Ten millions of people inhabit the manufacturing districts of which Manchester is the centre. It is at once the wealthiest and the poorest district in England, where wealth has an increasing tendency to accumulate in the hands of the few, and where, according to official returns, there are, at the other extreme, more paupers than anywhere else in the land, with the single exception of Middlesex, including London. The inevitable reverse to the medal of great commercial prosperity is wretched poverty existing side by side with it. It is only in poor agricultural, non-manufacturing countries that poverty is comparatively happy and endurable. If there is a remedy for such a state of things in the industrial centres, no one has yet found or applied it. There is always a large proportion here of the classes it has become the fashion to style “submerged,” and in times when prosperity wanes it increases so as to include most of the wage-earners, and to bring the smaller shopkeepers to the verge of ruin. Many of these periods of depression have been beyond human power to foresee or to avert, but others have been induced by the action of the manufacturers, in competition with one another. But in almost every instance of hard times the nearest remedy has been sought, on one side, or the other, in the strike or the lock-out. Lancashire is the home of these crude remedies.
Next to the shortage, or the high price, of raw material, or the slackness of trade, the greatest evil is that of the glutted market, caused by over-production, hardly possible before the days of machinery; an evil which is most often caused by the competition of manufacturers, who continue to manufacture, each one in the hope that, whoever else suffers, he at least will not. Over-production has in the past been carried on to such an extent that goods have had to be sold in bulk for very considerably lower than the cost of manufacture. Selling at a heavy loss, the manufacturers have sought the nearest means handy to reduce their deficit; and this has usually been found in the reduction of wages, rather than in decreasing the output. A five or ten per cent. reduction has generally brought about a strike, which has, before now, been welcome to great firms, in affording an excuse for ceasing to manufacture at a ruinous loss. To provoke a strike on these terms has been the only way out of an impossible situation; and the indignant workpeople have thus, instead of embarrassing the masters, unwittingly saved them from bankruptcy. The middle course is the expedient of “short time.”