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nominal value. Now, it is next to impossible to float an established private business in cotton manufacturing as a company. On a forced sale the depreciation of a cotton-mill anywhere in Lancashire amounts to from half to three-fourths of an appraiser’s valuation.

The proceedings of town councils in the Lancashire towns, and discussions of towns’ affairs at burgesses’ meetings and in the local newspapers, disclose the constant consciousness of those who take the lead of the gravity of the situation of the staple trade. Towns which, thirty years ago, were held up by their inhabitants as bright examples of enterprise and progress, are now proclaimed aloud to be “decaying towns”; and proposals for carrying out the most desirable towns’ improvements are exclaimed against and vetoed on the ground that, in the existing state of their principal trades, fresh expenditure upon public improvements ought not to be incurred. An exception is made as to votes of municipal bodies for technical schools, which are felt to be a necessity for the better training in mechanical science and artistic taste of the rising generation of the workmen. Also the local rates of some great towns have been heavily mortgaged by lavish votes towards the construction of public works promoted as a means of bringing trade to those towns, by cheapening the cost of carriage to and from the place of manufacture of raw material and manufactured goods. The ambitious scheme of the Ship Canal from the Mersey estuary above Liverpool to Manchester, upon which the Canal Company and the corporation of the latter city have jointly spent over £13,000,000 of money, originated in the conviction of some of Manchester’s ablest citizens that the city was in danger of losing the position it has gained and enjoyed as an emporium of manufacturing trade. The corporation of Preston, too, have committed themselves to the outlay of a million and a half upon a scheme for training and deepening the main channel of the Ribble, so as to render it navigable for ships of medium tonnage from the mouth of the estuary up to Preston, and in the construction of a large dock near the town. Preston was moved to that dubious venture by its apprehension that its trade could not be retained unless some advantage of cheap water-carriage could be offered as an inducement to capitalists to erect new mills in the town. These works, when completed, at a cost which may prove very burdensome to the ratepayers, can only benefit Manchester and Preston at the expense of the other manufacturing towns a few miles further inland, to which ship canals and navigable river-channels cannot be extended, and which must still receive and forward their goods to port by the dearer land-carriage.

Now, let us go on to consider the circumstances which, by their combined action, have arrested the growth of the foreign trade of Lancashire, and by their continued stress threaten to bring to pass the incurable decline of its commercial power. It may be observed that a trade in an article of universal utility, once fairly established, will last so long as the conditions out of which it was created can be maintained, and no longer. The consumption of it must not diminish; it must not be superseded by some novel thing designed for the same purpose; the price at which it can be supplied must not be advanced beyond the purchasing ability of the whole body of consumers; the quality and appear-