Food is not all. Britain the workshop of the world, and three-fourths of its working population artizans! Upon what do these vast armies of industry, these millions of working men and women, spend their toil to earn the wages that buy the food thus brought to them from such great distances and at {107} such expense? Once more we find the ends of the earth scoured to furnish them with the raw material upon which they work. Wool from Australia, New Zealand, India, Africa, South America; cotton from the Southern States, India, Egypt; timber from Canada, Russia, Scandinavia, Honduras; precious metals, ores, jute, hemp and other fibres, oils, gums, ivory, shells, hides, furs, precious stones--everything that can be moulded for use or beauty, all productions of land and sea, are poured forth day by day from the holds of a thousand ships in the greater ports of the United Kingdom to be transferred to the centres of British industry. The critical character of this dependence for a perfectly steady supply of raw material is under modern conditions as striking as the extent of the dependence. The great Yorkshire woollen spinners tell us that to be cut off even for three or four weeks from the supplies of Australian wool would mean the closing of hundreds or thousands of factories and a widespread paralysis of industry. They point out that when the regularity of sea transport depended upon wind and weather, or when the home market supplied a larger share of the material, common prudence made it necessary to lay in heavy stocks to provide against contingencies for many months. So fixed has now become the habit of depending upon the regular arrival of ocean steam-ships from week to week, the regular sequence of great wool sales at frequent stated periods, that it is possible {108} in manufacturing to live as it were from hand to mouth; that, as a matter of fact, a large proportion of manufacturers do so live, purchasing only enough for their immediate wants, and renewing their stock at very short intervals. Thus the effect of any stoppage of sea-transport would be disastrously felt at once, reaching in its influence alike the manufacturing capitalist and the workman in his cottage. A group of manufacturers at Galashiels, one of the important Scottish centres of the wool trade, told me that nine out of every ten pounds of wool they used was Australian. The proportion can scarcely be less in the Bradford district and other large areas of Yorkshire. Nor are such illustrations of the completeness of dependence on supplies abroad exceptional or confined to wool. Cut off Dundee from its importations of Indian jute and the collapse of its main industry would be sudden and general. Lancashire is not likely to forget what it means to lose control of her ordinary markets for obtaining raw cotton. We may put together once more the figures which express this marvellous relation to British industry to the remoter parts of the world.