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Giezendanner, however, did not think trade was a bad thing in itself, though it could lead to pride and extravagance in spending, and Bräker could have pointed out to him that the Toggenburg had a flourishing trade in cotton goods which were exchanged for these foreign imports. The cotton industry also gave employment to a vast number of outworkers, who prepared the raw material by cleaning and carding, spun yarn and wove cloth in their own homes and passed it on to the factories for finishing, dyeing and distribution. In the St. Gallen region, where the manufacture of linen cloth was already well established, cotton manufacture developed very quickly. By 1790 about 100,000 people were employed in it in the St. Gallen region, and 34,000 in Glarus. It was not the only way of earning a living outside farming, but none of the others could have provided employment on anything like the same scale. Bräker mentions water-powered mills of various kinds, [autobiography chapter 13], and people would also have been employed in service jobs such as transport and innkeeping. Simmler says that there were few craftsmen in the rural areas and that they operated mainly only in the winter. The only other industry mentioned by Bräker as having been practised by his own family is saltpetre-burning, but it was poorly paid, involved travelling away from home, and was dirty and dangerous work [see notes to chapters 5 and 22 of his autobiography].

It is not surprising that outwork in the cotton industry was attractive to potential workers. It offered employment to a whole family, parents, children and grandparents, it used a range of skills which many workers already possessed, and the simpler tasks could be picked up even by very young children. Nicolai (p 39) says that even as late as the 1780s the export trade in cloth was doing so well that twelve-year-olds could earn their keep. A spinner (or spinster, many of the spinners were unmarried women) could earn as much as two guilders a week, the same woman as an indoor servant or farmhand would get free board and lodging and eight guilders a year. According to Böning [biog. pp 69-70] a guilder would buy at least ten pounds of bread, or three pounds of butter, or six pounds of meat; a shirt cost a guilder and 36 kreutzer, and a pair of heavy-duty shoes cost up to three guilders. St. Gallen had been a centre of the linen industry since the 13 th century, but in the middle of the 18 th century this was supplanted by cotton and muslin manufacture. In the Toggenburg it took only a few decades to displace agriculture as the chief source of income. Simmler says "... every Toggenburger is so to speak a born weaver, who as soon as autumn comes digs himself into his cellar like a badger into his hole, and stays there until the warm sun of spring calls him out into the fields". Looms were built in cellars because the cloth needed to be kept damp - one can see why Bräker welcomed the spring so joyfully!

Most textile outworkers used the services of middlemen who dealt with merchants and manufacturers in St. Gallen, Herisau, and Winterthur. Some middlemen were employed by the merchants, others worked for themselves and took their small profit between buying the raw cotton and selling the finished yarn or cloth. Their main function in both cases was to transport the raw material to the outworkers and collect the finished articles. The cotton was imported from the eastern Mediterranean or the Caribbean. Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister" [book 3, chapter 5] gives an attractive picture of the "Yarn-carrier's" life as he travels round the remote mountain hamlets. He is greeted by all the inhabitants and gives out sweets to the children. Older people ask him for news about the wider world, about the state of the cotton industry, or for medical advice - he carries medicines with him. Goethe describes villages even more remote than those of the Toggenburg, and acknowledges that the cotton industry has brought them an increase of prosperity. High up in the mountains, among fir, larch and birch trees, they find "scattered country dwellings, of the poorest sort indeed, each carpentered by its inhabitants from shrunken timbers, the large black shingles of the roofs weighted down with stones so that the wind will not blow them away. But in spite of their dismal outward appearance the cramped inner space was not unpleasing, it was warm, dry and cleanly kept...".

Both subsistence farming and domestic industry did not always present such an idyllic picture. The farmer had to content with an unpredictable climate and occasional plagues of pests such as caterpillars; the industrial outworkers were subject to fluctuations in demand for their labour. Both farmer and outworker, who might well be the same person, were strongly affected by

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