This was not peace but pyrotechny; they were up like a rocket and he feared to come down like the stick. Lancashire was turned into a speculator’s cockpit and cotton mill shares were changing hands sometimes at ten times their nominal value. The point, especially, was the prohibitive cost of building, so that existing mills had monopoly valuations. The general anticipation, which William did not share, was that a world hunger for cotton goods would sustain the boom for four or five years; there was plenty of war-made wealth ready for investment, and the cotton trade appeared a promising field for high and quick returns. So much money was there and so attractive did cotton trade prospects appear that the local speculator began to be outbidden very greatly to his patriotic annoyance. The annoyance, indeed, was more than patriotic or parochial, it was sensible. A highly technical trade can be run to advantage only when its controllers have not only full technical knowledge, but full knowledge of local characteristics and prejudices, and Lancashire was, historically, self-supporting with its finance as well as its trade under Lancashire direction. From its brutal origins to its present comparatively humane organization, its struggles and its achievements had been its own. The interests of the financier are financial; one-eyed, short-sighted, parasitic interests. Steam and the factory system fell like a blight on Lancashire, but they had in them the elements of progress of a kind; they worked out, outrageously, in the course of a century to a balance where the power was not exclusively the employers’. The object of the London financiers who now perceived in Lancashire a fruitful field was to buy up mills, run them under managers for the first years of the boom, then, before new mills could be built, to show amazing profits and to unload on the guileless public before the boom collapsed. It was a raid purely in financial interests and opposed to the permanent interests of Lancashire, which would be left to bear, in a new era of distress, the burdens imposed by over-capitalization. To the financier, Lancashire was a counter in whose future he had no interest after he had floated his companies and got out with his profits. And he collected mills like so many tricks in his game.