Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 152.djvu/12

a portion of the trade formerly enjoyed by the towns where powerloom weaving originated has been drawn away to other neighbourhoods. Burnley has bereft Blackburn of the trade in narrow cloths, for which a lighter and. cheaper loom, made in Burnley, has been specially designed; and the transfer has been materially helped by a difference in the wage-scale for weaving of the two towns, in favour of Burnley for these narrow goods. But Burnley’s growth also rests upon inferior makes and deteriorated qualities, and therefore it is not likely to endure. In like manner, Nelson, by the accident of having a lower list of prices for weaving of such sorts, has filched from Preston the manufacture of certain fancy goods, such as sateens, and has thus attained its rapid growth at the expense of Preston. Its prosperity must be arrested when the advantage is taken away, either by raising of the price for weaving at Nelson, or the lowering of it elsewhere. The considerable variations in the prices paid for weaving the same sorts of cloth in different towns, even within the same district, has been a source of grievous injury to manufacturers whose mills are situated in localities where the wage-lists are highest. They find themselves beaten out of the market by younger traders, who have cunningly set up their weaving-sheds where they learnt that wages were lowest for the sorts they intended chiefly to make. The standard lists of wages were calculated and fixed by agreements between masters and operatives many years ago, and great changes in the descriptions of cloths made, have rendered the lists obsolete, and very unequal and unfair as between one town and another. Repeated and persistent attempts have been made to negotiate a uniform wage-list for the whole weaving branch in Lancashire, but they have always been frustrated by the averseness of the parties to accept any increase or reduction of those prices on existing lists which were to their advantage. The “wit of man” is not equal to the production of a revised list of prices for weaving which shall show a gain all round, on every kind of work, in each locality, to both operatives and masters. So the old lists are allowed to stand, with all their anomalies; and the extension of weaving in one corner of the county means nothing except the starting of new looms there, to get the benefit of a lower scale of wages by weaving selected cloths previously made in other towns, whose weavers are paid more for weaving those goods; and means probably the stoppage of the old machinery, or its replacement by looms adapted for weaving other goods already produced in excess of the demand. This transfer of specialties of the manufacture from one place to another is therefore no sign of increase in the trade at large, but implies usually the waste of capital by a double investment in two places to supply the same article, the first investor having his capital rendered useless by the action of the second;—another cause, in fact, of the multiplicity of failures in the trade, and of the general impoverishment of the cotton manufacturers as a class, to which we have previously adverted. The local extensions, I repeat, are no evidence that the trade as a whole is growing, but illustrate what all traders too well know, that competition, as it waxes keener, seizes upon every circumstance of variation which promises the slightest advantage to the last comer. In this case the local growth is adventitious, and may already have been checked