40 
English mill hand had to strive hard for his daily bread, the 
Indian could earn twice or three times as much as he would 
require for his daily bread. An idea of the extent of the Indian 
trade might be gathered from the fact that in 1890 there were 
in{Bombay 70 mills, with 1,895,000 spindles, and employing 
59,000 workpeople. The exports from Bombay alone, which in 
1875 amounted to 2,789,000 lbs., last year came to the very large 
total of 140,000,000 Ibs., the trade being principally with China 
and/Japan. 
Mr. J. Rawlinson, J.P., said he had listened with very great 
attention to the objection that Mr. Smalley was apparently 
prepared to make against the English factory law being applied 
to native labour in India. If the comparatively opulent and 
well-to-do operative of this country required the protection of 
the law as against his employer, the poor down-trodden native of 
India must require that protection in a much greater degree. Of 
course the thing was glossed over by Mr. Smalley, but to state 
that the Indian labourer could better work 80 hours in an ener- 
vating climate like that of India than the English operative 
could work his 56 hours was to state an absurdity. The increase 
in the Indian cotton trade was certainly phenomenal, but the 
fact that machinery was now made with such perfection that the 
work was almost automatic was one great cause of development. 
As to the large development of the exports of yarn to China and 
Japan, his own impression was that the reasons could be largely 
found in the nearness of the Indian markets to the Chinese and 
Japanese markets, the cheap labour, the suitability of the yarn 
they produced for those markets, and the enterprise of English 
machine makers. He was not one of those who was greatly 
alarmed about the increase of the cotton trade in India. It was 
a thing which we as a nation had every reason to look upon with 
satisfaction. So long as the competition was carried on under 
fair and equal conditions we ought to regard it with satisfaction 
rather than with dismay. 
Mr. Smalley distinctly objected to the term ‘‘ down trodden ”’ 
as applied to the Indian, and said that their system of civilisation 
was more elaborate than ours. 
Alderman Greenwood was inclined to take a somewhat gloomy 
view of the future prospects of the cotton trade in England, 
bearing in mind the enormous expansion of the Indian trade, and 
the fact that our own exports of cotton cloth and yarn were 
stationary, if not declining. They were driving us out of the 
market, and there seemed no limit to the expansion of their 
Indian trade. 
