122 Observations on the Commerce and Manufactures of Glasgow, &c. [Sept being dispersed over the whole country, seemed at first to threaten the dissolution of the local monopoly of the manufacture around Glasgow. But the improvement of Mr Watt upon the steam-cngine fixed the locality more closely than ever to his native city. Distance from the only market where the produce of mills was in demand, and the expence of transporting bulky commodities, absorbed more capital than steam-engines-waterfalls were soon disregarded; and the site of a cotton-mill was, and is now, valued in proportion to its contiguity to the market. The manufacturers of yarn into cloth have chiefly resided in Glasgow and Paisley; although these manufacturers have, in prosperous times, employed operative weavers, resident in almost every county of Scotland, from Aberdeen to the Border. The spinning and weaving departments of the cotton manufacture have been generally conducted as distinct branches of trade, although some few companies have combined both these operations. Besides these two great divisions, many subsidiary establishments may now be considered as attached to, and almost exclusively forming branches of, the cotton manufacture. These are the works of bleachers, dyers, printers, cloth-lappers, &c.; and to these again are attached dry-salters, vitriol manufacturers, and many other practical chemists, whose preparations are used in the various processes of the bleaching, dyeing, and printing departments. We may add machine-makers, loom and shuttle-makers, turners, and many other mechanical tradesmen who are employed exclusively, or extensively, in forwarding the operations of the cotton trade. About thirty-two years have now elapsed since this manufacture began to excite general attention in Scotland; and a period of equal duration, so eventful in political, commercial, and manufacturing vicissitudes, has never as yet occupied the page of history. In these vicissitudes, this traffic, from its rapid and unparalleled extension, has been deeply involved. In its infant and early stages, the public opinion seemed to regard it as opening a new mine of unexplored and inexhaustible wealth, in which adventurers of all descriptions were eager to embark, and to participate. For a few years past, the prevailing fashion has been to consider it as a trade rapidly declining, and so unprosperous, that few cautious and uninvolved capitalists would choose to venture their property within its vor tex. Both opinions contain some truth, mixed with a degree of exaggeration bordering on romance. Experience has proved the cotton manufacture to be a trade capable of great extension, and productive, within due limits, of important national and individual wealth; but the same infallible guide has unequivocally demonstrated that it may, and that it has been pushed too far; that it has attracted more than its legitimate proportion of public attention, and that it has absorbed more than its merited share both of capital and of industry. Under unparalleled depression, therefore, it continues at the present moment not only to exist, but to be forced to an extent not much less than it had attained, even in its more prosperous and seductive periods. It has ceased for a time to remunerate the workman, or to be lucrative to his employer, merely because it has greatly overstepped the natural and spontaneous demand. The marketable prices have certainly declined, in a degree unprecedented in any other manufacture of large extent, during an equal lapse of time; but the cost of production has also experienced a great, although certainly not an equivalent, declension. Much of the reduction of cost is fairly to be ascribed to the improvement of machinery, the division of labour, and the gradual increase of practical skill and dexterity; but much has also been abstracted from the profits of stock, and probably more has been wrung from the wages of labour. In the degree of depression, however, the spinning and weaving departments have been very differently affected, both in relation to manufacturers and operatives. The spinner may be said to have suffered little, when his state is compared with that of the weaver. The causes which have produced this inequality are easily developed; and some of them are peculiarly interesting to the future prospects of the British manufacturer, and of the country generally, in so far as it is interested in the prosperity of the cotton trade. In order to erect and complete an establishment for spinning cottonyarn, upon a scale sufficiently extensive to obtain the reduction of labour which is indispensably necessary, two considerable, or rather large capitals, are required. The first is sunk in buildings, machinery, and utensils; the second is kept floating, in order to meet the outlays for wages, purchase of raw materials, and contingent expences. Hence the competition is limited to those who are already affluent, or can command capital, and who are willing to embark that capital in a manufacturing speculation, from which, whether prosperous or not, they can seldom withdraw it without incurring great and certain loss. The weaving branch of the cotton manufacture, on the contrary, has been at all times more accessible to persons of small or of no capital, than perhaps any other manufacture whatever. There are no buildings or machinery to erect, and scarcely any tools or implements to provide. Workshops are built or rented, and utensils are provided exclusively by the operatives themselves. From these facilities of introduction, an immense number of small manufacturers constantly enter into the competition, very many of whom certainly neither succeed, nor can long maintain the position into which they have thrust themselves. Still, however, succes sors have been always found willing, in their turns, to try their fortunes, to hope for the best, and to encounter the worst which can happen. Although an influx of this kind must, of necessity, have greatly injured regular competitors possessing capital, yet the constant demand for yarn, which it has created and supported, must, upon the whole, have greatly overbalanced, to the spinner, the losses to which it has subjected him, by occasional bad debts. The influence of this demand has constantly tended to raise the prices of yarn, even under very great depressions of the prices of cloth; and, upon the whole, the trade of spinning has almost uniformly afforded profit, and sometimes great profit. The prices of yarn in the market have indeed sunk almost inconceivably low, and the wages of the operative spinners, reckoned by the quantity, have fallen at least as much as those of the weavers. Yet, singular as the fact must appear, a spinner can still earn 30s. per week, by fewer hours of labour than a weav er can earn 10s. The solution of this seeming paradox is simple, although curious and important. The proprietors of cottonspinning manufactories found their interest to lie in improving that machinery which was their own property, and which was known to be susceptible of immense improvement. Hence they were enabled to reduce their prices of labour, with very little diminution of the actual wages of the workman. The tools, looms, or machinery, of the weaving department, abandoned by the manufacturer exclusively to the workmen, have been very little improved. These proprietors, it must be obvious, have not time, nor capital, nor education, sufficient to fit them for the intense and unremitted study of economical improvement, which would be necessary to reduce prices without lessening wages. The unfavourable contrast between the relative situations of the spinner and the weaver will naturally excite the inquiry,-Why has the latter branch been so prodigiously overstocked? In the earlier and more prosperous years of the cotton manufacture, the mode of conducting it was such, as to render the situation of a weaver uncommonly alluring to the operative class of mankind. A weaver was limited to no precise residence, nor confined to the hours of a regular manufactory. He could generally procure a loom and utensils, at least partly, upon credit; and his proportion of a shop-rent rarely exceeded 12s. or 15s. annually. Whenever a certain quantity of work was finished, he could carry it instantly to the warehouse, on any lawful day, and he as instantly received payment, or a sum to account, frequently exceeding what he had actually earned. Thus he was sole and uncontrolled master of his own time, could make a holiday when he chose, and repair his loss by working a few extra hours upon other occasions. If active and frugal, he had it in his power, by working hard, to accumulate money;-if fond of recreation, he could indulge his propensity, to a moderate degree, without serious injury or inconvenience. Nor was his labour of that fatiguing kind which Section First. requires great strength, or produces subject of consideration at some fuR. JAMIESON. great exhaustion. Many descriptions ture period. of goods could be woven by boys of only eight or ten years of age. Hence poor people, with large families, eagerly crowded their children into a business by which they were able, in a very few months, not only to maintain themselves, but to assist their parents and relations. Masters were easily found willing, without any fee or premium, to teach apprentices for a moiety of their earnings; and to bind them only three, or, at the utmost, four years; and many young men, so instructed, became independent in income, and their own masters, at the early age of 15 or 16 years. The trade was long, indeed, very attractive, especially in some species of fancywork. So late as 1800, the writer of this article had occasion to see a legal proof taken, by which it appeared, that a weaver, by overlooking and teaching six apprentices, had earned, on an average of six months, above L. 4, 12s. weekly for his moiety, and had in a few years amassed property to the extent of upwards of L. 500. These advantages will fully account for that overstock of operatives, to which the present depression is solely attributable. (To be concluded in our next.) ON THE ORIGIN OF THE NATION AND The poetical narratives of Ossian, compared with the histories of the times which he has celebrated, shew the great power of the northern men at sea, and their warlike expeditions to the British Islands, even long before the days of Fingal. "In other days," said Carril, in the introduction to Swaran's Invasion of Ireland, “came the sons of Ocean to Erin. A thousand vessels bounded on waves to Ullin's lovely plains. The sons of Innisfail arose to meet the race of darkbrown shields." In several passages in the poems, mention is made of such invasions, both of Ireland and Morven, by the men of Lochlin or Scandinavia, long before the times of the poet. Connal had often fought with them. "The fleet of Ocean comes. Connal falls. His tomb is seen by the mariner from the waves of the north." A hereditary feud between the young Fingal and the Northern men seems to have continued, without interruption, till about the year 211, as the bards, after Caracul's retreat, sang, "Our delight will be in the war of the ocean; our hands shall grow red in the blood of Lochlin." Men of Scandinavian extraction had, long before this, made themselves masters of The ana part of North Britain. MAGNUSEN, PROFESSOR, &c. &c. cestors of Dubh, or Duth Maruno, COPENHAGEN, 1817. MR EDITOR, THE following is a translation, from the Danish, of a dissertation of the learned Professor Magnusen of Copenhagen. It is only an appendix to a larger work by the same author, in which his profound knowledge of the language and antiquities of his native country, (Iceland,)* and of Scandinavia, has enabled him to bring forward many learned, ingenious, and interesting illustrations of the poems ascribed to Ossian. The two remain ing sections of the Treatise on the Picts shall follow in the subsequent numbers of your Miscellany, if you consider them as worthy of insertion. The remarks on Ossian may be the * Mr Magnusen is one of the most distinguished of the Icelandic literati. Vide Sir George Mackenzie's Travels, p. 218. had, as we see, for many years, pos- * The Norman Rollo, or Rolf, became the founder of a race of powerful dukes and kings. Einar, one of his brothers, was prince of the Orkneys, a distinction which was enjoyed by his descendants; while another of his brothers, called Hrollaug, died a poor peasant in Iceland;-so different were the fortunes, in those days, of Northern men of the same rank and family, a mong their expatriated countrymen! In the war against Starno and Svaran, which is described in Cathloda, he was the chief leader of the Fingalians, probably because, being of Norwegian descent, he was better acquainted with the country and its inhabitants. He is described as a warrior without fear, a mighty hunter, and an adventurous seaman on Crum Thormoth's wave. Concerning him and his forefathers, mentioned by Ossian as mighty champions, his father Starnmor, and his son Ceandona, (i. e. head of the people,) the Scots still have many popular tales, although, according to Macpherson, the poems on which they are founded are long since lost. Duthmaruno's territory was in the north of Scotland, over against the Orkney Islands, and consequently in the vicinity of Caithness. As he, brave and Thormod or Thormoth, a genuine old Scandic name, by which many brave men were designated, where it occurs in Ossian, must be understood to refer to Scandinavian men, or places inhabited by them. The Gaelic Mod or Moth, according to Shaw, like the Icelandic Madr, or Mathr, signifies a man." The Welsh term Modwr, a king, or ruler, probably had originally the same meaning; and Thormoth may here mean Nor-men, many of whom connected the name of Thor, their chief object of worship, with their own, and might, with reason, call themselves Thor's Men, (as in fact they are called by the Pagan Scald Einar Skalaglam, in the poem called Velickla, quoted by Snorro in Oluf Tryggveson's Saga, cap. 16,) as those of them who were afterwards baptized called themselves Christ's Men, and Cross Men, as we see in the unpublished History of Saint Olaf, and the battle of Stiklestad. If we are right in this conjecture, Crum Thormoth will sig, nify simply" the Nor-men's bay, or gulf,' as crum has the same meaning in the Gothic as in the Celtic dialects; and it may here designate a bay then called Thor's men's-bay, a name which, in all likeli hood, it derived from the inhabitants of the neighbourhood being from the north. According to Ralph Higden, Matthese of Westminster, and others, Caithness, the first settlement of the Picts in Scotland, was conceded to them by the Britons. It is also very probable that they came hither over the adjacent Orkney Islands, from those that were more distant, and from Norway. The names of the oldest towns in the county of Caithness, such as Wick, Thurso, &c. are Scandinavian; and in the History of Orkney (Orknejinga Saga) we find many places denominated after the god Thor, such as Thorsà, (Thor's-brook,) VOL. 1. renowned as he was, is seldom mentioned in Fingal's expeditions, he seems to have been his ally, but not his subject. As to the rest, Duthmaruno gave powerful assistance in the conflict with the race of Morni, and probably also was, in no small degree, instrumental in preserving to Fingal the throne of his fathers; Duthmaruno seems, therefore, to have been one of the most powerful princes of the Caledonians in his day. Beside this celebrated northern fa mily, who had, as we see, so early established a dominion in Scotland, it appears to me that there are traces of many others to be met with in the tales of Ossian. In the bard's own time, the town of Balclutha, Alcluithe, or Alclyde, appears to have been in the possession of a people of Scandinavian origin, and to have been the capital of one of their kingdoms in Britain. It lay a little to the north of the wall of Antoninus, on the east coast of Scotland. Bede says, that the name of the town, in the British language, signifies Clyde's Rock. The same denomination would, in old Norse, be Hallr Klydar.* The name of the river (Klyda or Klythà) may also be derived from the same language. It has several large and steep falls, from the din and roaring of which it might well be called Klyda or Klydà. Icelandic, at present, the noise of a torrent or waterfall is called Klidr (or Klydr) and Ar klidr. In this city was born Gildas, † the eldest British historian, late in the fifth, or early in the sixth century. His own name, as well as that of his father, seems to be of Scandinavian origin. According to some writers, his father was called Caunus, and according to others, Navus. The names Kuun and Nefi In Thorsej, (Thor's-isle,) Thòrsvich,( Thor'scove,) and Thorsdalr, ( Thor's-dale.) * Balklyda, (Balklytha or Ballklytha,) either from Bali, a height, or Ballr, a hill or cliff, would bear nearly the same signification. There is a brook in Iceland called Ballarà, from which a country house in the neighbourhood has its name. Accord ing to Macpherson, bal here means a building or place of abode, and the Icelandic ból, bæli, has the same import, as has also the Greek mons. + According to Pinkerton's "Enquiry into the History of Scotland," &c. Vol. I Part II. cap. 15. R were in use in the north in the earliest times of which we have any account, but have since been laid aside. Two or three centuries before Beda's time, reigned in the same city of Balclutha, or Alclyde, the princes celebrated by Ossian in the poem of Carthon, Reuthanir, (properly Reidamer or Hreidmar, whom Fingal slew,) and his daughter's son Carthon. * It is worthy of remark, that their kingdom is called "The Stranger's Land," and Carthon himself and his followers, the "Sons of the Strangers," and the "Sons of the Sea." The lastmentioned hero invaded Morven with a numerous fleet, to revenge the death of Reuthamir and the destruction of Balclutha. He fell in this expedition. His mother was called Moina. Speaking of her visits to the grave of Carthon, the poet says, "She is seen, not like the daughters of the hill; her robes are from the Stranger's Land, and she is still alone." Macpherson describes the people of Morven, and the other Britons, as perfectly resembling each other in manners; but here Moina seems to have worn a costume quite different from that of the women of Morven; and the circumstance of her being still alone, gives us to understand that she belonged to a people of different origin and manners. It is, moreover, remarkable, that the dying Carthon breaks out into the following lamentation :-"A foreign tomb receives, in youth, the last of Reuthamir's race. Darkness dwells in Balclutha: the shadows of grief in Crathmo." From this last passage, one may conclude that he was nearly related to the fore-mentioned Scandinavian family which ruled in Crathmo Craulo. ↑ "This name the hero received from the storm that drove his father Clessamor from Balclutha, and is said by Macpherson to signify the murmur of waves." The Scandinavian Kúrdunr (perhaps of old pronounced Kurthonr, the accusative case of which is Karthon) means "the storm's noise," or din. +Carthon was the last of Reuthamir's race; and his kingdom probably devolved to his countrymen of Scandinavian descent. Some historians are of opinion that Alclyde, which is also called Dunclyde, (i. e. Clydetown,) with the adjacent territory, was in the possession of the Picts from the middle of the second till the fifth century. In the I am also of opinion, that the Scandic inhabitants of the maritime parts of Scotland are celebrated in the poem of Lathmon and Oithona. Macpherson thinks that Lathmon, (perhaps Lathmondr, or Ladmondr,) son of King Nuath, (Knut?) who reigned in Dunlathmon, (which, in the Norse language, would have been called Tun Ladmundar or Ladmunds Tun,) was a Pictish prince from the east coast of Scotland. Several circumstances induce me to suppose that he was of northern origin. He seems, at first, to have been in close alliance with Dunrommath, a prince or chief of the Orkney Islands, as he accompanied him in a warlike expedition against Fingal's kingdom. They there lost a great battle. Dunrommath saved himself by flight; but Lathmon was made prisoner, and was under the necessity of accepting peace on such terms as the conqueror chose to impose upon him. This, no doubt, put an end to the good understanding between Lathmon and Dunrommath; and the latter, shortly after, when Lathmon was gone to "the wars of his fathers, to the moss-covered rock of Duthormoth," + attacked his castle, put to death those who defended it, and carried off Oithona, (perhaps Oithuna, or Auduna,) who was betrothed to Gaul, Fingal's general. Lathmon's confederacy with a prince of Orkney against Fingal, and the pure northern word Thormod, from which either his fathers or their possessions were denominated, clearly indicate their Scandic extraction. The dying Oithona calls her fathers "the race of the mighty," and speaks of their castle as large, and well fortified. I suspect that the families of Duthmarunos, Carthon, and Lathmon, like most of the other inhabitants of the Orkneys and Shetland, were of Scan |