text:  Now it will not be denied that the cotton manufacture in this country has enjoyed supereminent advantages over that of any other in the world whether we look at the protective scale of duties maintained for half a century in its favour against foreign competition or regard those glorious inventions and improvements in machinery of which rigorous prohibitive laws against export during the same period in force long secured it a strict and even to a more recent period a _quasi_ monopoly and gave it a start in the race which seemed to leave all chance of foreign concurrence or equal ratio of progression out of the question altogether