STATISTICS OF FACTORY SUPERVISION.

The Rev. Mr. Baker has recently issued a pamphlet, defending the moral tone of the factory system against the charges brought against it in the Rev. H. Worsley’s Prize Essay on Juvenile Depravity. We purposely abstain from discussing the merits of the controversy, believing that the truth lies between the two extremes advocated respectively by the reverend disputants. Mr. Henry, however, gives a table of statistics, an abstract of which we cannot withhold. It shows the number of spinning and power-loom weaving concerns in the principal manufacturing districts of Lancashire and Cheshire; also, the number of partners, so far as they are known to the public.

It appears that in Ashton-under-Lyne, Dunkinfield, and Moseley, there are fifty-three mills in the hands of ninety-five partners; Blackburn, and its immediate neighbourhood, has fifty-seven mills and eighty partners; Bolton, forty-two mills and fifty-seven partners; Barnley, twenty-five spinning manufactories and forty-six proprietors; at Heywood there are twenty-eight mills in the hands of forty-six masters. Manchester, it would appear, is not so much the seat of manufacture as of merchandise. Though it abounds in warehouses for the sale of cotton goods, there are no more than seventy-eight cotton factories, having one hundred and thirty-nine masters. Oldham has the greatest number of mills; namely, one hundred and fifty-eight, with two hundred and fifty-two proprietors; Preston, thirty-eight mills, sixty-two partners; Stalybridge, twenty cotton concerns and forty-one proprietors; Stockport, forty-seven mills and seventy-six masters; while Warrington has no more than four mills, owned by ten gentlemen. The total number of cotton manufactories in these districts is five hundred and fifty, which belong to nine hundred and four “Cotton Lords.”

Mr. Baker’s “case” is that a proper moral supervision is exercised over the tens of thousands of operatives employed in these factories; and that such supervision is not delegated from principals to subordinates. It would seem, from his showing, that of the nine hundred and four proprietors, no more than twenty-nine do not reside where their concerns are situated; and that of the entire aggregate of mills, there are only four in or near to which no proprietor resides. Lancashire and Cheshire cotton factories, therefore, are as regards absenteeism, the direct antithesis of Irish estates. The consequence is, that while the former are in a state of average, though intermittent prosperity, the latter have gone to ruin.