Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 152.djvu/11

there is no agriculture—nothing but grass is grown. Without manufactures, it might support 20,000 inhabitants, instead of its present teeming population of over 600,000, It will not be denied, therefore, that the preservation of the cotton manufacture is of some consequence to a great body of the Queen’s subjects in this corner of her Majesty's dominions. And this is only one-sixth of the population of Lancashire (making ample deductions for the farming, coal-mining, and other employments) dependent upon trade and manufactures for its maintenance.

The power-loom was perfected in Blackburn, as the spinning-mule was in Bolton and Oldham; and the Blackburn district has, from the beginnings of the cotton trade, been noted for its weaving machinery and its skilled and hard-working weavers. Although Blackburn has lost in twenty-five years a full third of its spinning trade, it need not have yielded to despondency had but the weaving branch continued to develop. In a town which has in its weaving-sheds over 60,000 looms, the average number of looms running has been lessened by 6000 within a few years. In Preston, too, the decrease of looms employed is stated to be very large; and in some of the smaller towns around Blackburn there has been a considerable stoppage of looms. This is not the worst feature of the business. Half the weaving-sheds in the district have changed hands since the strike of 1878, having been transferred either on account of the failure of the former owners or tenants, or of their withdrawal from the trade, sick of its fluctuations and generally unprofitable results. The new tenants are for the most part men of practical knowledge and pushing character, indeed, but who have been induced to take the places by the offer of them at about half the rentals which would have been demanded when the trade was better. The financial weakness of the junior class of manufacturers (striving and deserving persons as they mostly are) is an additional cause of uneasiness as to the future of a manufacture which is so much in danger of collapse from the external pressure to which it is being subjected. Just now weaving-sheds are unsaleable, and cannot in some instances be let on any terms whatever. Great capitalists there yet are in the business, but they are few, become fewer year by year; and such as remain, do so, they avow, not because they can make it pay, but from attachment to concerns founded by their fathers or grandfathers, or from a sense of obligation to the corps of work-people whom they have employed so long, and who still trustfully look to them for work to earn the means of living.

It is true that, while in the largest and oldest towns cotton manufacturing has for some time past ceased to extend, and latterly has fallen off appreciably, it has made a sudden spurt in one or two new and small places. Also in Burnley, a good-sized town, more weaving-sheds were built, and some thousands more looms were started after progress had been arrested in the Blackburn district. Nelson, a few miles from Burnley, has sprung up from a hamlet to be a town of over 20,000 inhabitants and a municipal borough, on the strength of the erection in a short period of a number of weaving-mills. These instances of recent local increase may seem to go against the statement that the staple manufacture of Lancashire has suffered a decided check. Really, they do but import the