Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/485

Rh still another distinct subdivision of the business. While this minute subdivision of the industry is largely the outgrowth of conditions rather than a tendency evolved from experience, it may be said to be definitely determined that the best results are attained by it. Under this system a community like Bradford in England is a great beehive of interdependent industries, the separate stages of the manufacture being carried on in separate establishments. The whole energy of the management, in each branch, is devoted to securing the best results in that particular branch under the most economical conditions. Here, in a radius of 75,000 acres, with a population of 500,000 people, is consumed nearly or quite one half of the total quantity of wool worked up in Great Britain. Here a capital of £40,000,000, employing 140,000 operatives, turns out each year a product of manufactured wool valued at nearly the total amount of its capital. Here, built up within the century, is an aggregation of organized industrial development without a parallel among the princely cities of antiquity—the most striking, the most tangible, of the many results of the evolution of the wool manufacture. The complete organization of the Bradford manufacture indicates the ultimate development of the industry.

It is not difficult to understand why the development of Great Britain and France, in this particular, with its striking concentration of the textile industries in towns like Bradford, Huddlesfield, Manchester, and Leeds, and Rheims and Roubaix, has not been duplicated in the United States. While the factory system here has superseded a household industry, it is in no sense an outgrowth from it. We have seen why not, in the difficulties which attended the procurement of machinery in the early days of manufacture here. The first factories were stock companies, necessarily, for few individuals had the capital necessary to found mills. These original mills performed all the operations of the manufacture, because there were no agencies through which any part of these operations could be independently carried on. Waterpower being then the great desideratum, they were widely scattered on the streams of the New England and Middle States. This scattering created the necessity for the equipment of complete mills under one management. Time is gradually effecting something of a concentration of kindred industries, as in Philadelphia, which is called the textile center of the United States, and in New England towns like Fall River, Lawrence, and Lowell. With this concentration, there is gradually evolving a system of subdivision. This tendency we may look to see increase in the wool manufacture, with a corresponding gain in the stability of the industry, and in the variety and the excellence of its products.

Surveying the whole field, we are struck by two features in