THE DECENTRALISATION OF INDUSTRIES. 2? 



it the want of capital ? But capital knows no father- 

 land ; and if high profits can be derived from the work 

 of Indian coolies whose wages are only one-half of those 

 of English workmen, or even less, capital will migrate 

 to India, as it has gone to Russia, although its migration 

 may mean starvation for Lancashire and Dundee. Is 

 it the want of knowledge ? But longitudes and latitudes 

 are no obstacle to its spreading ; it is only the first steps 

 that are difficult As to the superiority of workmanship, 

 nobody who knows the Hindoo worker will doubt about 

 his capacities. Surely they are not below those of the 

 86,500 children less than thirteen years of age, or the 

 363,000 boys and girls less than eighteen years old, who 

 are employed in the British textile manufactories.* 



Ten years surely are not much in the life of nations. 

 And yet within the last ten years another powerful 

 competitor has grown in the East I mean Japan. 

 In October, 1888, the Textile Recorder mentioned in 

 a few lines that the annual production of yarns in the 

 cotton mills of Japan had attained 9,498,500 lb., and 

 that fifteen more mills, which would hold 156,100 

 spindles, were in course of erection.! Two years later, 

 25,000,000 lb. of yarn were spun in Japan; and while 

 in 1886-88 Japan imported five or six times as much 

 yarn from abroad as was spun at home, next year two- 

 thirds only of the total consumption of the country were 

 imported from abroad. + From that date the production 



* The number of boys above thirteen but under eighteen, working full 

 time, was, in the year 1890, 86,998.. The number of girls of that age is 

 not given ; they are considered as " women," and work full time. But 

 the proportion of women to men being as two to one in the textile 

 factories of the United Kingdom, the number of girls of that age (thirteen 

 to eighteen) may be taken as twice the number of boys, that is, about 

 190,000. This would give a total of at least 363,000 boys and girls less 

 than eighteen years of age, out of a total of 1,084,630 operatives employed 

 in all the textile trades of the United Kingdom. More than one-third. 

 (Statesman's Year-book for 1898, p. 75.) 



f Textile Recorder, i5th October, 1888. 



J 17,778,000 kilogrammes of yarn were imported in 1886 as against 

 2,919,000 kilogrammes of home-spun yarn. In 1889 the figures were: 

 35,687,000 kilogrammes imported and 12,160.000 kilogrammes home-spun. 



