all the three or four consecutive phases of the manufacture are an exception.
But it is especially in the division of the non-textile industries that we find an enormous development of small factories. The 2,755,460 workpeople who are employed in all the non-textile branches with the exception of mining, are scattered in 79,059 factories, each of which has only an average of thirty-five workers. Moreover, the Factory Inspectors had on their lists 676,776 workpeople employed in 88,814 workshops (without mechanical power), which makes an average of eight persons only per workshop. These last figures are, however, as we saw, below the real ones, as another sixty thousand workshops occupying half a million more workpeople were not yet tabulated.
Such averages as ninety-three and thirty-five workpeople per factory, and eight per workshop, distributed over 178,756 industrial establishments, destroy already the legend according to which the big factories have already absorbed most of the small ones. The figures show, on the contrary, what an immense number of small factories and workshops resist the absorption by the