically every variety of fabric made in the world, with the exception of linens and the very finest grades of other fabrics.”