"Some Unions divide the country round them into districts, and will not permit the products of the trades controlled by them to be used except within the district in which they have been fabricated.... At Manchester this combination is particularly effective, preventing any bricks made beyond a radius of four miles from entering the city. To enforce the exclusion, paid agents are employed; every cart of bricks coming toward Manchester is watched, and if the contents be found to have come from without the prescribed boundary the bricklayers at once refuse to work.... The vagaries of the Lancashire brick makers are fairly paralleled by the masons of the same county. Stone, when freshly quarried, is softer, and can be more easily cut than later: men habitually employed about any particular quarry better understand the working of its particular stone than men from a distance; there is great economy, too, in transporting stone dressed instead of in rough blocks. The Yorkshire masons, however, will not allow Yorkshire stone to be brought into their district if worked on more than one side. All the rest of the working, the edging and jointing, they insist on doing themselves, though they thereby add thirty-five per cent, to its price.... A Bradford contractor, requiring for a staircase some steps of hard delf-stone, a material which Bradford masons so much dislike that they often refuse employment rather than undertake it, got the steps worked at the quarry. But when they arrived ready for setting, his masons insisted on their being worked over again, at an expense of from 5s. to 10s. per step. A master-mason at Ashton obtained some stone ready polished from a quarry near Macclesfield. His men, however, in obedience to the rules of their club, refused to fix it until the polished part had been defaced and they had polished it again by hand, though not so well as at first.... In one or two of the northern counties, the associated plasterers and associated plasterers' laborers have come to an understanding, according to which the latter are to abstain from all plasterers' work except simple whitewashing; and the plasterers in return are to do nothing except pure plasterers' work, that the laborers would like to do for them, insomuch that if a plasterer wants laths or plaster to go on with, he must not go and fetch them himself, but must send a laborer for them. In consequence of this agreement, a Mr. Booth, of Bolton, having sent one of his plasterers to bed and point a dozen windows, had to place a laborer with him during the whole of the four days he was engaged on the job, though any body could have brought him all he required in half a day.... At Liverpool, a bricklayer's laborer may legally carry as many as twelve bricks at a time. Elsewhere ten is the greatest number allowed. But at Leeds 'any brother in the Union professing to carry more than the common number, which is eight bricks,