(2) Each important manufacturing industry has a number of industries which in their relation to it are secondary, although in some cases, having similar relations to a number of other trades, they may in themselves be large and important. In the large textile centres are found a number of minor industries, planers, sawyers, turners, fitters, smiths, engaged in irregular work of alteration and repairs upon the plant and machinery of the textile factories. The same holds of all important manufactures, especially those which are closely localised.
A somewhat similar relation appertains between those manufactures engaged in producing the main body of any product and the minor industries, which supply some slighter and essentially subsidiary part. In relation to the main textile and clothing industries, the manufacture of buttons, of tape, feathers, and other elements of ornament or trimmings may be regarded as subsidiary. In the same way the manufacture of wall-papers or house paint may be considered subsidiary to the building trades, that of blacking to the shoe manufacture. These subsidiary trades are related to the primary one more or less closely, and are affected by the condition of the latter more or less powerfully in proportion as the subsidiary elements they furnish are more or less indispensable in character. The fur and feather trades are far more dependent upon direct forces of fashion than upon any changes of price or character in the main branches of the clothing trade. On the other hand, any cause which affected considerably the price of sugar would have a great and direct influence on the jam manufacture, while the rise in price of tin due to the M'Kinley tariff caused serious apprehension to the Chicago manufacturers and exporters of preserved meats.
(3) The relations between one of the great arterial industries, such as coal-mining, railway transport, or machine-making, and a specific manufacture may be regarded as auxiliary. The extent to which the price of coal, railway rates, etc., enters into the price of the goods and affects the condition of profits in the trade measures the closeness of this auxiliary connection. In the case of the smelting industries or in the steam transport trades, even in the pottery trades, the part played by coal is so important that the relation is rather that of a primary than an auxiliary connection—i.e., coal-mining must be ranked as co-ordinate to smelting. But where heat is not the direct agent of manufacture, but is required to furnish steam-motor alone, as in the textile factories, the connection may be termed auxiliary.
(4) The relationship between some industries is "sympathetic" in the sense that the commodities they produce appeal to closely related tastes, or are members of a group whose consumption is related harmoniously. In foods we have the relations between bread, butter, and cheese; the relation in which sugar and salt stand to a large number of consumables. Some of these are natural relations in the sense that one supplies a corrective to some defect of the other, or that the combination enhances the satisfaction or advantage which would accrue from the consumption of each severally. In other cases the connection is more conventional, as that between alcohol and tobacco. The sporting tastes of man supply a strong sympathetic bond between many trades. The same is true of literary, artistic, or other tastes, which by the simultaneous demand which they make upon several industries, in some proportion determined by the harmonious satisfaction of their desires, throw these industries into sympathetic groups.[114] These four bonds mark an identity of interest between different industries.
The relationship is sometimes one of divergency or competition of trades. Where the same service may be supplied by two or more different commodities the trades are related by direct competition. Oil, gas, electricity, as illuminants, are a familiar example of this relationship. Many trades which produce commodities that are similar, but far from identical in character, feel this relationship very closely. The competition between various kinds of food, which with different kinds and degrees of satisfaction may produce the same substantial effects, between fish and meat, between various kinds of vegetables and drinks, enables us to realise something of the intricacy of the relations of this kind. In clothing we have antagonism of interests between the various fabrics which has led to great industrial changes. The most signal example is the rise of cotton, its triumph over woollen clothes by the earlier application of the new machinery, and over silk by the early superiority of its dyeing and printing processes.[115] So in recent years in the conflict among beverages, tea, and in a less measure cocoa, have materially damaged the growth of the coffee industry so far as English consumption is concerned. Where such rivalry exists, an industry may be as powerfully and immediately affected by a force which raises or depresses its competitor as by a force which directly affects itself.
§ 9. The growth of numerous and strongly-built structural attachments between different trades and markets related to different localities implies the existence of a large system of channels of communication throughout our industrial society. By the increased number and complexity of these channels connecting different markets and businesses, and relating the most distant classes of consumers, we can measure the evolution of the industrial organism. Through these channels flow the currents of modern industrial life, whose pace, length, and regularity contrast with the feeble, short, and spasmodic flow of commerce in earlier times. This advance in functional activity of distribution is thus expressed by Mr. Spencer:—"In early English times the great fairs, annual and other, formed the chief means of distribution, and remained important down to the seventeenth century, when not only villages, but even small towns, devoid of shops, were irregularly supplied by hawkers who had obtained their stocks at these gatherings. Along with increased population, larger industrial centres, and improved channels of communication, local supply became easier; and so frequent markets more and more fulfilled the purpose of infrequent fairs. Afterwards, in chief places and for chief commodities, markets themselves multiplied, becoming in some cases daily. Finally came a constant distribution, such that of some foods there is to each town an influx every morning; and of milk even more than once in the day. The transition from times when the movements of people and goods between places were private, slow, and infrequent, to times when there began to run at intervals of several days public vehicles moving at four miles an hour, and then to times when these shortened their intervals and increased their speed, while their lines of movement multiplied, ending in our own times, when along each line of rails there go at full speed a dozen waves daily that are relatively vast, sufficiently show us how the social circulation progresses from feeble, slow, irregular movements to a rapid, regular, and powerful pulse."[116]
The differentiation of function in the several parts of the industrial organism finds a partial expression in the localisation of certain industries. As there is growing division of labour among individuals and groups of individuals, so the expansion of the area of competition has brought about a larger and larger amount of local specialisation.
Roughly speaking, the West of Europe and of America has specialised in manufacture, drawing an ever larger proportion of their food supplies from the North-West States of America, from Russia, the Baltic Provinces, Australia, Egypt, India, etc., and their raw materials of manufacture from the southern United States, South America, India, etc., while these latter countries are subjected to a correspondent specialisation in agriculture and other extractive arts. If we take Europe alone, we find certain large characteristics which mark out the Baltic trade, the Black Sea trade, the Danube trade, the Norwegian and White Sea trade. So the Asiatic trade falls into certain tolerably defined divisions of area, as the Levant trade, the Red Sea trade, the Indian, the Straits, and East Indian, the China trade, etc. The whole trade of the world is thus divided for commercial purposes.[117] Though these trade divisions are primarily suggested by considerations of transport rather than of the character of production, the geographical, climatic, and other natural factors which determine convenient lines of transport are found to have an important bearing on the character of the production, and convenience of transport itself assists largely to determine the kind of work which each part of the world sets itself to do.
The establishment of a world-market for a larger and larger number of commodities is transforming with marvellous rapidity the industrial face of the globe. This does not now appear so plainly in the more highly-developed countries of Europe, which, under the influence of half a century's moderately free competition for a European market, have already established themselves in tolerably settled conditions of specialised industry. But in the new world, and in those older countries which are now fast yielding to the incursions of manufacturing and transport machinery, the specialising process is making rapid strides.
Improved knowledge of the world, facile communication, an immense increase in the fluidity of capital, and a considerable increase in that of labour, are busily engaged in distributing the productions of the world in accordance with certain dominant natural conditions. Those industrial forces which have during the last century and a half been operative in England, draining the population and industry from the Southern and Eastern counties, and concentrating it in larger proportions in Lancashire, the West Riding, Staffordshire, and round the Northumbrian and South Wales coal-fields, specialising each town or locality upon some single branch of the textile, metal, or other industries for which its soil, position, or other natural advantages made it suitable, are now beginning to extend the area of their control over the whole surface of the known and inhabited globe.