Do not let us be deceived into supposing that, apart from these factors, there is any peculiarity in the cotton trade to account for these developments. If there were, we should behold the ill paid and overworked cotton workers of the Southern States, many of whom are of the same race as ourselves, producing fabrics as good as ours, at the same speed, and equal profit. Indeed, we need not go so far as America for our object lesson. The South West of our own country may provide it. Bristol, no less than the more northerly parts of the island, had its cotton mills. The same advantages were presented: the port open to the Atlantic, the moist westerly climate, the plentiful supply of labour. The same factory law applies, the same hours and conditions are enforced; the employers, of late years at any rate, have been men of capital and of intelligence. One factor only has been absent: the powerful organisation of workers. Because of its absence, wages have fallen to the level of unskilled trades in the district. Men do not work in the cotton trade in Bristol, nor adult women. The employees are girls, earning the low wage of a Bristol factory girl. Of profits there have, for years, been practically none. No employer can afford to make improvements in methods of production; and at the present moment it is, I believe, an open secret that the one remaining mill is only kept open because its owner is unwilling to turn away the hands.[79] But for the strong trade unions of the northern operatives, the whole of England’s cotton trade at the present day might be in the position of Bristol’s cotton trade, and the Lancashire worker might be toiling for as many hours and as small a wage as his German competitor. To the organisation of the workers, English labour owes that comparatively fortunate position which is, as Mr Schoenhof, years ago, perceived, “the only vantage ground which England possesses and which secures to her the safe and indisputable rulership of the commerce of the world.”[80] In this particular industry of cotton, other nations, as he points out, whose labour is ill paid and whose hours of work are long, are trying to defend themselves by a high protective tariff “against the results of England’s high pay and short hours.”... “Yet it is all machine work driven by steam power and conducted in factories under the best intellectual management which the countries afford. But how world wide the difference in the results!”[81] World wide indeed—not as to national trade only, but as to national happiness. CHAPTER IV THE MINIMUM WAGE IN PRACTICE