Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/484

 462 THE ECONOMIC JOURN a question of. the substitution of machinery for hand work, but of women for men. I.n,.Leeds  itself, with the exception of the youths who are bei.g' trained as 'tuners,'. only women work at the loom. In the village of Yeadon, a few miles from Leeds, men and women work at the same mills, a man being allowed to have two looms with a boy or girl to help him, whereas a woman has only one loom. At Huddersfield, where the finest cloths are made, some of the firms employ men weavers only, and consider them superior to women. This .opinion is not shared by a Leeds manufacturer, who tried a dozen Huddersfield men, and found that, although they wanted more pay than the women, they did not do the work so well. Even where men and wome. n are employed together on the same work it is difficult to compare their rates of payment because men tune their own looms and women do not. In Leeds itself the question does not arise; and in other places the employment of men is determined almost entirely by the demand for men's labour in other trades, and not by underselling on the part of women. Women were employed because wages were low, not v/ vers. Leeds has steadily increased its demand for men's labour in a multitude of industries connected with the machinery and iron manufactures, and men's labour could not be obtained at the loom at wages which would leave any margin for profit. lqor does Leeds as a whole do the high class of work about which there might be some doubt as to the advisability of employing men or women. All but a few firms in Leeds use shoddy, mungo,.or extract to a very considerable extent in the manufacture of their cloths, and the lower the class of cloth the lower the margin for wages and profit. But the flax and the woollen trades are no longer the principal industries of Leeds even for women. The last decade, which has seen the flax trade at its lowest ebb, has also seen the rise and rapid increase of another industry which may be said to have had its origin in Leeds, and which promises to revolutionize the tailoring trade of East London and elsewhere, viz., the wholesale ready-made clothing trade. The rise and decline of the flax industry may be traced in the figures of the census returns. In the earlier years returns were given of the number of girls and boys under twenty employed in the different trades. In 1871 the returns for the towns only gave he nmber of men and women above twenty, statistics useful enough for a study of men's industries, but giving little light as to the employment of female labour. In 1881 the returns were for males and females of all ages. The figures given in brackets