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SPINDLE, LOOM, AND NEEDLE IN NEW ENGLAND.
The major steps in the manufacture of clothes are four: first to harvest and clean the fiber or wool; second, to card it and spin it into threads; third, to weave the threads into cloth; and, finally to fashion and sew the cloth into clothes.

We have already seen the influence of Eli Whitney's cotton gin on the first process, and the series of inventions for spinning and weaving, which so profoundly changed the textile industry in Great Britain, has been mentioned.

It will be the business of this chapter to tell how spinning and weaving machinery was introduced into the United States and how a Yankee inventor laid the keystone of the arch of clothing machinery by his invention of the sewing machine.
Great Britain was determined to keep to herself the industrial secrets she had gained.

According to the economic beliefs of the eighteenth century, which gave place but slowly to the doctrines of Adam Smith, monopoly rather than cheap production was the road to success.