Saxony

Of all manufacturing countries on the Continent there is scarcely one which developed so powerfully under the Continental System as Saxony. Various factors contributed to this. To begin with, Saxony lay at some distance from France and was governed by a native prince in whom Napoleon had confidence. A powerful French interest further demanded that its economic life should be spared from violent dislocations and galling restrictions, because the Leipzig Fair, which has seldom had in its long history so much importance as during the Napoleonic wars, demanded a certain liberty of movement for its existence, and that existence was of great importance to French exports, the direct connexions of which seldom extended farther to the east than Leipzig. Under these circumstances it was natural that Napoleon should take care not to exercise there the continual intervention that fell to the lot of his vassal states that bordered on France. On the other hand, Saxony had an excellent situation for connexions both with the North Sea and with the Baltic, and also, before the incorporation of Trieste, with the Mediterranean, and it was therefore less affected than most countries by the changed directions of maritime trade. Even though the Leipzig Fair, owing to this change, diminished in importance during the last years of the Continental System, yet the supply of cotton for the country's own requirements was even then, as far as one can judge, sufficient; and in any case it was incomparably better than in France, as is very clearly shown by the foregoing tables illustrating the prices of cotton.

Saxony was already at this time a manufacturing country with a many-sided development, both as regards the majority of textile industries—cotton, wool, linen—and iron-working. But so far as I know, it is the history of the cotton industry under the Continental System that has been subjected to the most thorough investigation. This has been done especially in the work that has so often been cited in these pages, namely, König's Die Sächsische Baumwollenindustrie am Ende des vorigen Jahrhunderts und während der Kontinentalsperre (1899), which on the whole would seem to be the most useful of the existing monographs on the industrial conditions of this period. In general, this one-sidedness in the literature very well corresponds to the reality, for it is in the sphere of the cotton industry that one really has to expect the workings of the Continental System in Saxony.

The Saxon cotton industry, which had a long history behind it, had not become the object of British competition until the seventeen-seventies, after the inventions in the spinning industry, principally as regards the fine goods (muslins) that were manufactured in Voigtland in the south of Saxony, mainly in Plauen. The competition had been met by the imitation of the British goods, but for this purpose the Saxon yarn was too coarse; and this brought about the admission of British yarn for the muslin factories shortly after 1790. But even then there was no more than a short breathing space, for before the close of the century the British competition was regarded as overwhelming, even in the matter of muslins. The second main division of Saxon cottons, the coarser calicoes intended for printing, which were produced on the northern slope of the Erzgebirge, centering in Chemnitz, held out some-what longer. That too was based on British yarn as warp, but it also went under immediately before the introduction of the Continental System.

What made it possible to check this development under the Continental System, however, was not only the fact that Saxony was an old home of the cotton industry, which was only gradually disturbed in its position, but also two other important facts. One was that what had been revolutionized in the British cotton trade at this time was really only spinning, while the power-loom was still only in its infancy. The beginning of the Continental System was simultaneous with the well-known and peculiar phase of the British industrial revolution when the hand-weavers, who were later reduced to abysmal misery, had brilliant incomes owing to the scarcity of workers to weave the increased quantities of yarn produced by spinning-machines. No doubt the economic organization of British weaving also had been changed under the pressure of the great spinning-mills, and the technique of weaving had also been improved in Great Britain. But for a country which was able to bring its own spinning industry into approximate equality with the British spinning industry, there was still some possibility of holding out against British competition; and we here come to the second fact that made possible a restoration of the Saxon cotton industry when the Continental System placed difficulties in the way of the importation of British cotton. This second fact was that the spinning-machinery had already obtained a firm footing in the country before the blockade rendered difficult the importation of British machines and British operators. Hargreaves's spinning-jenny, which was only a multiple spinning-wheel and therefore did not put an end to, but rather supported, home industry, had already reached Saxony in the seventeen-eighties, and there were thousands of machines there before the Continental System. But of far greater significance was the fact that in the year 1801, in consequence of the importation of British operators, two great spinning-mills were started in Chemnitz, one with Crompton's mule and the other with Arkwright's water-frame. This created the possibility of producing both long and fine thread, though not by any means so fine as the British thread (mule-twist up to no. 70 and water-twist up to no. 36), and, in general, of keeping pace with the development of British technique. It was really only the mule-spindles that obtained a firm footing during the period of the Continental System; while water-frames never came into common use, and jennies almost completely disappeared, the number of mule-spindles increasing steadily from 13,200 in 1806 to 255,900 in 1813 (of which in the half-year between Michaelmas 1811 and Easter 1812, there was a rise from 132,000 to 210,150, an increase of 59 per cent.). The development of machine spinning suffered a slight check at the collapse of the Continental System in 1813-14; but on the whole the results attained in this matter seem to have held their ground. Alongside this, moreover, there arose a special and comprehensive industry for the manufacture of spinning-machinery, distributed over some dozen workshops, of which the most technically advanced, though not the largest, was under the management of the British mechanic who had fitted up the first mule spinning-mill in 1801.

Thus it is fairly clear what causes made it possible for the Continental System to check the decline in the Saxon textile industries. Despite their importance, the period did not bring any general quantitative increase in production. According to König's calculations, which are based on the year 1805 when the effects of British competition had already appeared all along the line, there was only one year (1810) that exhibited higher figures (an increase of 25 per cent.) than the year taken as the basis, while the figures of the other years and average were lower. The course of development showed a decline for the muslin industry, which was dependent on the almost unobtainable high numbers of yarn. That industry partly passed to Switzerland, and partly lost through British competition its most important remaining market, Turkey. On the other hand, there was an increase of nearly 40 per cent. for unprinted calicoes, so that the cotton industry of Voigtland, and consequently of Saxony as a whole, passed more and more to the production of calicoes. In a somewhat similar way calico-printing grew, and the results were so satisfactory that the British could sell nothing whatever when, after Napoleon's fall, they first showed themselves openly at the Michaelmas Fair at Leipzig in 1814.

In spite of all this—and here is perhaps the point that presents the greatest interest—the Saxon cotton industry, like the correspondent French one, had not been in a position to keep pace with the technical development of Great Britain during the period of the blockade. There were practically no steam spinning-mills, but somewhat more than half of the spinning-mills were driven by water-power and the rest by animal-power or hand-power. Far more important, however—for the former was evidently mainly due to a good supply of natural power—is the fact that cylinder-printing did not come into use during the period, but calico-printing was still performed by the extremely slow hand method. Consequently, it took the British only three or four years (1817) to get the better of the Saxon calico industry; and under the influence of this competition the transition to machine-printing, which it had not been possible, or, more correctly, necessary, to adopt during the long period of blockade, took place in 1820. Although the Continental System had a very strong stimulating effect on industrial development in many directions, therefore, yet it had not built up industry so firmly as to prevent a relapse for some years after the close of the blockade; and this was due to the incapacity of protection to provide for the adoption of the technical advances that had not been introduced before the beginning of the blockade.