In 1861, the population of Lancashire amounted to twelve per cent. of that of England and Wales. But the births in this county amounted to thirteen and a half per cent. of those of the English and Welsh populations. Such had been the effect of a superior demand for labour. In 1801 the population of the county of Lancaster amounted to 673,486. In 1861 it had grown to 2,429,440. In the same period the population of Manchester rose from 94,876 to 460,018. The population of Burnley had grown from 4,000 to nearly 30,000 in the same interval; and all the cotton towns would show a somewhat similar rate of extension. Taking the whole county, the population had increased 100 per cent. in little over thirty years—a rate faster than would seem possible unless aided by immigration. Thirty years ago, great efforts were made to induce agricultural labourers to migrate into Lancashire, and among the ablest, and possibly not the least effective, were those in the form of letters from Messrs. Henry and Edmund Ashworth to the Secretary of the Poor Law Commissioners, giving a full account of the improved condition of some families which had abandoned their pastoral life in Buckinghamshire, and had found in manufacture greater prosperity than they had experienced in agriculture.

It is often remarked that many of the features of American society are reproduced in Lancashire. And why is this? These features, which some think very ugly and others very much admire, are nothing more than manifestations of the supremacy of labour. Labour and capital rule in the manufacturing districts. A fish out of water is in a comfortable position compared with that of an idle man in a Lancashire town, where for the most part, master and man, millionnaire and the poorest of his hands, eat to live, and live to work, ten hours a day for five or six days of the week.

The extraordinary increase of the population in Lancashire is greatly due to continuous immigration, but also to a natural rate of increase by births unexampled in this country. Dr. Kay (now Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth) estimated in 1835, that from 1821 to 1831, 17,000 persons per annum had flocked into Lancashire from other parts of the United Kingdom, and that at that time the

Irish and their immediate descendants dwelling in Manchester and Liverpool numbered 110,000. During the last twenty years the annual rate of increase has been about 40,000, of which probably one-fourth only is due to immigration. That the population of Lancashire is far from being all native, is evidenced by the fact, that in 1851 as large a proportion as 27 per cent. was returned as having been born elsewhere. In 1861 this percentage had fallen to 26-4, showing that immigration was declining, but that even then more than one-fourth of the population of Lancashire was foreign. In 1861 there were 640,844 dwellers in Lancashire who were not born within the county. Of this number 217,320 could boast Hibernian nativity; 37,260 were emigrants from Scotland; 17,329 were born abroad; 374 drew their first breath at sea, and the remainder came from other counties of England and from Wales. Every county has its representatives in the manufacturing districts. Here are Londoners by thousands, hundreds of men and maids of Kent; nearly two thousand Somersetshire lasses, a large muster of Yorkshiremen, and a fair representation of the Principality. So that whatever it may once have been, the population of Lancashire is certainly now a conglomerate, the better perhaps for being thus compounded.

The purpose of this introduction will be completed when a survey has been taken of the chief industry of the county, including that fringe of the adjoining counties of York, Derby, and Chester, which together form the cotton districts. Long before the natural resources of the district were enlisted to assist in the cotton manufacture—long before the keel of the 'Mayflower' grounded on the New England shore-long before the streams and the coal-fields of Lancashire did suit and service to King Cotton, the spinning-wheel and the hand-loom were busy in the hovels of Bolton and Manchester. Lancashire was the manufacturing county when Elizabeth began her splendid reign, and whilst the Spanish Duke of Alva was ravaging the Low Countries, he drove to the shores of England and to the county of Lancaster many skilful artisans from the thriving towns of Belgium. Bolton became the home of a number of these refugees, who worked diligently as subjects of Queen Bess, and pro

bably with more benefit to themselves than when they were liable to the continuous alarms endured by those who dwelt in the land which was the shambles of the medieval wars of Europe.

But if it be sought to discover why Lancashire, at this early time and with no apparent advantage over other counties-save that of climate--became the home of the cotton manufacture, it may well be answered, that the circumstance arose from its comparative incapacity for agriculture, from the moisture of the temperature, and the ready supply of fuel. Lancashire in the time of Elizabeth was one wide expanse of desolate moor and unwholesome bog-land. Cultivation was only attempted here and there; land drainage, even in its rudest form, did not venture to operate upon a case so hopeless. The towns fixed themselves on the banks of the rivers and warmed the moist atmosphere with the peat which lay so ready to their hands. Clustering round some well-dowered abbey or dependent upon some grave monastery, the villages grew, their inhabitants plying the distaff and the shuttle as their only means of subsistence. And so it came to pass, that when the thrifty weavers of Ghent sought a new location, they found themselves at home in Bolton-le-Moors.

But while the cotton manufacture was thus giving feeble signs of life in this country, there was a land far across the globe, where it was already a most ancient and most honoured form of industry. While the handicraftsmen of Lancashire were fumbling over their coarse yarn, and turning out clumsy fabrics composed of cotton and wool, there were millions of deft workers in the empire of Aurungzebe, weaving such fabrics as can only be equalled by the finest machinery now within the giant mills of Manchester. What encouragement there is for commercial ambition in the fact that cotton, which has received within our own time at least kingly attributes, was then chiefly imported for the manufacture of candle wicks; while Lancashire did a lively trade in rushes for the same and less honourable purposes.

To India belongs the origin of the cotton manufacture. Shall not England henceforth remember this more truly? The debt she owes to Greece for value received in literature, are not the defunct Bavarian dynasty and the dower

of the present boy-king, some acknowledgment of it? She has well repaid Italy for her teaching in art. It will be a strange but a happy instance of retributive justice, if India, whose cotton manufactures first excited our envy and cupidity, should become a chief source of our supply of the raw material, and turning her lithe fingers from the wheel and the web to the cultivation of the cotton plant, should provide Lancashire with the raw material and receive clothing in repayment.

No Europeans have ever yet been able to vie with the Hindoos in the fineness of their hand manufactures. Those who are acquainted with the race, and know their frequent lubrications and their listless inactivity, will hardly be surprised at this. A Hindoo woman needs no clasp to her armlet any more than she would to her finger ring; it passes over her hand. And if time is money in the East, as it is said to be in the West, Her Majesty's subjects in Hindostan are the most prodigal people upon earth. The nomenclature of the cotton trade is to a large extent Eastern. 'Cop,' a term so familiar in every spinning-mill and on every exchange throughout the district, is simply an Anglicism of the Indian word for cotton. Far to the south of Bombay, near the western coast of India, lies the town of Calicut, to which belongs the honour of giving a name to all the calico ever produced. On the banks of the Tigris stands the city of Mosul, once the narrow home of the muslin manufacture, and from this city the name of the fabric is derived.

Towards the latter part of the eighteenth century, the English cotton manufacturers suffered so severely from competition with the goods brought over in the vessels chartered by the East India Company, that every artifice was used, and it is even said that in some places threats were resorted to, in order to induce the women of this country to wear the coarse textures of home manufacture in preference to the more beautiful fabrics of India. Nothing is more curious in the history of the cotton trade than the readiness it has displayed at all times to accept protection for itself, and to denounce the use of this defence by other trades. Not that this is by any means an unnatural feature of any industry. Need we, as an example of this, remember how, when it was proposed to

abolish the duty on the importation of raw cotton, the flax spinners petitioned against this step on the ground that the wearing of cotton caused erotic sensations, and thereupon set themselves up as protectors of the morals of the people?

For nearly three thousand years India possessed a virtual monopoly of the cotton trade; and had it not been for the invention and improvement of our machinery, she would still have maintained supremacy. As it is, the manufacture is not progressing in India. Her hand-spinners are in the same position as our own hand-loom weavers, professors of an art which has long since been distanced by invention. Their occupation must go where those of the stage-coachmen and the Great Moguls have gone before. The irresistible logic of facts confirms their sentence. In 1815 there were but eight pounds of cotton yarn exported from England. Eight hundred thousand pounds weight of cotton goods were exported in the same year; but these were for the consumption of the English army and residents. In 1860 this country exported 241,978,364 pounds of yarn and goods to India. Britain has become, or is fast becoming, the clothier of Hindostan; and the cause is obvious. In 1812 we could manufacture coarse yarn cheaper by a shilling a pound than the Hindoo spinner; but in 1860 our manufacture cost only one-fourth the price of Indian. The natives of India will never manufacture with machinery on an extensive scale; their constitution and habits, their climate and their frequent ceremonials render it impossible. One of the best reasons given why the cotton manufacture has not largely succeeded in Roman Catholic countries is, because of its disturbance by the continual recurrence of feast and fast days.

To return to the English manufacture of cotton, which we left in the hands of the Flemings and the Lancastrians of the time of Elizabeth. From that day it grew-it could hardly be said to flourish-until the invention of the spinning-jenny marked the first step in that advance which was to lead to such tremendous results. It will be well, perhaps, to attempt a little explanation here. Cotton has been described by a now eminent writer as the 'flocculous product of a malvaceous shrub;' his meaning would have been more clear, though possibly less 'sensational,' had he simply informed his readers that it was