Note 29 — Chapter III
Reading edition
Were any confirmation of this conclusion needed, it is afforded us by the fact that in 1786 a spinner received ten shillings a pound for spinning cotton of a certain quality: in 1795 he had received only eightpence, or a fifteenth part of ten shillings; and yet in the course of a similar day’s labour, he made more money than he had been able to do under the former scale of payment. The price of spinning No. 100 was ten shillings per pound in 1786; in 1793, two shillings and sixpence. The subsequent drop to eightpence coincided with the application of machinery to the working of the mule.