If, however, there be any one state of the atmosphere more favourable than any other for the manufacture of cotton, then it is quite impossible that our notoriously variable climate can always present it. Moreover, it seems to be the case that for some processes at least, a combination of dampness with great heat is desirable: and this combination, natural to some countries, is actually forbidden by the English law. Countries possessing a climate at once hot and damp must, it would seem, have a natural advantage over us, and here again, the Southern States are favoured by nature. Another explanation sometimes put forward is that the English workers, among whom the manufacture was first established, possess a hereditary skill of manipulation. The physiological possibility of such inheritance seems to be questionable: and, considering the great changes undergone by the machinery employed, the existence of it would be, at least, very surprising. Moreover, this supposed hereditary dexterity would require to have grown up in strangely few generations, since, in 1830 or so, the cotton workers of England are described as being deplorably poor workers, degenerate, physically and morally. Their condition, at that time and for a good many years afterwards, was appalling. A more horrible picture than that presented in Mr P. Gaskell’s “Manufacturing Population of England,” published in 1833, can hardly be conceived. These cotton operatives were, in short, as unpromising in physique, in character and in industrial efficiency as any group of casual, irregularly employed labourers that could be selected to-day from the ranks of unorganised industry: as ill paid, as wretched and as much oppressed as any sweated home worker in a slum garret. By slow degrees, from that first Act which, in 1802, made some faint attempt at shortening the hours of the unhappy parish apprentices, the law has gone on, steadily diminishing hours of work. From 1854 onward, the working week for women in textile trades became one of 60 hours. Within a few years later, these hours were reduced to 56½; and now, the legal week in the textile trades is one of 55½ hours. At all these stages, the regulations, though nominally affecting only women, have, in practice, decided the hours of men also. Thus, the British textile worker is employed for fewer hours than any foreign competitor. Wages, though not high for the individual, are, owing to the fact that nearly all its members work in the trade, high for the family. Rates of pay have steadily risen; the average nominal wage of 24s. 9d. for men in 1881—itself an immense advance upon the starvation rates of the thirties—had risen, in 1902, to 27s. 3d. For later years I cannot cite figures, but the amazing prosperity of the trade during the last year or two can hardly have failed to affect wages favourably.[77]