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are only four millions of people, yet they import £25,000,000 worth of British goods annually, their total imports being worth £67,000,000, and their exports are about equal. If they continue to consume British manufactures at the same ratio, by the time they have doubled their numbers our export trade with Australasia will be worth £50,000,000 a-year. That may be forty years hence; but it is something to be permitted to hope that one quarter of the globe peopled by British men and women may remain to us, and cultivate a trade which eventually may be of the first magnitude, and an inestimable resource to the manufacturers and operatives of the old country in a later generation. At present our trade in cotton goods with Australasia is worth over £2,000,000 a-year, and is increasing.

We have now glanced at the existing condition and outlook of the trade in British cotton manufactures—the Lancashire trade, as it may be called—with the principal foreign countries and the British colonies. There remains British India; and from what has been shown of the limited and decreasing quantity and value of our cotton trade with other countries, the paramount importance of India to the trade of the United Kingdom, and of Lancashire most of all, will be manifest. Frankly, the reason of all reasons why the decline of Lancashire as a manufacturing county seems to us inevitable, is, that the danger is imminent of our being robbed of India as the chief market for British cotton piece-goods which it has hitherto been. An extremely formidable rival cotton manufacture upon the modern system has, as the world knows, been planted in the course of a generation in the Bombay district of India, prosecuted by companies of Anglo-Indian and native capitalists, and, having become firmly rooted, grows with portentous rapidity. Abundant capital is at the command of these associations of traders, who, encouraged by their success thus far, and made confident by the knowledge of the many advantages they possess over their competitors in the United Kingdom, do not conceal their intention that the products of their mills shall, at no distant date, displace the bulk of the products of Lancashire spindles and looms in the bazaars of India. The Lancashire manufacturers may be excused for their uneasiness, not unmixed with irritation, as they feel this indispensable branch of their business slipping from their grasp; and they have demanded, and continue to press for, interposition on their behalf by the Imperial Parliament and Government, in the form of an identical factory law for the Indian textile manufacture with that which is imposed upon themselves.

The Indian military Mutiny of 1857-58 had no sooner been suppressed by the Government, and the anomalous rule of the East India Company supplanted by the regular Government of the Queen, than, availing themselves of the better security for property and trade thus afforded, a number of capitalists, some British, some native Indian, formed companies to erect and work cotton-mills in the district around the city and port of Bombay. Furnished with engines, machinery, and equipments obtained from England, and managed upon the British system by competent overseers, also brought from this country, the Bombay mills were to be worked by employing the labour of the peasantry of India, who should be trained to tend the machines, and to man-