CHAPTER LXXXVI.
THE FINANCIAL AND TRADE SITUATION AND PROSPECTS.[[12]]
[12]. An address delivered at the Annual Banquet of the National Association of Cotton Manufacturers, at the Hotel Brunswick, Boston, on Thursday evening, April 16, 1908, by Henry Clews, LL.D.
In familiarizing myself with the history, scope, and objects of the distinguished organization I have the honor to address—The National Association of Cotton Manufacturers—I was impressed by the vast extent and importance of the interests it represents through its membership, which covers not only New England but the whole manufacturing world of the United States, to say nothing of foreign countries in which it has a notable representation.
Such an organization is obviously capable of exerting great and lasting power for good in the improvement and development of the cotton manufacturing industry in this country, and incidentally it cannot fail to benefit all our manufacturing interests, for there are ties, visible and invisible, that bind them all together in a bond of mutual sympathy.
How immense these interests are is almost beyond computation; but we may form some idea of them from the fact that the capital stock of the textile mills, print works and bleacheries represented by your Association’s own members alone, aggregates no less than $334,500,000, without counting their surplus.
Your statistics further tell us that in these mills are 17,157,637 spindles, 1,472 sets of woolen and worsted cards, 5,849 knitting machines, and 67 printing machines. These figures are eloquently suggestive of the country’s manufacturing enterprise and skill, which have kept pace with its rapid growth, and the progress of mechanical science.
Beyond all this, you have $400,075,000 more capital in the affiliated manufacturing industries of cotton cloth, cotton, textile machinery, mill supplies and the like, represented by your associate members. This, indeed, is a grand exhibit.
So your association is the representative of $734,586,000 of capital, a large item in the national wealth of the United States. But, great as it is, it will continue to grow with this great and ever-growing nation, and with it will come still further improvements in mechanical processes, methods and machinery, and a far wider foreign market for our manufactures, especially in the Orient and South America, where the British and the Germans have dominated trade in the past.
This association in its work for the advancement of cotton manufacturing interests, and particularly in the promotion of their commercial relations, and whatever relates to improvements in manufacture, is a valuable ally of the motive power that turns the wheels and runs the machinery of the mills; and I congratulate you on being united for a purpose so conducive to both the prosperity of a great manufacturing interest and the national welfare.
I will now turn to the main subject, the financial and trade situation, present and prospective, in which I find much that is encouraging and favorable to a general betterment of conditions from this time forward.