If we had for the United Kingdom full statistics, giving lists of all the factories, with the number of workpeople employed in each of them, as we have for France and Germany (see below), it would have been easy to find the exact number of factories employing more than 1,000, 500, 100, and 50 workmen. But such lists are issued only for the mining industry. As to the statistics published by the Factory Inspectors, they do not contain such data, perhaps because the inspectors have no time to tabulate their figures, or have not the right to do so. Be it as it may, the Report of Mr. Whitelegge for 1897 gives the number of factories (textile and non-textile) and workshops for each of the 119 counties of the United Kingdom and for each of the nearly hundred sub-divisions of all the industries, as well as the number of workpeople in each of these more than 10,000 sub-divisions. So I was enabled to calculate the _averages_ of persons employed in the factories and workshops for each separate branch of industry in each county. Besides, Mr. Whitelegge has had the kindness to give me two very important figures--namely, the number of factories employing more than 1,000 workpeople, and the number of those _factories_ where less than ten workers are employed. * * * * * Let us take, first of all, the TEXTILE industries, which include cotton, wool, silk, linen, jute, and hemp, as well as machine-made lace and knitting. Many of my readers will probably be astonished to learn that even in the cotton industry a great number of quite small factories continue to exist up to the present day. Even in the West Riding district, which is second only to Lancashire for the number of its cotton mills, and where we find nearly one-third of all the workpeople employed in the cotton industry (237,444 persons), the average for all the 3,210 factories of this district is only seventy-three persons per factory. And even in Lancashire, where we find nearly one-half of all the workpeople employed in the textiles, these 434,609 men, women, and children are scattered in 3,132 factories, each of which has thus an average of only 139 workers. If we remember that in this number there are factories employing from 2,000 to 6,000 persons, one cannot but be struck by the quantity of small factories employing less than 100 persons, and which continue to exist by the side of the great cotton mills. But we shall just see that the same is true for all industries. As to Nottinghamshire, which is a centre for machine-made lace and knitting, its 18,434 workpeople are, most of them, working in small factories. The average for the 386 establishments of this county is only forty-eight persons per factory. The great industry is thus very far from having absorbed the small one.