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(at Burnley it has been very sharply), and it is insignificant when compared with the stagnation or actual decline which is seen over the whole area of the Lancashire cotton piece-goods manufacture.

Enough has been stated to sustain the assertion that the cotton trade of Lancashire is not what it once was, and, with what follows respecting the external conditions and adverse influences, to warrant the prognostic of its decline. To bystanders watching the checkered course of this trade, the prospect has seemed to darken without a single luminous break of late years; but if one found that the men who are strenuously engaged in carrying on the trade, and bearing the load of its crosses, were still hopeful of a recovery from its atrophy, the sympathetic onlooker would be fain to attribute his dejected view to lack of acquaintance with the inner working of the trade. Lancashire traders are not, as a body, naturally croakers. They possess a manful self-reliance, a sustaining sense of their competency to meet foreign adversaries on fair terms, ay, even on terms not too outrageously unfair and unequal, and in the contest to keep their own. They have the Briton’s hereditary failing, of not knowing when they are beaten. Formerly, in the days when the cotton goods of Lancashire found free sale abroad in every important country, the makers of and traders in them had an abiding confidence in the future of their trade. In temporary emergencies they spoke cheerfully of the unlimited scope for increase of business in supplying the wants of enormous unreached provinces and populations in the interiors of India and China. That was prior to the creation of the system of State railways in British India, and the establishment of a rival cotton manufacture with British capital, machinery, and management, in India. At that time it was not feared that either the continent of Europe or the United States of America would be closed against British manufactures by prohibitory import duties; and it was thought that the immense purchases of food articles, raw materials, and manufactured goods in which they excelled, from the United States, France, Germany, and Russia, must always be paid for by consignments of British textiles and other manufactures, of which cottons must be the bulk.

Sadly altered now is the tone of producers and traders in Lancashire cottons when they talk of foreign trade. Their state of mind is that of anxiety and alarm. They are all pessimists; an optimist is unheard of on Manchester Exchange. Lancashire chafes as it feels that the inlets of trade in foreign lands are blocked everywhere. Significantly, the gloomiest views of the future are expressed by those manufacturers and merchants whose foresight is keenest, who have had the largest experience, and who watch events and the markets most narrowly. The wisest men in the trade have warned their fellows and the operatives that evil days may be in store, and must be prepared for. The oldest firms amongst mill-owners have shown what they expect by their having ceased long since to extend their works or to increase their production. Some make no secret of their wish to be out of the business, and one by one sell out when they can at almost any sacrifice. Before the ailments of the business became so inveterate, a number of large concerns were converted into joint-stock companies, that being the only method of disposing of the mills for a price near the