are nearly 2,000 textile factories in forty-nine counties, and everyone of these factories has much less than 100 workpeople; while a very considerable number of them employ only from forty to fifty, from ten to twenty, and even less than ten persons.132
This could have been foreseen by everyone who has some practical knowledge of industry, but it is overlooked by the theorists, who know industry mostly from books. In every country of the world there are by the side of the large factories a great number of small ones, the success of which is due to the variety of their produce and the facilities they offer to follow the vagaries of fashion. This is especially true with regard to the woollens and the mixed stuffs made of wool and cotton.
Besides, it is well known to British manufacturers that at the time when the big cotton mills were established, the manufacturers of spinning and weaving machinery, seeing that they had no more orders coming, after they had supplied this machinery to the great factories, began to offer it at a reduced price and on credit to the small weavers. These last associated — three, five, or more of them — to buy the machinery, and this is why we have now in Lancashire quite a region where a great number of small cotton mills continue to exist till nowadays, without there being any reason to foresee their disappearance. At times they are even quite prosperous.
On the other side, when we examine the various branches of textile industry (cotton, wool, silk jute, etc.), we see that if the great factories dominate in the spinning and weaving of cotton, worsted and flax, as well as in the spinning of silk (the result being that the average for these branches reaches 150 workers per factory for cotton, and 267 for the spinning of flax), all other textile industries belong to the domain of the middle-sized and the small industry. In other words, in the manufacture of woollens, shoddy, hemp, hair, machine-made lace, and mechanical knitting, as also in the