Manchester long ago ceased to be a cotton-manufacturing centre. The growth of the industry, the growth of the city, and the increase of rent, rates, and taxes within it, all led to Manchester becoming the metropolis of cotton, in which it is no longer worked up from the raw material, but where the finished product is warehoused. Warehouses, and not factories, are the prominent buildings of “Cottonopolis”; which is now a city of merchants and middlemen, and the metropolis of the Lancashire industrial towns, where all professions and trades are represented. To see the cotton mills, you need go to Stockport, Bolton, Blackburn, Oldham, and Preston: but whenever they suffer, Manchester will share in their trials. The magnitude of the cotton-spinning trade is too great to be readily grasped. In the comparatively early stages of its history, in the years 1793-1824, the value of the total exports was £365,000,000, or an average of, say, twelve millions sterling a year, and that of the raw material imported £128,000,000. In 1887, the total value of the annual exports had risen to £70,957,000; or, in other words, it had grown almost six-fold. [Sidenote: _ENGLAND’S BRAIN-CENTRE_] There were then 700,000 operatives, and a sum of £29,400,000 was paid annually in wages. According to the returns for 1905, the exports of cotton goods in that year were valued at £92,000,000, showing an annual increase since 1887 of considerably over a million sterling a year. And still the tide of commercial prosperity is rising; no fewer than eighty new cotton mills having been built in Lancashire in the eighteen months comprising 1906 and the first half of 1907: with the result that there is more work to be done than hands to do it. When in due course the usual over-production ensues, and the scarcity of labour is replaced by lack of work, the bulk of misery and suffering will be proportionately increased; and should there ever come another Cotton Famine, the horrors of 1863 will fade into comparative insignificance. VIII [Sidenote: _THE MANCHESTER SHIP CANAL_]