and thus secured themselves against the disastrous results of free competition. Their union helped them to gain better wages; the law helped them to health and to leisure. In less than three generations, the cotton workers of North Western England have become intelligent, independent citizens. They are no longer oppressed, no longer illiterate and no longer vicious. Free libraries and co-operative stores grow and flourish, and the old English passion for music, still dormant in the South, is well awake in the large cotton towns of the North. In industrial efficiency the English spinners and weavers of cotton have no rivals. As the Tariff Commission reported, “Nearly every mill started abroad with English machinery requires a certain amount of British workpeople and overlookers to start it and to train up native labour.” (Sec. 205.) This increase of skill, dependent very largely upon an improved standard of life, has rendered possible a vast improvement in methods of production, with the usual consequence of a greatly enlarged output. The masters, from whom the increasing stringency of the law has demanded an ever rising standard of capacity, are men of a better class than their predecessors, and among the most enlightened of British employers. Meanwhile, in other countries, many of the evils which Lancashire has left behind, still prevail. Children toil to-day in certain American mills, as they toiled once in ours; in many European countries, hours are still injuriously long and wages inadequate to the demands of a civilised life. Yet employers of this cheap labour cannot produce so profitably as Lancashire can. “On the general efficiency of British labour as compared with that of any foreign country witnesses are practically unanimous,” says the Report of the Tariff Commission. (Sec. 89.) In short, the English cotton manufacturer produces more cheaply and more profitably, upon the whole, than any competitor, and in the highest branches of the trade, can hardly be approached. The reasons of this pre-eminence are that the good conditions enforced by law and the comparatively high wage enforced by the trade unions combine to create for him the most efficient body of cotton workers in the world. Once more, the facts of industrial history proclaim the truth that efficiency is not the cause but the product of fair wages, healthy surroundings and reasonable leisure.