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double the quantity of work in the shorter day that the Indian operative puts through in the longer one, still the difference in cost, in the item of wages, is wide enough to account for the successful aggression of the Bombay Cotton Spinning and Manufacturing Companies upon the position formerly held by the cottons of Lancashire in the markets of British India. The capture by these advancing invaders of portion after portion of the trade of Lancashire with the people of India goes on uninterruptedly. When and where is it to stop! We are told that the whole of the trade with India, China, and Japan in the coarser counts of cotton yarn up to 24’s twist is regarded as already gone; and it is anticipated that in counts of yarn up to 30’s that trade can and will be taken entirely by Bombay before half-a-dozen years have passed. Lancashire is not able to bespeak much sympathy in its continuous losses of foreign, colonial, and Indian trade from the country outside its own borders; perhaps because other interests, in other provinces of the kingdom, are also suffering more or less severely, and are quite absorbed in their own peculiar difficulties and troubles. Yet surely the issue is momentous for the whole British nation, and not for Lancashire alone. England minus Lancashire, as a gigantic manufactory, would no longer be the rich, mighty, advancing England of other days. Last year the Government of India, with the object of preventing systematic overwork of women and young children in the cotton-mills of that country, drafted a bill for extending the protection of the law to those weaker members of the native operative class, by fixing the hours of their labour and meal-times, and their holidays. The intentions of the bill were good, and the Anglo-Indian mill-owners themselves tacitly admitted its necessity. The precedent of the British Factory Acts was followed in the idea and principle of the measure, but its authors paused at the application of the strict limitations of female and child labour in the latest Factory Acts enacted by the Imperial Parliament. This Factory Bill for India was met in Bombay with passionate protests against its undue interference with the arrangements of Indian cotton-mills; in Lancashire it was received with emphatic declarations of its inadequacy, and the heads of the India Office were urged to require that the bill should be assimilated to the Factory Acts of this country before it was passed into law. A lively controversy sprang up between Lancashire and Bombay. The Bombay factory interest pronounced the demand for anything like uniform regulation of female and child labour in Indian and British factories to be preposterous; insisted that the conditions, domestic, industrial, and climatic, in India were so entirely different from those of the British Isles, that to compel them to accept the restrictions enforced in Lancashire cotton-mills would be grievous oppression. Further, it was asserted that the manner of working in a Bombay mill is so lazy, and the opportunities for rest and relief during the day are so frequent, that the long hours are not at all exhausting, nor the absence of regular meal-times (except one half-hour stoppage at mid-day) inconvenient. To these assurances the answer made by Lancashire was that they are not given by the Indian factory workers themselves, nor by anybody entitled to speak for them, but by professional advocates of the mill-masters;