Moreover, these rises have coincided with a fall in the price of food so marked that the increase in average real wages, between 1881 and 1902, is reckoned to be more than 36%. The number of persons employed has also steadily grown, and the returns of the Chief Inspector of Factories show that in 1901 the industry gave occupation to 513,000 persons. The increase in the number of spindles and of looms, however, has been far greater than the increase in the number of hands. Machinery has made vast strides and becomes daily swifter and more economical of labour; so that the total growth of the trade, since the days of employers who vowed that a ten-hour day would ruin them, almost passes calculation. Moreover, the development of the industry tends more and more towards those branches which demand most skill. Our exports increase more largely in fabrics than in yarn, and most of all in coloured fabrics, the prices of which are rising. We are in short “specialising in the more expensive and difficult work.” We are producing those really exquisite coloured cotton stuffs which under various fancy names have, during the last few years, made summer dresses so attractive, and which are well worth the comparatively high price at which they are bought. On p. 61 of the pamphlet written by Professor S. J. Chapman for the Free Trade League[78] may be found a most interesting table of the comparative increase, all over the world, in the number of spindles, between the years 1870 and 1903. We find that “about a fifth of the total increase in the world’s spindles in a third of a century has fallen to the United Kingdom. The whole of Europe, taken together in a period of industrial awakening, cannot boast a growth of cotton spindles more than twice as great as that which has taken place in this country alone, though in 1870 Europe was almost at the beginning of her cotton spinning, and has since then been fostering it.... In 1870 the American nation had a fifth as many spindles as the United Kingdom, and to-day she does not possess half as many as the United Kingdom.” And this in spite of the fact that the population of the United States is so much larger than ours.