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country, this colony. They wouldn't permit us to do any manufacturing. I have forgotten, but I once knew whether Slater had come of a textile family in England or not. I think not, but he may have. They did some hand weaving and spinning here. There was local, domestic cloth on the market - not of cotton, but of linen and wool, which was a natural adjunct to an agricultural process. But they had to import the biggest part of their cloth from England. By this time there was quite a settlement here. The colony was no longer a child.

Mr. Slater went to England, deliberately got himself a job in a textile mill without anybody's knowing that he came from the colony. They needed hands and he just got a job as a hand. He was a good and faithful worker and he got around. He was something of a mechanic and he got to be a loom-fixer, as they call it, which is the mechanic in the trade always. When the looms broke down, he repaired them. When the spinning mechanisms broke down, he repaired them.

This fellow, not being allowed to take out of England one piece of machinery or one plan, in his three years in the mill memorized every part of the machinery. The spinning jenny had only been recently invented. He memorized the whole process of the mechanical spinning. He memorized