Perhaps the biggest boom of the year has been in cotton; the exports of cotton goods for the twelve months having shown an increase of more than ten millions over the previous year. Unfortunately it is in cotton that the depression during this past two months has been greatest. The industry—in measure, no doubt, as result of that depression—is threatened with most serious conflict between capital and labour. For some years past the relations between the mill owners and their operatives have been 0 good that Manchester men have become quite enamoured of the Trade Union system; buts few weeks ago Mr. Lloyd George's services had to be invoked to prevent a conflict, and now is likely to be faced with a more serious problem, perhaps, than eyen the:
391 threatened railway strike. The points in dispute have not yet been rendered very clear to the layman; but the principle at stake is fairly plain. Certain of the men's advisers have been endeavouring to secure their end by means of strikes directed against individual firms, though there is no pretence that those firms treat their men in any way differently from the other firms, The individual firms cannot fight the Unions, and so all the mill owners,—or at any rate ninety-five per cent of them,—have resolved to act together and declare a general lock-out unless these sectional strikes are abandoned. The lock-out, it is said, would immediately involve about 150,000 operatives, and eventually,—unless terms were arrived at,—a great many more. Indeed the chief hope of averting the danger lies in the terrible proportions which it must inevitably assume if it is not stopped immediately.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.