Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 152.djvu/9

After an interval, 5 per cent more had to be taken off. Reduced wages failed to bring good trade, whilst the operatives were so impatient under the infliction, that 5 per cent of the 15 per cent taken had speedily to be restored. These incessant conflicts over the wage-rate of masters and operatives embittered both parties, and aggravated sorely the difficulties with which the mill-owners had to contend.

The last ten years—1882-91—may be shortly characterised as lean years throughout for those whose capital is employed in the cotton manufacture of Lancashire. They resorted to concerted short-time working twice or thrice during the period, and once to another small reduction of wages, which could not be continued, with very transient advantage. The whole manufacturing interest, at best not nearly so financially strong as outsiders supposed, has been seriously impoverished.

The present situation, therefore, is this, that the cotton trade of Lancashire so far as producers are concerned (of distributing agency at Manchester, and dealers in raw cotton at Liverpool, we are not immediately thinking) is chronically “stale, flat, and unprofitable.” It has come to a dead halt, if it has not moved several steps in retreat. In proof we offer the following observations. First, there are the outward and visible signs, not to be misread, that a prominent trade of the first magnitude, connected with an equally important local industry, no longer makes progress. The cotton manufacture, over at any rate the larger portion of the area which it has occupied in Lancashire, has for some years past not extended at all; indeed, it has visibly contracted. Taken in the bulk, it may be said that north and west of Bolton the spinning branch of the trade has been steadily going backward these twenty years. In the towns of Preston, Blackburn, Burnley, Darwen, Accrington, Haslingden, Rawtenstall, Bacup, Colne, Clitheroe, Padiham, Great Harwood, Oswaldtwistle, Chorley, Wigan, Warrington, and Lancaster, and numerous populous villages between, one may look in vain for a new cotton-spinning mill built since 1875, whilst a large number of old spinning-mills have been burnt down and not rebuilt, and many an old mill has had its machinery cleared out and sold as old metal, and been demolished as useless. The number of spindles running in Blackburn and Preston has been diminished by hundreds of thousands. In two or three of the smaller towns cotton-spinning has threatened to become extinct by the suspension of business by owners of the existing mills, and the impossibility of securing fresh tenants at the lowest rentals. Observers at a distance imagine that cotton-spinning in Lancashire must be doing well, and point to Oldham, where numerous spinning-mills of the largest size have been reared, filled with the most improved machinery, and started since 1870. But Oldham alone no more suffices to show Lancashire trade flourishing, than one swallow makes a summer.

At Oldham, the system of building, stocking, and working spinning-mills by joint-stock companies has been developed, and pushed by men who make their profit out of company-promoting. These companies have a limited share capital and liability, and work largely with borrowed money. Thereby Oldham has certainly been enabled to attract to itself the lion’s share of the spinning trade. As regards profits, the results have been anything but brilliant; but there the