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that in this country Parliament does not take the views and wants of the operatives from the mill-owners, but goes to the workpeople themselves. Let the merits of the dispute between these rival combinations of traders in cotton goods, in Lancashire and in Bombay, be what they may, the fact remains that whilst factory labour in Lancashire commands a high price, and is most rigidly guarded by special laws, such labour in India is very cheap, and hitherto has been subjected to less legal restriction or Government inspection; and that the users of the latter kind of labour have thereby so decided an advantage over the users of the former kind, that they are unmistakably taking away their trade piecemeal.

Statistics cannot be made interesting to those readers who have not a faculty for appreciating figures, and we have refrained from presenting figures to prove, what is known and recognised by all who concern themselves with the movements of British commerce, that the foreign trade in cotton goods produced in Lancashire has for some years been undergoing diminution in many directions, and particularly with Europe, North America, and India. This one latest piece of evidence from official returns that our cotton trade with our own great Eastern dependency is fast falling off under the influence of the unequal competition with the rival manufacture established there, may be cited, that this country’s trade in cotton piece-goods, in the year 1891, with the British East Indies, on a total value of £18,063,907, shows a decrease of £1,844,203. That is an immense decrease to have taken place in a single year. Ten years of this rate of diminution would suffice to wipe out the trade altogether, and to complete the ruin of so much of the staple Lancashire manufacture and industry as subsists by the supply of the markets of India, equal, roundly, to one-third of the entire export of cotton piece-goods. But whilst the trade of Lancashire with India in these fabrics has been falling off with such startling rapidity, within the years 1885-90 the number of cotton-mills in India has increased from 87 to 137; of spindles, from 2,145,646 to 3,274,196; of power-looms, from 16,557 to 23,412; of operatives employed, from 67,186 to 102,721; and the quantity of cotton used in the mills of India, from 2,088,621 cwt. to 3,529,617 cwt.

In such a crisis of their trade, the manufacturers of Lancashire may be pardoned for their importunacy in asking of the Government of India, as they do, a brisker action in the construction of additional railways in India’; both of short branch lines to serve as feeders to existing main lines, and likewise of two or three main cross-country lines connecting the western and eastern parts of the peninsula, and projecting into Burmah, and towards the unpenetrated tracts stretching to the north-east of British India. Lancashire is impatient with the slowness of the development of the State railways of India, which are more than ever necessary for the expediting and cheapening of the carriage of the exported natural products of the country to the ports of shipment, and of imported British manufactures from the ports to the consuming populations of the interior. It has been demonstrated that in India railways can be made directly self-supporting; whilst by stimulating agriculture and other indigenous in-