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dustries, they increase the resources of the people, and so tend to augment the imperial revenue from taxation. To pause in the prosecution of railway works is a mistake from every point of view. That, at any rate, is the opinion of the men of Lancashire, to whom the opening up of the “hinterland” of Southern Asia has become of vital concern. In the call for a bolder extension of State railways, Lancashire and Bombay can unite their voices, for the manufactures of both stand to benefit by improved means of transit and distribution of goods; and the Government of India need not fear to excite the anger or resistance of one interest when it is satisfying the other.

But it has to be confessed that whilst the moving spirits amongst the great body of the traders of Lancashire formulate and press their requests for a more vigorous prosecution of railway extension in India, which the Government of India says that the state of its finances does not warrant—or for the assimilation of the hours and conditions of factory labour in India to those of British factory labour, which the imperial policy of ruling India primarily in the interests of the people of India is held to forbid—they know all the while that the external trade in cottons of this country is not to be reinstated in its old position of supremacy by any merely local reliefs and artificial expedients like these. Just because it is mainly an external trade, it cannot be guarded and fostered by the Government or by Parliament as it might if it were wholly or principally an internal trade. Hemmed in by hostile forces on every side; virtually excluded from most foreign countries by prohibitory duties and jealous exclusive habits of their populations; and ousted from one and another dependency and colony of the British empire by new manufactures set up therein to secure the advantages of cheaper labour, near markets, and raw material grown upon the spot; that cotton manufacture, which governs the state of every other and lesser industry and trade in Lancashire, is palpably contracting in its dimensions year by year, and one clearly forebodes that the shrinkage must continue, with calamitous consequences to those whose property, business, and occupation are inseparably attached to that manufacture. Lancashire will die hard, and slowly, though it may be with recurrent social convulsion and commercial cataclysm. The time is not quite at hand when it shall be numbered with those ancient seats of empire and marts of ocean-ranging commerce “whose decay hath dried up realms to deserts.” But that this county—filled with cities vying in vastness with the capitals of the greatest nations, and towns which are so many human hives, with factories, foundries, forges, and workshops innumerable; served by magnificent ports and merchant fleets; teeming with a keen, striving population of nigh four millions —has passed the meridian of its prosperity, and has entered upon the first stage of its declension, is the gloomy conviction to which a constant and close observation of its course has forced the reluctant minds of some of its inhabitants who are not least jealous of its fame, or proud of its record of peaceful conquests and its former pre-eminence as the school of inventors and the home of the mechanical arts.