We have not for the United Kingdom such statistical data as are obtained in France and Germany by periodical censuses of all the factories and workshops, and the numbers of the workpeople, foremen and clerks, employed on a given day in each industrial and commercial establishment. Consequently, up to the present time all the statements made by economists about the so-called “concentration” of the industry in this country, and the consequent “unavoidable” disappearance of the small industries, have been based on mere impressions of the writers,--not on statistical data. Up till now we cannot give, as it is done further in these pages for France and Germany, the exact numbers of factories and workshops employing, let us say, from 1,000 to 2,000 persons, from 500 to 1,000, from 50 to 500, less than 50, and so on. It is only since factory inspection has been introduced by the Factory Act of 1895 that we begin to find, in the Reports published since 1900 by the Factory Inspectors (_Annual Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for the year 1898_: London, 1900), information which permits us to get a general idea about the distribution of working men in factories of different sizes, and the extension that the petty trades have retained in this country up till now.[130] One may see it already from the following little table for the year 1897, which I take from the just-mentioned Report. These figures are not yet complete, especially as regards the workshops, but they contain already the greater part of the English industries. +---------------------+-------------+--------------+--------------+ | | Number of | Number of | Average | | 1897. |factories and| operatives | number of | | | workshops. |of both sexes.|operatives per| | | | |establishment.| +---------------------+-------------+--------------+--------------+ |Textile factories | 10,883 | 1,051,564 | 97 | |Non-textile factories| 79,059 | 2,755,460 | 35 | |Various workshops | 88,814 | 676,776 | 8 | | +-------------+--------------+--------------+ | Total | 178,756 | 4,483,800 | 25 | +---------------------+-------------+--------------+--------------+ Let me remark that the Factory Inspectors consider as a _workshop_ every industrial establishment which has no mechanical motive power, and as a _factory_ every establishment provided with steam, gas, water, or electric power.