Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/474

458 and the rehandling there, handicap them in competition with Glasgow shippers of the same articles, which is one of the chief reasons for the construction, now in progress, of the Manchester ship-canal. In countries where deposits of coal and iron are comparatively rare, as in France, Germany, and elsewhere, the favored spots necessarily become themselves the chief centers of manufacture and population. Furniture is a rather bulky and expensive article to move about, and its manufacture, for use through a large portion of the United States, has found an appropriate and central position at Grand Rapids, Mich., where the most useful native timbers and water-power are in abundance.

The lighter metal and wood manufactures, the textiles, leather, pottery, and miscellaneous small wares, in which the cost of transport is relatively less important, are determined, as to their location, by a much greater complexity of conditions, and the general rules on this point are subject, in their case, to variation from specially dominant influences. In order to combine the most obvious advantages, they should not be situated too far from a supply of coal and iron, should be convenient to the sources of their raw material, whether home or foreign, and to the markets where their finished products are expected to find a sale. While, too, each article and department of manufacture will usually succeed best around a center of its own, where a skilled and adapted population has become settled, it is still more important that all should be conveniently clustered for mutual assistance. While these conditions are more or less generally complied with in all great manufacturing countries, they are most completely so in Great Britain, partly by reason of its natural facilities, partly owing to the absence of any fiscal interference by their own Government. Thus it may be observed that the location of the cotton manufacture in Lancashire, of the woolen in Yorkshire, and of the lighter metal and miscellaneous in and around Birmingham, is in compliance with those principles, as well as the subdivision and specialization of all these various industries, many of which and similar ones may also be found in Scotland, which, to a certain extent, is a smaller independent center. Subject to necessary geographical differences, the location and arrangement of similar manufactures in the United States and on the European continent follows as nearly as possible the same conditions. Only in New England had we in existence a population capable of successfully undertaking the production of the great variety of those articles when prematurely called for by the imposition of our high protective tariff on their importation; and the situation of that country, in a corner, as it were, of our territory, and without local supplies of coal and iron, is not all that could be desired for the purpose. True, its seaports, convenient for coastwise navigation, its abundant