THE COTTON TROUBLES. T HERE seems to be no doubt whatever
that the grave disorganisation which is being suffered in the great cotton industry of Lancashire is due to a quite real deficiency in the supply of the raw material. With all the talk about "corners," no one pretends that there is anywhere at this moment available nearly cotton enough to enable the numerous mills now running half time, or less, to run full time. Supposing England and the States were united under the rule of a perfectly well informed and benevolent despot, he could not put his hand on hidden stores and drag them forth for the relief of the crippled trade. They are not in existence. They are coming into existence every day as the new crop is gradually harvested, but it is an exceptionally late crop, and there seems no reason to anticipate that its results will be freely available for the supply of Lancashire mills till well into October. The ingathering of the cotton harvest, moreover, is spread over several months, and the total amount is still liable to be very seriously affected by catastrophes like the tornado at Galveston the other day, and by "killing frosts." Consequently, the Lancashire spinners, and to some extent the manufacturers depen- dent on them for yarn—not seldom the two branches of the trade are carried on by the same firms—are only too likely to be gravely hampered in their industry for weeks to come. This is extremely trying to both employers and operatives, and none the less so as the partial stoppage of a trade through actual scarcity of its raw material is in this country, except, of course, in the historic case of the American Civil War, an almost unknown experience. They are Englishmen, however, and they will not gird against Providence on account of the weather conditions, whatever they were, which kept down the cotton crop of 1899 so much below what was expected, or the rains in June last which are said to have seriously interfered with the maturing of the crop of the present year. They have had good times during the last two or three years, and are, therefore, much better able to bear the inconvenience and stress of the present crisis than if it had come, say, in 1817. Among the workpeople, we are confident, thrift is steadily spreading, and the habit of living from hand to mouth and eating or drinking up their share of prosperous trade is less and less prevalent. We have heard, indeed, of a great cotton centre where a keen and sympathetic social observer thought that thrift was pushed almost into a vice, narrowing and hardening the characters of those who practise it. We can hardly imagine that there is very much of this form of excess. But the fact that such a tendency has been noticed in a typical portion of the great cotton district affords encouragement to the belief that the present slackness of work, and the proposed entire stoppage for a fortnight in October, should that be found necessary in the best interests of the trade, will not produce much acute hardship.
Although, however, as we trust, there will be little which could fairly be called suffering, there will be quite enough inconvenience to excite among those who labour under it, both employers and operatives, a good deal of indignation against any persons who can be at all plausibly held responsible for having aggravated the present situa- tion. There will be a deepening and embitterment of the feeling which has long, we imagine, prevailed widely and with no little strength among all ranks in the cotton industry, against the cotton speculators at Liver- pool,—persons who are held to fulfil no good economic function, who render no service justifying their existence, but rather make it their one aim and object to cultivate and utilise and fatten on the difficulties of their hard- working neighbours. Now we are very far from desiring to defend, or even excuse, the practices of " corner " makers, whose temper is beyond doubt about as pro- foundly egoistic and anti-social as it is possible to con- ceive. Yet we must confess that we are glad to find that our well-informed contemporary, the Manchester Guardian, while it has published news correspondence from Liver- pool pointing to the existence of a set of men, young in years, but old in cunning, subtlety, and greed, who have long foreseen and assiduously turned to their own advan- tage the present scarcity in American cotton, in its editorial columns distinctly minimises the influence exer- cised by such persona in that regard. For, in our opinion, not only is it undesirable for excessive achieve- ments in evil to be credited to any men, however far from admirable may be their spirit and methods, but also it would be a distinct economic mistake to cultivate the habit of mind which regards middlemen such as the cotton operators at Liverpool as having no useful function. You may hear it said that the great spinners might buy their cotton direct, and so dispense with the whole gang of brokers in Liverpool. We do not believe it. The exist- ence of the brokers represents a natural and inevitable division of labour. The cotton market is one of great and growing complexity,—growing, we say, because undoubtedly one result of the present month's experi- ence will be to develop the importance of other sources of supply, such as the Indian and Egyptian. And the great spinners and manufacturers, who have to study with keenest intensity, and with no little imagination, the markets for their yarn and piece goods all over the world, have no time to study in detail the market for the raw material also. Not only is this so, but we venture to hold that, purely selfish as may be the objects of the speculators, and real as may be the annoyance, and even loss, which from time to time, as perhaps now in Lancashire, they inflict on those engaged in strictly productive industry,yet they fulfil not seldom the functions of buffers and of warning indi- cators. We are not even perfectly sure that in this case of the short supply of American cotton, they will stand dearly convicted of having intensified over the whole year the inconvenience which that scarcity was bound to produce.
We cannot help feeling, though we say it with much diffidence of a trade with so admirable an intelligence service as the Lancashire cotton trade, that to some extent they seem to have been rather easily deceived. Why was it so unpleasant a surprise to so many persons in the trade when a very few months ago Mr. Henry Neill, of New Orleans, who had stuck to it through the winter that the cotton crop of 1899 was a bumper harvest of eleven million bales, acknowledged that it had turned out to amount only to about nine millions and a half ? It was this late surprise much more than the performances of any clever young speculators at Liverpool which, as it seems to us, has been the chief circumstance aggravating the inevitable inconvenience and injury caused by the actual cotton scarcity. Surely it is not too much to expect that the leaders of the cotton trade will illustrate the proverb, "Once bitten, twice shy," and will take effectual steps to secure that in future the true character of the cotton crop in ths United States shall be known to them and all con- cerned both early and accurately. We cannot believe that there will be any insuperable difficulty in fulfilling this requirement.
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