244 FIELDS, FACTORIES AND WORKSHOPS. 



in the neighbouring county. All work is done in small work- 

 shops, save in the great arm factory of the State, which 

 sometimes will employ from 10,000 to 15,000 persons, and 

 sometimes only a couple of thousand men. 



Another important trade in the same region is the manu- 

 facture of hardware, which is all made in small workshops, 

 in the neighbourhoods of St. Etienne, Le Chambon, Firminy, 

 Rive de Giers, and St. Bonnet le Chateau. The work is 

 pretty regular, but the earnings are low as a rule. And yet 

 the peasants continue to keep to those trades, as they cannot 

 go on without some industrial occupation during part of the 

 year. 



The yearly production of silk stuffs in France attained no 

 less than 7,558,000 kilogrammes in 1881;* and most of the 

 5,000,000 to 6,000,000 kilogrammes of raw silk which were 

 manufactured in the Lyons region were manufactured by 

 hand.f Twenty years before, i.e., about 1865, there were 

 only from 6000 to 8000 power-looms, and when we take into 

 account both the prosperous period of the Lyons silk industry 

 about 1876, and the crisis which it underwent in 1 880-6, we 

 cannot but wonder about the slowness of the transformation 

 of the industry. Such is also the opinion of the President 

 of the Lyons Chamber of Commerce, who wrote me that the 

 domain of the power-loom is increased every year, " by in- 

 cluding new kinds of stuffs, which formerly were reputed as 

 unfeasible in the power-looms ; but," he added, " the trans- 

 formation of small workshops into factories still goes on so 

 slowly that the total number of power-looms reaches only 

 from 20^000 to 25,000 out of an aggregate of from 100,000 

 to n 0,000 ". 



The leading features of the Lyons silk industry are the 

 following : 



The preparatory work winding off, warping and so on 



* 7>558,ooo kilogrammes in 1881, as against 5,134,000 kilogrammes in 

 1872. Journal de la Societe de Statistique de Paris, September, 1883. 



1 1 take these figures from a detailed letter which the President of the 

 Lyons Chamber of Commerce kindly directed to me in April, 1885, to 

 Clairvaux, in answer to my inquiries about the subject. I avail myself 

 of this opportunity for addressing to him my best thanks for his most 

 interesting communication. 



