18821883188418851886188718881889189018911892189318941895
From United Kingdom11·913·513·211·210·211·112·915·316·415·713·913·814·215·0
From Germany3·13·32·82·52·42·62·83·13·33·33·13·23·9—

TEXTILES.

To our textile industries Mr. Williams has devoted a chapter which is one of the gloomiest in his book. Let it be at once admitted that we are no longer the monopolists of the textile industries of the world to the extent to which we once were. Nor could any sane man expect that we should for ever retain our former exceptional position. Other nations move as well as we. They buy the machines which we invent and make; they employ our foremen to teach them the arts we have acquired, and in time they learn to weave and spin for themselves instead of coming to us for every yard of cloth or every pound of yarn. This relative advancement of foreign nations and, too, of our own Colonies and Dependencies was and is inevitable. It is part of the general industrialization of the world. But what we have to note with satisfaction is that this process has involved little or no positive loss to us, that we are still far ahead of all other nations in the production of textiles, and that even in those cases, notably the woollen industry, where our export has fallen off we can point to an increased demand by our own people for the goods we manufacture. It is not in this spirit that Mr. Williams will look at any British industry. Even where he has a fairly good case, he spoils it by gross exaggeration and by the suppression of counterbalancing facts.

COTTON YARN AND THE PRICE THEREOF.

Dealing first with cotton, he follows his usual device of picking out bumper years, and then exclaiming, “See what a fall since then!” he goes on:—

“A consideration of moment is that this decline in values does not signify a corresponding decline in quantities. On the contrary, in yarn manufactures, with an actual increase in the exported weight, there is a decrease in the cash return. Thus in bleached and dyed cotton yarn and twist there was a qualitative rise between 1893 and 1895 from 36,105,100 lb. to 40,425,600 lb., with a fall in the value thereof from £1,862,880 to £1,832,477. Between 1865 and 1895 the average price per lb. of cotton yarn declined from 23·98d. to less than 8·85d. ’Tis a good enough explanation of the vanishing dividends, the low wages, the lack of enterprise and initiative.”

Mr. Williams must either be very innocent, or expect his readers to be. He apparently has forgotten that the most important element in the price of cotton yarn is the price of the raw cotton out of which the yarn is spun. What the Lancashire spinner cares about is not the absolute price of yarn or the absolute price of raw cotton, but the margin between the two. If that be satisfactory his profit is secure. Therefore, the mere statement that the prices of yarn have fallen so much in so many years, by itself explains nothing. As a matter of fact the price of cotton yarn has followed, and continues to follow, very closely the price of raw cotton, the spinners’ margin remaining fairly constant. It is useless to go back to 1865, when the most careless economist might surely have remembered that the American war made cotton dear, and machines were less efficient than they now are. But I have taken the trouble to work out for the last ten years, from figures kindly supplied by the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, the average margin between the price of a pound of standard yarn (32’s twist) and a pound of standard cotton (middling American). The result shows that while the spinners’ margin was slightly less in 1895 than in 1893, it stood at practically the same figure as in 1892 and 1894, and was a good deal higher than it had been in 1886. So that here again there is no real foundation for Mr. Williams’s statement.

THE DAYS OF BIG FORTUNES.

It is undoubtedly true that big fortunes are no longer made in the cotton trade, or at any rate not so rapidly as in the days when cotton spinners waxed fat on the labour of tiny children who had to be flogged to keep them awake. It is also true that many joint-stock spinning companies have paid no dividends, and that many have collapsed altogether. But those who know anything of Lancashire know that a very large number of these companies were not started in response to any real increase in the demand for cotton goods, nor on account of any genuine anticipation of such an increase. They were started, as a good many companies are started in a county south of Lancashire, in order to put money into the promoters’ pockets. Having served that purpose they were allowed quietly to collapse. Lancashire does not miss them. That the cotton trade, as a whole, is in a healthy condition in spite of these manœuvres of the company-promoter will be seen from the figures relating to cotton in the following table, and from the diagram that illustrates them:—

Textiles.