It will be seen that Messrs. B. D. Tata & Ca. for their cotton mill claim inclusion as from 1921 in the company of firms which have dispensed with the contract labour system in Shanghai. An even stronger qualification should be applied to the comments on that subject. The China Printing & Finishing Company, by far the biggest calico printing concern and British up to the hilt, has never done other than engage its labour direct, The China Printing & Finishing Company is the only: British firm in China which deals with the whole processes embraced by the cotton textile industry from the handling of the raw cotton to the out-turn of the finished product in the bleached, dyed and printed forms. Its parent company, the Calico Printers Association, is amongst the premier textile concerns in Great Britain, and probably the largest combine of its kind in the world, Messrs, Paton Baldwins, Ltd., another important British firm, engaged in the woollen textile industry, has never employed contract labour nor used the compradore system; from the time of its starting operations in China three years ago, it has consistently recruited its labour direct. This, of course, does not detract from the merit of Messrs, Jardine, Matheson & Co.'s adoption of the direct recruitment method, but it corrects the suggestion that they are either the first or the only British company so to do. As the oldest British textile concern their abandonment, of the contract system is, however, specially significant,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.