144

THE COTTON TRADE IN ENGLAND

Add to this, that in consequence of the operatives’ organisationsthe employer can more readily stop hands, because the tradeunions in cases of scarcity of work mostly help their members,whilst in Germany an efflux of labour has to be feared, or theoperative has to depend upon poor-relief. Whilst the English employer possesses, through the trade unions, the advantage ofeasily obtaining labour and just as easily dispensing with it, theGerman employer still seeks t» attach the workman by moneyclubs, etc. This patriarchal social policy, also once customary inEngland, has to-day made room for a purely contracting relation.

(d) The operative comes into account in the industry, not only asproducer, but also as consumer. Whilst centralised industrialdevelopment increases the quantity produced, it evolves, on theother hand, an extensive population capable of buying. This isthe condition of its own existence. Without it the centralisedindustrial development would only be an episode, and would cometo a standstill as soon as the as yet non-industrial nations hadestablished their own industries. But thus every industrial nationextends permanently the home market to the lower classes, andobtains selling markets in the same proportion that other nationsbecome industrial, and, therewith, capable of consumption; as,for instance, the two industrial countries, England and Germany ,are to-day the most important markets for each other (24).

Before the modern economical development set in, only limitedportions ot the population were customers of the industry. Thecountryman especially, in general scarcely drawn into the world’smarket, made his own clothing, as is still done in portions of theEuropean Continent (25), and even in certain districts of what wereformerly the purely agrarian Southern States of North America .(26).

The arising of the world’s market brings forward with centralisedindustry the new class of industrial operatives, who for the satisfy-ing of their wants are forced to buy from the commencement.This consuming power, at first slight, rises hand-in-hand withtechnical progress and cheapening of food—both results of cen-

24, Compare Ellison : “ Cotton Trade,” p. 152, and Lotz, p. 202.

25. If, for instance, Viebahn (III., 952) still gives, together with 394,805hand-looms in cottage industry, 387,909 as partially used, this refers to thevery frequent, even to-day not quite stopped, home production, in peasantcircles, of clothing at the end of the ‘'sixties.”

20. Compare Atkinson : “Distribution of Products,” p. 121.