Sir Charles W. Macara, bart. : a study of modern Lancashire

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

RIVERSIDE

Ex Libris
C. K. OGDEN

SIR CHARLES W. MACARA

SIR CHARLES W. MACARA, BART.

Sir Charles W. Macara, Bart.

A STUDY OF

Modern Lancashire

BY

HASLAM MILLS

SECOND EDITION

MANCHESTER

SHERRATT & HUGHES

1917

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE

I. INFLUENCES - i

II. VICTORIAN MANCHESTER - - 17

III. THE HOUSE OF BANNERMAN - 35

IV. THE OPERATIVES - - 53
V. MASTERS AND MEN - - 73

VI. THE BROOKLANDS AGREEMENT AND

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL • - 93

VII. INTERNATIONALISM : INTERNATIONAL
COTTON FEDERATION : INTER-
NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF AGRICUL-
TURE - 125

VIII. WAR : COTTON RESERVE : COTTON AS

CONTRABAND: NATIONAL REGISTER 155
"'\
IX. REST IN CHANGE OF WORK : LIFEBOAT

SATURDAY, ETC. - - - - 177

APPENDIX PAGE

A. The Cotton Industry : A comprehensive
Survey from the Earliest Times,
A paper prepared, at the request of
the Belgian Government, by Sir
C. W. Macara, Bart., and delivered
at the Ghent Exhibition, 1913 - - 191

ft

CONTENTS

APPENDIX PAGE

B. America : Address on the Opening Day

of the International Convention of
Cotton Growers, Spinners and Repre-
sentatives of the Cotton Exchanges,
Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A., 1907 - 209
President Roosevelt : Correspondence,

etc. - 218

C. Egypt : Address on the Opening Day

of the International Cotton Confer-
ence, Alexandria, 1912 - - 222

The Development of the Sudan : Deputa-
tion of the British Cotton Growing
Association to the Prime Minister
(1913) : British Government re-
quested to guarantee a loan of
£3,000,000 - - 233

Reception by Viscount Kitchener at

Cairo - - 239

Text of Illuminated Address - - 245

D. India : Deputation of the International

Cotton Federation to the Most Hon.
the Marquess of Crewe, Secretary of
State for India - - 249

E. The Industrial Council : An article

contributed to the "Financial Review
of Reviews " by Sir C. W. Macara,
Bart., Oct. 1911 - - - 253

Industrial Unrest : Inquiry by the

Industrial Council .... 272

Capital and Labour : Paper read before
the British Association. Manchester
Meetings, 1915 - ... 276

F. Letter to President of the Free Trade

Union, 1909 - - ' - - - 289

CONTENTS

APPENDIX PAGE

Defence of Mr. Macara's position by
the Chairman of the Manchester
Royal Exchange • • 295

What the Leaders of the Operatives in
the Cotton Trade and Allied Indus-
tries think of Protection - - 298
Manifesto against Tariff " Reform,"

with List of Signatures - - 299

Lancashire's Verdict - - 312

The Indian Cotton Duties, 1917 :
Interviews with a representative of
the Manchester Guardian - - 318

G. Women on the Land : The Needs of

Agriculture - 321

Speech on Trafalgar Day, 1916 - - 324
Tribute to Lord Kitchener - - - 327

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

SIR CHARLES W. MACARA, BART. - Frontispiece
(From a painting by C. Rowley.)

Presented by the General Committee of the
Federation of Master Cotton Spinners'
Associations, January, 1909.

FACE PAGE

LADY MACARA - - - - - - 182

I

(From a painting.)

MRS. HENRY BANNERMAN - - 22

(From a miniature).

Wife of the founder of Henry Bannerman &
Sons; grandmother of Sir Henry Campbell-
Bannerman.

REV. WILLIAM MACARA - - 54

MRS. WILLIAM MACARA - - 70

SIR HENRY CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN - - 118

MAJOR-GENERAL SIR ARCHIBALD GALLOWAY - 150

Chairman of the Honourable East India
Company.

Influences

CHAPTER I

4 INFLUENCES.

ONE of the best gifts for life is to be born into a
definite positive atmosphere ; to be racial ; to taste
of the soil; to have flavour, aroma, and what
one may call bite. There is a number of such
atmospheres. Sometimes it is a social stratum.
The English governing classes are a social
atmosphere to themselves. To be born into an
English governing family is to belong to a soil and
climate and to be one of the definite cultures of life ;
it is to have a bias — a bias in this instance towards
public life, and an instinct and a habit for public
affairs. There are counties and corners of the
earth, again, in which it is almost momentous to
have been born. To begin life in Aberdeen, for
example, is to begin it with a start.

Fifeshire again, is a fermentation of human
character, the forcing ground of a distinct type of
man. Charles Wright Macara was a son of the Free
Kirk Manse. This also was an atmosphere — an
atmosphere oxidised by strong principles, enlarged

CHARLES W. MACARA

by the historic experience which is called " The
Disruption," enlightened by the familiar play of
great names and great ideas. Nor was this all. On
another side he was connected by many ties with
the government of India, and heard much of life —
and of death — in the remote and burning plains of
Empire, and, fed and nourished thus on strong
traditions, he was, himself a Fifeshire village lad,
equally at home with the son of the laird and the
son of the ploughman ; in and out of the cottages
of one of the knottiest peasantries of Scotland.

These experiences, though he may not have
known it, were the silver spoon in the mouth of the
young Charles Macara. They were the preparation,
and almost the predestination of the life he was to
live. It was his own wish to be a soldier. The manse
at Strathmiglo looked at the proposition, but was
not wealthy enough to entertain it, and we
shall see him going into business, making his
own way, and then, in later years, when his real
nature began to get its scope and its chance,
bringing into the industrial affairs of England the
qualities of strategy, management and providing
which would have made him a successful leader on

INFLUENCES

the field. Lancashire got what the Army and what
India lost — a general who knew when to advance,
and, not less important, when and how to retreat;
one who could fight a stern battle, and, when the
time came, negotiate a lasting peace. It was he who
very largely gave Lancashire a new sense and a
new habit of organisation ; he ushered in the new
age of the collective spirit.

Others of an earlier age had won Lancashire her
freedom. In the forties the object of statesmanship
was to get undone things which ought not to have
been done ; in the nineties the problem had changed,
and was to be stated in terms of getting done things
which could no longer safely be left undone. It
was Charles Macara who very largely showed how.
His business career is part of the public life of

Lancashire.

******

The Macaras are a clan. They are related to the
larger clan of Macalpine, and their origin is traced
to the Trossachs. Charles Macara was the eldest
of the seven children of the Rev. William Macara,
and was born at Strathmiglo, a Fifeshire village, in
1845. William Macara, the father, was born in

3

CHARLES W. MACARA

Glasgow in 1812. He had a distinguished though
distant relation in the person of a certain Colonel
Sir Robert Macara, who flowered during the
Napoleonic wars into the full command of the
Royal Highlanders, and gave up his life at Quatre
Bras, the day before Waterloo.

In the landscape of family history — its
secluded pastures of quiet living and sober

I undulations of achievement and character — this Sir
Robert Macara, a soldier steeped and seasoned in
the strong martial brine of his times, the colonel
of the wild and barbaric Black Watch, promoted
and finally decorated for eminence on the field, and
cut down at last on the eve of the supreme agony
of Waterloo, occurs like an abrupt eminence,
sudden, solitary and scarred, a spasmodic upheaval
of the family habit into adventure and romance.
But for him the family of William Macara was
made of the good plain prose of Scottish citizen-
ship : it was a family, at any rate, in which "
the ministry and the pulpit were the natural
outlet of superior promise, and so we find
that in 1836 William Macara, after a period
of study at the Glasgow University, was licensed

INFLUENCES

as a preacher of the Gospel by the Glasgow
Presbytery of the Church of Scotland. It was a
step towards ordination, though it still fell short
of the full degree, and in the next few years William
Macara is acting as assistant to one elderly and
eminent Divine after another in the cities of
Glasgow and Perth.

It was a period of great crisis and moment in
Scottish politics and theology. The waters were
definitely racing and churning to the brink of the
Disruption ; the Free Church of Scotland was
stirring to its birth, and we get glimpses of William
Macara, a fine presence in the pulpit and the parish ;
strong swimmer in the excited waters of con-
troversy ; heart and soul with the party of Chalmers ;
edifying his congregation in Free Church principles
with such a thoroughness of edification that, when
the Disruption occurred, the church at Perth
left the Establishment with hardly the shed-
ding of a single member; now attending the
first General Assembly of the Free Church
of Scotland ; now hurrying back to Perth,
where he preached twice the next day from texts so
minutely applicable to the crisis, and so completely

5

CHARLES W. MACARA

expressive of his own views, that the argument may
be said to have been clinched in their mere
announcement. Still lacking full ordination, he
was unable to take part in the solemn spectacle in
St. Giles' Cathedral on May i8th, 1843, at which
the seceding ministers asserted the spiritual
independence of the Church of Christ, and then,
bench after bench, and file after file, withdrew
from the presence of the secular authority, but he
joined them, so to speak, in the cold grey light of
the street outside, and lent all his will and strength
to the practical business of the next moment, which
was an urgent exercise, not of theory, but of action.
Born of the spirit, the new Church had yet to be
born of the flesh ; the Word had to be incarnated
in a Church, in a governing mechanism, in a
membership, in bricks and mortar. The problem
came down from the high ground of pure thought,
and wandered among the temporalities of law and
architecture and finance.

The Free Church of Scotland was a model of
practical statesmanship. Chalmers himself was at
once a scholar, a saint and a consummate man
of affairs, a churchman at once of the highest

INFLUENCES

inspiration, and of the most finished technique, and
we can perceive among his associates and followers
a certain polish and suavity, a kind of smoothness
and an aptitude for the world of men, which
came of much rubbing against hard and practical
affairs. It was to be seen in the character of
William Macara. He was of a school of accom-
plished ecclesiastics. We have heard how he
hastened away from his first General Assembly
to confirm the knees of his congregation at Perth.
The question what he should say was less urgent
than the other question, where he should say it.
Excluded from his own Church, he preached in a
hired schoolroom, and afterwards accepted for
himself and his congregation the temporary shelter
of a Wesleyan Chapel. Out of such confusion the
Free Church of Scotland gradually emerged.
William Macara himself became, in 1844, the
minister, fully ordained now, of the Free Church
of Scotland at Strathmiglo, where he sustained for
forty-five years a supremely diligent and well-
ordered ministry of the Gospel. He was a typical
son of his climate and his times; had played his
part in one of the greatest events of Scottish history,

7

CHARLES W. MACARA

and Charles Macara, born at Strathmiglo, drew his
earliest breath in an atmosphere saturated in large
ideas, strong purposes and illustrious names. It
was perhaps a better patrimony than either money
or an estate.

Shortly after his settlement at Strathmiglo in
1844 William Macara was married to Charlotte
Grace Cowpar, a devoted daughter of the Free
Church of Scotland, and a faithful follower of the
Disruption movement in Perth. She was the
daughter of a substantial farmer who had been
Colonel of the Forfarshire Militia, but, being left
an orphan at the age of five, she was, with a
sister and several brothers, affectionately sustained
and brought up by an uncle. This uncle — the
great-uncle of Charles Macara — was Major-General
Sir Archibald Galloway. The rush of young
Scotsmen into the Indian Service, which was
started in the late years of the eighteenth century
by Dundas, the friend of William Pitt, carried
young Archibald Galloway into a humble office,
from which he rose by his own abilities, until he
became finallv Chairman of the Roard of jfhe

INFLUENCES

Honourable East India Company, and left the
name of Galloway high up among the Scottish
names which we find written large in Indian history.
In India Sir Archibald Galloway had a double
reputation as an administrator and a soldier. He
is numbered with contemporaries like Lord Gough
and Sir Marion Durand, in the company of great
Indian soldiers. His own military service included
much fierce and breathless fighting in the Punjab
war, which gave him the experience of no fewer
than thirty-five engagements. His career as an
administrator was long and distinguished. He
took to India the habits of a Spartan, with the result
that thirty-five years of active service left his
capacity for service still unexhausted, and he was
able to give a further period of fifteen years to
the service of the Board in London, death finally
overtaking him in the office of Chairman. One of
his sons was a magistrate in the Indian Civil
Service, and during the Mutiny was killed at Delhi.
A grandson, born at Delhi, Admiral Galloway
(retired), has had a distinguished career in the Royal
Navy. In the family of Mrs. William Macara
Sir Archibald Galloway created a powerful

9

CHARLES W. MACARA

Indian tradition. The Manse at Strathmiglo
was in contact with the governing type of
mind, and heard the echoes of tumultuous
events. It became connected by many intimate
ties with the administrative and military service
in India, and quivered with the anguish of the
Mutiny. To young Charles Macara India seemed
to offer a possible opening. Life, as it turned out,
had him reserved for other purposes, but meanwhile
India, with its legends of service and sacrifice and
death, was another point of view. It blended with
much subtlety with the austere influences of the
Free Church and the rich exhalations of life and
character which arose from the village community
of Strathmiglo.

Strathmiglo was indeed very formative, and the
son of the Free Church minister had the freedom of
the parish, and was in contact with all its social
varieties. The parish of Strathmiglo is divided
between the three Scottish counties of Fifeshire,
Perthshire, and Kinrosshire. It was the home
of a well-marked and well-defined community,
a nursery of character, and, in a word, an atmo-
sphere. William Macara's congregation in the

10

INFLUENCES

Free Church of Strathmiglo consisted very largely
of the farmers who cultivated a rich and fertile
countryside, but, behind the farmers, and in their
midst, was a settlement of handloom weavers, who
held the secret, and prospered by the production
of a fine linen damask. The modern factory system
has swept up the weavers and their craft into its
palm. They have been pocketed by the mechanical
giant, and have disappeared. But in the middle
of the last century they were a small and proud
industrial autocracy. Many of these weavers
owned their own cottages and weaving shops, and
were the masters of their own lives. They were
very much the same human material that Barrie
found in Kirriemuir.

Heads were extremely hard in Strathmiglo ;
speech was broad, and faces were of granite ;
definite views on politics and theology, and more
especially theology, were to be had for the asking,
or even without the asking. Dialectics and disputa-
tion were a village sport, and even those who
did not themselves play, were yet keen critics of the
art and science of the game, and had the records

of great performances at their finger tips. It was

ii

CHARLES W. MAC AHA

the home of the cruel political sport of " heckling."
Political speakers who visited Fifeshire l in those
days found themselves addressing an audience

which, for all the response and reaction that could

i

be won from it might have been the Sphinx.
Whatever such a frozen silence might have be-
tokened in Sussex or in Kent, in Fifeshire it was but
the mask of an extreme activity of mind. The man
and his argument were undergoing minute examina-
tion, and the result, whether favourable or unfavour-
able, was not yet determined. The speech was, in
fact, an essential, but rather dull preliminary to
the real business of the evening, which began when
a questioner in the body of the hall, an accepted
master of the art, proceeded to balance the speaker
on a series of cunningly-invented logical dilemmas,
the process causing an excitement which, in other
parts of the country, is reserved for wrestling or
rat-catching.

Strathmiglo was like that. Sufficient as the
village was unto itself, great scenes and great ideas
were yet perceptible on every quarter of its far

i. Strathmiglo is in the constituency which Mr. Asquith has
represented for many years.

12

INFLUENCES

horizons. From hills in the parish which would
be climbed by any adventurous youth, the whole
kingdom of Fife could be seen stretched to the
boundaries, where it faded into the firths of Forth
and Tay ; in one direction the North Sea broke
its teeth on the confines of high tide ; in yet another,
Edinburgh Castle could be seen reared above the
murk of the romantic, towering city. Towards the
west lies Loch Leven, with its island castle in
which Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned, and
further off are the hills overlooking the field of
Bannockburn, on which King Robert the Bruce
marshalled his camp followers — a strategic move
which is said to have had a considerable effect on
the result of the memorable battle.

The Disruption of 1843 cut across Scottish society
vertically, and not after the fashion of religious
revivals in England, horizontally. People of the
highest social standing and consequence went over,
they and their houses, to the Free Church of
Scotland. It was, in fact, a body to which that
personal question as to the rich man and entrance
into the Kingdom of Heaven came home, in the

CHARLES W. MACARA

case of many pointed instances. However that
question may be determined, there is no doubt that
a rich and powerful laity in the pews ministered
considerably to the social lustre of the pulpit. In
his own parish, the Free Church Minister had a
standing comparable with that of the English rector
or vicar in his, and in the faithful parishes of
Fifeshire, while the momentum of the Disruption
was still unspent, there was a catholicity in the
social quality of the office to which no other
reformed ministry could pretend. Nor was this
all. The migration of Scotsmen into England,
which excited so much attention in the days of
George III., was still proceeding. There were many
Scottish merchants in London ; there \vas a powerful
Scottish community in Manchester. These exiles
were in full sympathy with the great movement
of 1843, and the Free Church minister in his remote
Scottish parish found himself associated by many
ties of faith and friendship with a new mercantile
aristocracy in England.

We shall see how this, and not India or the
Army, gave Charles Macara his opening into life.
Meanwhile, although the son of the Manse, he is in

INFLUENCES

attendance at the Strathmiglo parish school,
rubbing shoulders, after the Scottish fashion, with
the son of the laird and the son of the ploughman.
No schooling could have been better for one who
was called on in after years to meet Labour and
the leaders of Labour at the level table of negotia-
tion, and to act as a diplomatist in the strained
relations of class and class. Always very definitely
a member of his own class, correct and polished in
speech, punctilious in clothes and all that makes
the outer man, Charles Macara yet possessed, in a
very marked degree, the faculty of talking to the
workman and his leader as man to man. He
neither strutted nor did he seem to condescend.

Meanwhile at Strathmiglo the process of academic
instruction went on. The elements he had from the
parish school. Latin he had from his father, in
systematic doses, to which the lad, who had strong
lungs and legs, and many errands of his own among
the hills and on the sea-shores of Fife, offered a
stout, but fruitless, resistance. But the time of the
spreading of the wings was near. The village was
good to be born in, but not so good to stay in.
The first break in the long habit and routine of

15

CHARLES W. MACARA

youth occurred with the departure to a public school
in Edinburgh. At this school his academic
education was continued till his seventeenth year,
when it came to an end. Preparation for life had
ceased ; life itself began without delay. The army
was beyond William Macara's means. His son
therefore came face to face with the problem of
self-support. There was, however, one bank on
which he could draw, and in which he had indeed a
good account, and that was his father's good name,
his high standing in the life of Scotland, his troops of
friends. With such support as these things
afforded, and with his own strong constitution and
the clean generations behind him, he committed
himself to the deep end of life. He took the far
cry. The scene changed to Manchester ; the cry
of the sea-birds dies away and the roar of the
trodden streets begins. Charles Macara began in
business. But he brought to it ambition and the
large constructive view. He made the business life
what it too seldom is — a liberal profession and a
public career.

16

Victorian
Manchester

CHAPTER II

VICTORIAN MANCHESTER.

IT was in 1862 — the high and pompous noon of the
Victorian age — that Charles Macara, then in his
seventeenth year, arrived in Manchester. An
opening had presented itself in the office of a firm
of merchants in Mosley Street ; an economical
lodging was secured in Rusholme, now devoured
and digested by its great neighbour, but at that
time a suburb and a seclusion into whose provincial
peace the city omnibus sprawled every hour like the
splashing of a stone in a pond. Life had begun.
* * # * * * #

If we look minutely at the outward and forbidding
aspect of things, we shall find comparatively little
change between Manchester of to-day and that
earlier Manchester of the sixties, in which the young
beginner pored over the ledgers of the Mosley Street
firm, considered colours and examined textures
beneath the dowdy light of the window-pane,
wrestled with the furious crisis of the incoming and
outgoing posts, and learned his way in and out of

'9

CHARLES W. MACARA

other warehouses, all of them tortuous with
passages of frosted glass, all sweet and exotic with
that miasma of raw calico, which, spread over the
city and bottled in its narrow streets, gives
Manchester its characteristic plantation smell, the
smell of Uncle Tom's Cabin — an exudation on
warm and stagnant afternoons as of superheated
humankind. Some superficial changes have been
made, but not many. They are changes, not so
much in the shape, as in the speed of life.

In the sixties a youth sent across the town to
collect an account or match a pattern would set
his watch and calculate the period of his emancipa-
tion by the Infirmary clock; or — though this would
be a little later — if the errand was worth a ride,
he would sling himself in a casual and absent-
minded manner on to the foot-board of an omnibus
which was feeling its way at the moment behind
a cavalcade of somnambulistic horses, and at the
end of his journey would duly drop off into the
street, the horses knowing of his departure from the
community behind them not so much by any
disturbance in the routine of their four feet, as

merely by the relief from so much weight.

20

VICTORIAN MANCHESTER

Blackpool, though it was beginning to be visited,
was not then a suburb to which one transferred
oneself in the course of a conversation or a survey
of the leading articles and the market report, but
was definitely a destination, a goal and a climax,
approached cautiously by the successive and well-
defined stages of Bolton, Chorley and Preston, after
which the traveller, instead of being familiar as he
is now with the landward slope of every tree, and
the contour of every meadow of cows, entered rather
into the acute and vivid sensations, and shared the
romantic status of those who are a long way from
home ; wrhile those who went to London knew that
they were going several weeks before, and when
the time came, prepared to make a day of the
journey with collapsible sandwich tins, thereby
tasting, however, a joy which has been crushed out
of experience by the train which bolts the miles
unmasticated, and never stops — the joy of really
going to London, of approaching London through
the modulations of the Midlands and the home
counties, savouring half a dozen different atmo-
spheres at half a dozen deliberate and ceremonious

stops — the social suavity of the platform at Rugby,

21

CHARLES W, MACARA

with its hunting men and sporting dogs; the
tingling expectancy of Willesden ; the final surrender
of dismembered tickets ; and, in a word, the adven-
ture, the romance, the fidgets.

Such was Manchester, and such its social timidity,
its unsophistication in the days when Charles
Macara tried at the door of fame and riches with
the key of that humble opening in the warehouse
of the Mosley Street firm. And yet Manchester
belonged definitely, even then, to the superior class
of the capital cities, and to the company of those
which are looked to and resorted to by admiring,
radiating, and by comparison benighted, communi-
ties outside. It was an axis, a metropolis; it had
provinces. To this fact the Art Treasures
Exhibition, held while Charles Macara was still
growing out of his clothes and thrusting his toes
out of his boots in Strathmiglo, had borne striking
testimony. In the year of the Art Treasures
Exhibition, Manchester summoned most of the
North-west of England into the hushed presence of
the arts of music and of painting ; flaunted crinolines
so fabulous in diameter and circumference, that the
turnstiles were choked and put out of action, and

22

MRS. HENRY BANNERMAN.

VICTORIAN MANCHESTER

admission had to be given through gates originally
designed for the entrance of pantechnicons; and
promenaded with rhythm and composure on broad
and embroidered walks to the admiration of the
rustic thousands whom the excursion trains had
collected, and would, with the fall of night, restore
to the upper watersheds of population, remote
bleak and exposed.

This was Manchester society, and if further
proof of its substance and sensibility was wanting,
it was to be found in numerous shops, the names
of which were beginning to occur in the politer
conversation, and their habit to be incorporated
into the sa-voir vivre of an appreciable acreage of
England; in the possession of a rectangular and
grimy building peremptorily and without fear of
contradiction designated the Gentlemen's Concert
Hall; in restaurants illuminated with gas and
gleaming with monumental brides-cakes; in the
visibility of a struggling club life behind the flat
windows of Mosley Street; and in the hairdressers'
shops, in which, on tessellated marble floors, and
amid a riot of far-fetched perfumeries, the hair of
the male sybarites was beginning to be brushed

23

CHARLES W. MACARA

upwards by rotatory brushes on machines which
revolved.

In point of fact, the town had got too big for its
boots. The modern world which struggled into birth
in and through Manchester had dislodged the resi-
dential population, and deposited it on sedate sub-
urban slopes, just over the edge of the actual crater.1
Manchester people no longer lived in Manchester.
It was by turns inundated and forsaken by the alterna-
tions of a powerful and systematic human ebb and
flow, and the mercantile streets exhibited after seven
o'clock at night that state of suspended animation
and condition of trance which is the characteristic
of seaside pools left by the receded tide, such life
as was visible — that of a belated clerk or cleaner —
visibly seeking its egress into the native element
which murmured low on the suburban shallows. The
characteristic creations of this age and epoch were
the stately suburbs of Rusholme, of Pendleton, and
of Kersal. They were the homes of the authentic
breed of Manchester men. Charles Macara was
shaped in their school, and carried on their apostolic

i. It was in 1832 that Cobden horrified Manchester by opening
a warehouse in Mosley Street, and in 1845 that he went to live
in Rusholme.

24

succession. What manner, therefore, of men were
they?

One thing, at any rate, is certain. The type has
largely disappeared. Its habitations remain, and
can still be traced in Victoria Park and in
Broughton Park ; on the terraced heights of Kersal
and Prestwich, and in the weighty social settlements
of Withington and Didsbury — heavy four-square
mansions approached by drives which fork away
at a given point in their progress and pursue a
north-west passage through a further afforestation
of rhododendron bushes to the stables, where, in the
bright morning of Manchester, grooms dressed
well-matched horses for the afternoon round of calls,
or for the Hall£ Concerts at night, and maids
glanced out at them from upper windows in which
cheval glasses indicated themselves majestically.
Sometimes one of these houses is removed by a
painful surgical operation, and a new social skin
is grafted in small scarlet houses over the wound.
Over large areas of these inner suburbs social
anaemia has begun to indicate itself in a fading
complexion and a feebler pulsation of life; they
have become institutional, and the deaf and dumb,

25

CHARLES W. MACARA

the fatherless, and the patients of throat specialists
count the hours where once the red family blood
ran. From this house the family have been promoted
into the landed aristocracy, and fallen upon a
deep territorial sleep in Wales or the west of
England ; in another they have encountered and
failed to survive the searching test of the third
generation.

Much of the departing grandeur of the upper
middle class was dismantled by the safety
bicycle, which caused, in one season, larger social
modifications and readjustments than the tall bicycle
— the devotees of which were, and remained until the
end, a sort of dedicated caste, a kind of alpine
club — accomplished in thirty years.1 Still more of
this stripping of the pageantry and the trappings
of life was done by the motor car. One motor car
differeth not very much from another in glory, and
the difference, where it principally resides, is
invisible and inexplicable to the popular intelli-
gence, but the horses and carriages of the sixties
and of the seventies and eighties, the three decades

i. The only man of eminence I can discover who committed his
limbs and life to the tall bicycle was Robert Lowe, afterwards
Viscount Sherbrooke.

26

VICTORIAN MANCHESTER

being spiritually identical, not only signalled a con-
siderable social consequence, but specified many of
its gradations, from the estate and twilight condition
of dowagerdom, unmistakably notified in the elderly
white horse and coachman not without a suspicion
of adhesive straw, to noontide family splendour
indicated in buckskin and cockades, flying foam and
bevelled glass, behind which some great personal
force could be seen communing with itself as it
drove home. Sweeping the gravelled roads of
Victoria Park ; keeping themselves warm by
gingerly perambulations during long afternoons
of fitting and trying on in King Street and St.
Ann's Square; assembling on Thursday nights
outside the Free Trade Hall so that no man could
count them, and outside Nonconformist Chapels on
Sunday mornings in appreciable numbers ; flashing
their owners to public ovations at great meetings,
and bringing them back to Meadow Bank and
Hopefield and Sunnyside after homeric victory — or
defeat — at the polls, they indicated the magnificence
and variety of the social landscape in the days
before Manchester had dispersed itself over two

counties and along two coasts, before limited

27

CHARLES W. MACARA

liability had drained much of the nourishment out
of the soil of Lancashire, filled up the valleys of its
society, and evolved Oldham.

But it was not only for his chariots and his
horses, combined as these things often were in his
life with the personal habits of a Spartan, and an
inflexible custom of Christian service,1 nor yet for
his half-acre of back pew, with its sumptuous
scriptures and dark blue rep, or for the famous
physicians, in attendance at other times upon the
Queen, who were telegraphed for to his sick bed, or
the centipedic funeral which occurred when finally
he died, that the Manchester man of this age was a
notable and a personage. He was the heir of a still
greater age ; he was a disciple. His youth had
been brooded over by Cobden and Bright, and the
League. He had seen what he had seen ; heard
with his ears, and his father had told him.

Manchester was a city with a soul. It stood for
an idea. The counting houses of Portland Street
and Mosley Street, the drawing-rooms and libraries
behind the rhododendron bushes of Rusholme and

i. One of the Cheetham family, who represented Lancashire in
several of the mid-Victorian Parliaments, travelled from London to
Ashton-under-Lyne every Saturday, without missing once, to teach
his Sunday School class.

28

Kersal, and the yellow stone houses among the
damp enfoldments of the hills and vales of
Lancashire where the calico printers lived, were
altogether saturated in an idea. They were a
" school." They had counted for more in modern
thought than Oxford. They had melted their
jewellery for a cause. They had organised stupendous
bazaars, crowded together into meetings and
subscription lists, and with one heave more, and yet
another, had finally hoisted Manchester into the
saddle from which she bestrode for two generations
of time the public policy of England, Peel
answering the hand on the bridle, Gladstone,
through a long life, straining every sinew. And
about the town there lingered for a long time,
discernible in its men and its institutions, this
flavour left by the passage of pure thought-
astringent, antiseptic to the infections of merely
growing rich.

The principal hall of assemblage in the town, the
one in which Charles Hall6 interpreted Beethoven,
and audiences of the well-dressed warmed their
hands at the faint mid- Victorian ecstasies and

sorrows of the Songs Without Words, was called,

29

CHARLES W. MAC ARA

not after the goddess of Music or the Prince
Consort, not as in Liverpool after the patron saint
of England, or, as in Bristol, after the philanthropist
who gave the land and an endowment, but, in a
manner unusual in England, after the name of an
intellectual abstraction with which Manchester had
been at once platonically and practically in love.1

It was not a vulgar city.

*******

Into this society, then, Charles Macara was
launched, though not without the chance of picking
up a favourable breeze. Though closely confined
for the present to the undistinguished warehouse
in Mosley Street, and walking a very narrow plank
of spare cash, he yet had introductions, and there
was no quarter of residential Manchester which did
not offer him open doors. As a likeable lad with
good and even distinguished connexions in Scot-
land, he carried some social canvas. Canvas is
rather a dangerous thing when there is still no
great cargo, and only such ballast as seventeen or
eighteen years can be expected to have stored, and

i. The Free Trade Hall, opened in 1843 when the Anti-Corn
Law League was moving swiftly to its triumph, and still so
called, to the embarrassment of those who use it to preach the
opposing doctrine.

3°

VICTORIAN MANCHESTER

in those early days in Manchester, Charles Macara,
sailing light, but not unhandsomely rigged, is
beating down the treacherous channel of well-
appointed, well-connected impecuniosity. Many
have come definitely to grief in those shallows;
others hang about them a life-time, and never reach
the broad and buoyant water over the bar,
biography, and particularly commercial biography,
being crowded with the figures of those who have
risen to wealth and station from nothing, but
exhibiting comparatively few who have achieved
the more difficult feat of rising from something.
There is nothing so difficult to live down as a start
in life. Charles Macara kept up appearances
sturdily. Somehow or another he managed to
square good looks, good manners, and a rather
nicely-cut coat with very slender means.

No one suspected that ends only just met.
Mrs. Parlane — a member of the Barbour family—
who invited him to her house in Stanley Grove
on Saturdays, and put him in the way of
meeting the wealthy Scottish set in Manchester —
the Barbours, the Bannermans, the Maclarens, the
Thorntons, and the Blairs — did not suspect it — or

31

CHARLES W. MACARA

perhaps she did, and guessed that a better dinner
than the Rusholme lodging, or the cheap restaurants
in the town could supply at the price, would do a
Fifeshire lad with an appetite almost as much good,
if not more, than the conversation.

The Grosvenor Square Presbyterian Church was
a great resource. The fact is not always understood
that in the days when the theatre was still regarded
as malarial, miasmatic, and the music-hall was not
less on the shady outskirts of the town than the
mortuary, and there was nothing like the present
free trade in pleasure, religious sectarianism was
the principal calorific of the English towns, as it
remains the principal calorific of the villages to this
day — roof, coals of fire, and fellowship. Sects and
schisms — they ran like heating pipes through cold
chambers, radiating that very high degree of
warmth which comes from the agreement and
communion together of small and isolated, and in
some cases despised minorities, spreading the arts
of music, oratory and public affairs. Charles
Macara found a debating society at Grosvenor
Square, and in that society he disentangled the

affairs of Church and State in the company of other

32

VICTORIAN MANCHESTER

young Scots — John Alexander Beith, who became
President of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce,
and John Kenworthy Bythell, who was afterwards
the Chairman of the Directors of the Manchester
Ship Canal.

Meanwhile, on the commercial side, the prospect
unfolded itself slowly. The day of small things in
Mosley Street was followed by a temporary removal
from Manchester to Glasgow, which had the
attraction of being considerably nearer home. In
Glasgow Charles Macara grew out of his first youth,
added considerably, in the service of a firm of
merchants, to his knowledge of business, and in
1868, at the age of twenty-three, was able to take
his first important post. This post he secured with
the great jute firm of Cox Brothers, of Dundee.
One of the four brothers who founded this business
had married a cousin of Mrs. William Macara, of
Strathmiglo, and it was through this relationship
that Charles Macara came into contact with one of
the super-firms of British industry, which carried on
vast operations in Dundee and in India, and was
represented in all the great commercial centres
of the world. He was appointed to assist

33

CHARLES W. MACARA

in representing it in Manchester, and this event
may be taken as his definite beginning as a
Manchester Man. All the ties which he had
formed during his first brief stay in the city, and
broken on his departure to Glasgow, were repaired,
and it was not now as a lad who was glad of a
friend, but as a young man who was beginning to
be of definite account, that he joined the substantial
society which gathered every Sunday morning in
the Grosvenor Square Church for the preaching of
Dr. Munro. The business of Cox Brothers had not
been flourishing in the district of Manchester as
the governing intelligence in Dundee desired that
it should. Charles Macara gave it a new drive
and new direction, and it was not long before he
was at the head of the Manchester branch, with a
free hand over a large area of commercial England.
He held this office with the firm until 1880, when
he was succeeded in it by a younger brother from
the Manse at Strathmiglo, going himself in that
year, to a larger sphere, and coming for the first
time within sight of the work of his life.

34

The House of
Bannerman

CHAPTER III

THE HOUSE OF BANNERMAN.

IN 1875 Charles Macara, then in his thirtieth year,
and still in the service of Cox Brothers, of Dundee,
had taken the momentous step of marriage. The
union which he made in that year was destined to
turn decisively the current and direction of his life,
and was not without its bearing on the course
of events in Lancashire. It liberated into the
atmosphere a new personal force. But not yet.
Thus far, through the morally decisive years in
which the deposits of living are laid in the small
decisions of life, its daily and hourly refusals or
assents, its yeas and its noes, its to-morrows and its
nows, each one so diminutive that only a microscope
could reveal its quality and structure, and yet
forming in the mass a concrete so hard and fast
that only a miracle shall modify its determinations,
Charles Macara had planned and built his own
fortunes. And so he continued to do for yet five
years more after his marriage. During that period
of time he still represented the Dundee firm, and

37

CHARLES W. MACARA

added ounce by ounce, and inch by inch, to his
weight and stature in Manchester. Then in 1880
the call came to bigger things. The dawn broke,
and found him ready to march. In that year he
was summoned to one of the most famous of
Manchester Houses. Marion Young, whom he
had married five years before, was a daughter of

the house of Bannerman.

*******

Bannerman 's ! It is not the full name of the
old-established business house of which Charles
Macara became in 1880 the managing partner. Its
full name, with a summarisation of its calling and
mission to the world, is written on the monumental
brass-plate in York Street, but Manchester knows
it emphatically — emphatically, rather than briefly,
for it is still a vibrant and sonorous name, a kind
of deep-stop in the organ of the town's common
speech — as Bannerman's. Manchester is curiously
precise and pedantic in the handling of its house-
hold names. There are firms which are never sum-
moned into conversation, but all the partners must
appear on parade; others in which the attendant
"company," the "sons" or "brothers," and, in an

38

THE HOUSE OF BANNERMAN

occasionally arresting instance, the " nephews," are
invoked. And there are others which, with the
same invariableness, float about the common talk

.»

like disembodied spirits. *' They have become
elemental, and their names are short and stark.
They have mislaid their minuter descriptions, like
Melba and Patti, the resulting effect of the
phenomenon being one of much grandiosity. It is
by such curt and rough indications as " Philipses "
and " Wattses " and " Rylandses " that Manchester
signifies dynasties. A man has but to tell a
suburban railway carriage, if the fact be not already
perfectly well known, that he buys or sells for
" Philipses," or more vaguely, but still intelligibly,
that he is at "Wattses" and the whole carriage
will immediately comprehend and moodily visualise
the universe which he inhabits. To be like that is
to be institutional. Bannerman's is like it.

There is a state to be kept up. There are
lingering domestications. It has china and silver
and a man-servant. It dines. It has the faculty
found only in the very proudest realms of trade and
commerce, and reserved usually to private banks,
though joint-stock banks noticeably aspire after it

39

CHARLES W. MACARA

in their head offices, of totally preserving its dignity
in the face of an unreserved odour due to the steam-
ing of vegetables. These things imply tradition
and length of days. They are the ways of
merchant princes, and merchant princes are to be
distinguished from the modern breed of professional
millionaires, who rush furiously from boardroom
to boardroom, and give out " yes " and " no " in
the vestibules of expensive hotels. And then it is
understood all over the town that Bannerman's has
lofty associations and the fact is well in the general
consciousness, though many are vague as to how it
came about, that it gave a Prime Minister to
England. York Street flows mutely by its feet
and reflects contentedly its sedate, rectangular
splendour. York Street itself belongs to the sober
noon-days of Manchester. Its architecture is of the
second period of the modern city ; the first, discover-
able in the regions of Cannon Street, where, amid
what were once the courts and alleys and lanes
of the mediaeval town, lies the shameful debris of
the orgy of profits, which began with the coming
of steam ; the third represented by the self-
consciousness of King Street banks. And over

4°

THE HOUSE OF BANNERMAN

York Street, so sepulchral and unearthly oa
Sunday, so soiled and secular on Monday, there
broods the big sign-board with the big name.

Bannerman's!

*******

To unearth the founder of the firm we shall have
to go back to Scotland, and in Scotland — more
precisely in Perthshire — in the very earliest days of
the nineteenth century, we shall find the Henry
Bannerman of the York Street sign-board and the
brass-plate. According to every rule of fortune-
making, this Henry Bannerman, when we find him
in the Perthshire farm, should be a promising, and
probably it might turn out on a narrower examina-
tion, a precocious infant in arms, or, at the most,
he should be dreaming dreams and viewing the
rural prospect with distaste at the tail of the plough.
To our surprise we find that though owner of the
land, he is himself the farmer; that the farm has
been, not a failure, but a success; that he has a
family of six sons, the eldest grown already to full
manhood, and showing every likelihood of being a
successful farmer too, and six daughters; and that

he is himself at least fifty-five years of age. Henry

41

CHARLES W. MACARA

Bannerman seems, indeed, when we first find him in
the small hours of the nineteenth century, to have
already determined and declared himself, and his
career, as we survey its completed journey, resembles
the course of a river, which, when almost within
sound of the diapason of the awaiting sea, suddenly
doubles back upon itself, turns inland again upon
life, and finally winds home through a different
latitude and a different physiography.

Far away on his Perthshire farm, though not
perhaps even in Perthshire beyond the reach of
the travelling pack-horses which were distributing
Manchester goods over far and wide, Henry
Bannerman heard of the heaving commotions of
that convulsed and chosen and apparently inspired
city ; how that hardly a day passed but steam was
admitted into the vitals of someone's mechanical
hobby, and behold the thing worked ; how that the
hand-loom weavers were leaving the eaves of
domestic industry, still to be seen in the stone
villages of undulating Lancashire, and were flocking
for the great migration into factories, where they
revealed themselves in a new social and spiritual

significance as "hands"; how that the factories

42

THE HOUSE OF BANNERMAN

were an uproar, and that one of them in Salford
had but recently been lighted by a new and dazzling
illuminant peremptorily called "gas"; how that
the newly-established Chamber of Commerce, or
"Association of Trade," was beside itself with the
habits of the gentiles who devoured Manchester
goods, but recoiled from paying for them. It was
the new age. To Henry Bannerman, mainly
because we never recognise history when we see it
in the making, it was not so much the new age as,
and that even at fifty-five with its overfacing
handicap, the new opportunity. It was, however,
to be approached cautiously. David Bannerman,
the eldest son, was sent to Manchester to survey
the prospects on the spot.

In the meantime the rest of the family remained at
home, and the routine of the farm went on, seed-time
and harvest and seed-time again. In Manchester
David Bannerman began at once to do well.
Within a few months he had a warehouse and a
partner in Marsden Square which is to be seen
to-day, an authentic remnant of early mercantile
Manchester, and in a year or two Manchester itself
is no longer an experiment. Word is sent to the

43

CHARLES W. MACARA

family in Perthshire that it is no longer an
experiment, but a result. Without further delay
Henry Bannerman uprooted himself. He gat
himself thence, so heavy the encumbrances that he
carried with him, so numerous the family, such the
tribe, and such, be it added, the faith, that it
resembles a migration of the patriarchs.

Nor was it carried out without adventures on the
way. The journey was from Perthshire to Glasgow,
and thence by sea to Liverpool. The vessel was
fourteen days at sea, and the last twenty miles,
after long waiting for a breeze that would serve into
port, had to be done in an open boat. At last,
however, it was accomplished, and the next news of
the travellers is that the firm of Henry Bannerman
and Sons — the sons being David, the pioneer,
Alexander, John and Henry, for Andrew, the
youngest, became a calico printer in another firm —
has been established in Market Stead Lane, and is
trading in fustians, cotton ticks, grey and white
calicoes, nankeens, muslins and plain fabrics, and
the family is living in Mosley Street, where it keeps
two maids. It is possible out of various fossils
preserved in the stratum of modern Manchester to

44

THE HOUSE OF BANNERMAN

re-furnish the former ages of the town. Tudor
Manchester may still be imagined with the help of
a conspicuous fragment in Market Place, but that
other age, infinitely less distant in time, hardly less
remote in spirit, during which — some twenty years
before the first cab was launched on the streets of
Manchester,1 — the Bannermans lived in Mosley
Street, has to be recovered from an occasional
domestic doorway to a warehouse, though a more
sustained similitude of it is to be found in St. John
Street.2 In such houses as may still be found in St.
John Street, with their folding shutter boxes
and candelabra, with the swift and steep ascent from
the secularities of the front street door to the over-
powering sanctities of upper chambers, with every
plain surface concealed by its antimacassar, the life
was lived — lived by men whose rolling collars and
love-lorn stocks, and generally ambrosial air, seems
hardly in keeping with the severe commercial
rectitude and counting house virtuosity which were
also theirs. It was the classical age of Manchester ;
the age of Cobden's citizenship; the age of Moses
and the prophets.

1. In 1839 its " stand " was in Piccadilly.

2. The " Harley Street " of Manchester.

45

CHARLES W. MACARA

Henry Bannerman died in 1823, his second career
having lasted some fifteen years. Six years later,
in 1829, his eldest son David, the pioneer of the
family adventure, died also in the prime of life.
He has the distinction in local history of being
the first Dissenter to be elected borough-reeve, the
executive head of the town, whose mediaeval and
operatic office melts out of reality in the dawn of
incorporation, and is reproduced in the plainer
prose of the modern mayoralty. The family
business was carried on by his brothers, and, after
their retirement, by his two sons, James Alexander
Bannerman and David Bannerman, and his nephew,
William Young.

The house of Bannerman was by this time
prospering exceedingly. A succession of removals
from one street in mercantile Manchester to another
ended in the late thirties in the final settlement
in York Street. As we approach the fifties and
sixties, we find the sons of Henry Bannerman
releasing themselves from the routine of Manchester,
and becoming county gentlemen. Henry bought
the Hunton estate, in Kent, which he developed,

becoming in time one of the largest hop growers

46

THE HOUSE OF BANNERMAN

in England. He filled the office of High Sheriff of
Kent, and died at Hunton Court in 1871. John
bought the estate of Wyastone Leys in Hereford-
shire, the Mansion House of which, on the banks
of the Wye, is one of the notable homes of England.
Considerable events attended on the marriages
of the daughters of the Mosley Street house. Janet
Bannerman married a certain James Campbell, who
made a fortune in business in Glasgow, became
Lord Provost of that city, and was knighted. The
second son of this marriage, Henry Campbell, was
made the heir of Henry Bannerman, of Hunton
Court, added Bannerman to his surname, and as
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, became Prime
Minister of England. Another daughter married
James Young, and it was owing to this marriage,
and his own union with their granddaughter,
Marion Young, that Charles Macara entered the
firm at that critical moment, when its youth was
spent, and its traditions growing a little dim. With
his entrance the firm renews its youth, and
begins to belong, as it had not belonged before,
to the public life of Manchester. We shall see how
the sedate dining-room in York Street sees miracles

47

CHARLES W. MACARA

done in the handling of matters and men, and how
for twenty-one eventful years York Street itself is

something like the Downing Street of the cotton trade.

******

It is from houses like that of Bannerman and the
multitude of other houses like it in character, that
Manchester gets its distinct commercial atmosphere.
They give it its Venetian caste among the cities of
the Empire. They radiate a powerful gentility, and,
in Moss Side, Alexandra Park, and other bow-
windowed and aspidistraed suburbs, nourish large
populations which get their livings with pens
behind their ears. This is often counted against
Manchester for a reproach. Philosophers who have
had occasion to lose their tempers with the town,
have complained of it, and have sworn in their
wrath that Manchester is sedentary ; that it is a city
of middle-men, seignors and burghers, who make
nothing but money, who spin not, neither do they
weave, and have argued themselves, and would argue
the world, into a low fever of cosmopolitanism ; and
that the town is, in point of fact, a Babel of half the
known and several of the unknown languages of

the earth. The charge does not lie at any rate

48

THE HOUSE OF BANNERMAN

against the house of Bannerman, which spins and
weaves as well as distributes, and as a general
accusation against Manchester it conflicts awkwardly
with the traditional military spirit x of the town.
The truth is that the cotton trade, of which Charles
Macara rose, as we shall see, to be the head in title
and in fact, is about the highest and most nervous
form of life in the kingdom of commerce, and the
separation of function as between one member and
another, though of the same body — broker, spinner,
yarn agent, manufacturer and merchant — set in
early, and grew more and more marked according to
biological law. The second largest trade in the country
after agriculture, it is as subject as agriculture to varia-
tions in practice due to habit and climate and soil.
South Lancashire spins, and North and North-east
Lancashire weaves. In South Lancashire Bolton
spins fine yarn, and Oldham just as inveterately
spins medium and coarse yarns.

Among the weaving towns, again, there are
localisations, Blackburn and Burnley living largely
on India, Nelson and Colne weaving coloured yarn.
Bolton, which is on the dubious frontiers of

i. Exhibited notably in 1914, when the sedentary warehousemen
and clerks joined the colours en masse.

49

CHARLES W. MACARA

spinning and weaving and has a foot in both
camps, ministers to the feminine vanities of
the civilized world. Where there are these
fine shades of difference in manufacturing
practice we should expect the more elementary
distinction between the merchant and the manfac-
turer. The earliest Lancashire manufacturer was
his own distributor. For the home trade he
employed travellers, who perambulated the country
at the head of small processions of pack-horses; in
such European countries as were open to him he
had agents who sold his goods at periodical fairs,
of which the fair at Frankfort in Germany was a
notable example. It was to guard against the
perils of this method of trading that the Chamber
of Commerce, which afterwards took to high politics
and won a place for itself in history, came into
being.

The rapid growth of the trade in the age of

steam l split the rude organisation of the eighteenth

i. The first steam engine for spinning cotton was erected in
Manchester in 1789. Forty years later — in 1830 — Lancashire sent
abroad cotton goods of the total value of ^19,428,000, and consti-
tuting more than half the foreign trade of England. In 1860 the
value of Lancashire's cotton exportation had grown to ^75, 551, 178.
In 1913 England sent abroad in manufactured goods of all kinds
the equivalent of ^"411,000,000, of which Lancashire contributed
in cotton goods slightly less than one-third. The exportation of
Lancashire piece goods to India alone, in one year before the
European war, was more than ^37,000,000.

5°

THE HOUSE OF BANNERMAN

century. The Manchester merchant disentangled
himself from the main body of the trade, and
Manchester, the seat of the market, began to acquire
that exotic and outlandish flavour which contrasts
so curiously with the stubborn, and as it is exhibited
in Oldham, the ferocious insularity of the county.
Much of the distributing business fell into the hands
of the immigrant Scotsmen, of whom Henry
Bannerman was one, and Charles Macara, in due
time and succession, another. The German agents
of the eighteenth century became the German
residents of the nineteenth. It was the break-up in
1825 of the Turkey Company, which intro-
duced the Greeks, and settled them at Kersal,
and the Greeks were followed in course of time by
the Armenians and the miscellaneous company of

the Levantines, the small change of humankind.

******

The house of Bannerman 's was some seventy
years old when Charles Macara came to manage it
in 1880, and in the next few years he is busy in
York Street spring-cleaning; breaking doors and
opening windows into papistical chambers ; conquer-
ing the active opposition, and, much more formid-

5'

CHARLES W. MACARA

able, the passive resistance of the pontifical spirit.
The broad classification of Lancashire trade is into
home and foreign, and home trade includes colonial
trade, the raciality and psychology of the two
being the same. He closed down the Canadian
trade of the house, and abolished the fancy
goods departments, which still remain a large
part of the home and colonial trade of Manchester,
and trained the firm exclusively on " heavy " goods,
by which denomination Manchester understands
such grave and reverend sanctities as counterpanes
and curtains, quilts and sheets and blankets, flannels
and calicoes and all the family of things which stand
in relationship to the same idea. It is from these
things, and the soul of these things, that a home
trade warehouse gets its air of an intense domestic
anxiety. They are the things which essentially and
finally matter to life. More than furniture of wood
or brass, and much more than ornaments of silver
and of gold they breathe the spirit of careful and
settled living. They are very near to life and death.
They are the solicitude and circumspection of
matrons. They are Manchester's contribution to
the world.

52

The Operatives

REV. WILLIAM MACARA.

CHAPTER IV

THE OPERATIVES.

BUT it is still neither primary nor essential
Lancashire. The warehouse in York Street, York
Street itself, and all mercantile Manchester, even
Mosley Street round the corner, and perhaps
especially Mosley Street with its banks and clubs,
and its club-men twinkling like glow-worms in the
eternal twilight of deep smoke-rooms, and applying
themselves behind upper windows to cool and
admirable luncheon tables — even these things, and
all these things together, are neither primary nor
essential Lancashire. They are parasitical on
Lancashire; an excrescence on the real life and
organism. Nothing is more remarkable in
Lancashire than the comparative invisibility of its
typical and characteristic people. They are always
behind the veil, and the best view of the cotton trade
is to be obtained on the coast at Blackpool, or even
further away than Blackpool, across the Irish Sea,
in the Isle of Man, a self-governing unit of the
British Empire which lives almost entirely on the

55

CHARLES W. MACARA

profits of Lancashire's annual recreation of body
and mind. Here, at the proper season of the year,
we shall find the originals— the assembled Card
and Blowing Room hands, the amalgamated
Spinners, the linked companions of the weaving
sheds, and, in a word, the operatives, a term which
has been appropriated by Lancashire, and, applied
as it is to cotton workers alone among the regiments
of mechanical craftsmen, reflects the pronounced
delicacy of the process, and the skill rather than
strength of those who carry it on.

At Blackpool we shall find the true types. The
overlooker in a Sabbatical garment, surmounted
by a new cap of pale grey, maintains behind a
ceremonious cigar, a sturdy independence of the
sunset; his wife, a pace and a half behind him, is
absorbed in the passive assimilation of oxygen, and
the frequency of the salutations, the plentiful
occurrence in conversation of familiar and self-
explanatory names-—" our James Henry " and " our
Violet" — are due to the circumstance that a whole
street, and probably almost a whole town, has risen
en masse and migrated to the coast. Nothing is

new to them except their surroundings. At night

56

THE OPERATIVES

the electrification of the town is seen twenty miles
out to sea by lonely mariners; and multitudes as of
the Apocalypse sway to the music of great orchestras
on floors of glass. They are the operatives.
Manchester itself hardly knows them. Only on the
north-eastern frontiers of the city, and there overlain
by the more recent stratifications of chemicals and
engineering, are the blue shawls, oval faces, and
powdered hair which are characteristic of the staple
trade, to be seen at all. And even in the true cotton
towns they are not to be seen except at certain times
of processional going in and coming out.

In the unchartered hours of morning and after-
noon the Lancashire factory town is in a condition
of partial trance. Only a meagre middle-class life,
struggling for existence in the deeply impoverished
soil, stirs faintly in and out of shop doors in the main
street. From up the steep side streets there arises
the sustained intonation of invisible machinery,
broken by the recurring pulmonary troubles of
exhaust pipes. On a hot afternoon the town
perspires steam ; it is as resonant as an organ loft.
Across the mill yard a boy wheels a skip full of
yarn ; the mill manager, in his alpaca cap, discusses

57

CHARLES W. MACAUA

technicalities with a sky-blue engineer; the engine
itself is dimly discernible behind glass, like an
appalling tiger in a cage; and a row of houses with
terra-cotta lace curtains and powerfully raddled
window-sills try to look over the high wall. In the
long street constituted by these houses, elderly and
monumental women discuss the revolving pageantry
of births and funerals; if it be evening and the genial
time of the year, spinners read the news of the day
in doorways which admit into interiors rich in brass
and mahogany, and busts of Charles Dickens glare
defiantly, and similar chiselled representations of
Queen Victoria brood majestically at fan-lights over
the doors. Primary and essential Lancashire !

It is one of the definite climates and cultures of
earth; a nursery; a frame under which life runs
some riot. Its men are the cool and instructed
connoisseurs of a wide range of arts and accomplish-
ments— of the times and speeds of homing pigeons,
the leg-passing of centre forwards, and the
crescendoes and diminuendoes of almost morbidly
perfect brass bands. In its Whit-week it has a
season of the year, a ritual and rubric of the
calendar, almost to itself. The minute accuracy

58

THE OPERATIVES

with which Whit-week is every year performed, with
its trombones, its blue silk banners, and spiritual
pride, its frankly denominational ostentations and
rivalries, its buns and lemonade at the supreme
moment of pageantry, its day-trips by waggon, canal
boat or rail, according to the day of the week, is an
achievement of Medes and Persians. The com-
munity is one considerably addicted to dress. The
transformation which is effected in individual cases
somewhere between the weaving shed and the
promenade at Blackpool, or even between the
weaving-shed and the Sunday School choir,
is the theme of general remark, but Lancashire
is perhaps the one community in the world in which
the final essence is ingeniously extracted from the
precious experience of new clothes by the simple
device of all putting them on on the same day.
The sensation which each individual experiences
in his own person is multiplied vicariously and
the phenomenon, as it occurs on Whit-Sunday,
resembles the casting of its skin by a particularly
large snake. Politically the community is incalcul-
able and unsteady. The Lancashire operative has
always been strongly in favour of Factory Acts.

59

CHARLES \V. MACARA

factory inspection, and the regulation by the StaU-
of his hours and conditions of work. But- these
views have been limited and sectional to his own
trade, and not in any way a part of a general
collectivistic conception of politics. They have, in
fact, been combined very frequently with a sturdy
and even truculent Church-and-Stateism,1 and not
seldom in certain parts of the county with a definite
clerical-mindedness which is accounted for in part by
the historic Catholicism of some of the northern
regions of the county. The cotton operatives have
shown no great leaning to the political theorisation
which makes so many State Socialists among the
engineers, nor is he pronouncedly under the influ-
ence of the minor Methodist bodies which nourish
the orthodox Radicalism of the miners. But he is
in the very forefront of the classical trade unionism
of England ; he is of the straitest sect, and it was in
this capacity and character that Charles Macara
became aware of him, fought him, got to know him
better, and finally co-operaled with him in large acts

of statesmanship for the peace of the whole trade.

* * * *

1. James Mawdaley, the famous leader of the Operative
Cotton Spinners, was a Conservative candidate for Oldhnm with
Mr. Winston Churchill in 1899.

60

THE OPERATIVES

The house of Bannerman serves the two offices
of production and distribution. In Manchester
it is the merchant of cotton and other goods; in the
provinces of Manchester it spins and it weaves.
During the course of its history the firm became
possessed of mills and machinery in Ancoats, in
Dukinfield and in Stalybridge. The journey from
one of these places to the other and on to the third
is not long, but it contains sharp and definite
transitions. Ancoats, incidentally, the home of
fine cotton spinning, is the blunt and stark butt-end
of Manchester ; it is powerfully rivetted down by
railway arches ; its open spaces are goods yards ;
canals evaporate white steam at the bottom of deep
fissures, and the gasometers are like fungus in a
sour field. From these presences the resident
population of Ancoats has not fled ; rather has it
crowded in, and small houses teeming with life are
encrusted in every crack, holding on to the great
works — holding on to each other — like barnacles
clinging to the knees of towering rocks. In
the streets of Ancoats mechanics sit at their
doors on summer nights and contemplate the face

and listen to the inner spiritual trouble of gigantic

61

CHARLES W. MACARA

engineering establishments cooling down, commun-
ing with themselves, bubbling, squeaking, spitting
and dithering like kettles uneasily on the hob. The
local spirit of Ancoais has been trodden out by the
march of events, and all its institutions, except cotton/
engineering, goods, grease and gas are exotics car-
ried there — holiness tabernacles, lectures on the pre-
Raphaelites and societies for impressing on mothers
the extreme desirability of having a clear egress
from each end of a feeding-bottle — by earnest
landscape gardeners from Altrinch.im. The
only traces of native Lancashire are the heavy
chalking of the pavement for " hop-scotch,"
the habit of sitting outside upper window-sills on
Friday evenings for the better use of a wash-leather,
and the appearance occasionally at an open door of
the mother of a family who, after announcing her
intention of " warming " one of her offspring half a
mile down the street turns in again, not at the
moment pursuing the matter further, though
even so, the manifesto has neither the buoy-
ancy, nor the piercing shrillness and general
carrying quality, nor the evident underlying

intention of doing no such thing which it would

62

THE OPERATIVES

have, for instance, in Dukinfield, the second
of the cotton climates in which Charles Macara
found himself face to face with the natives.

For Dukinfield is double-dipped in itself. Some-
where in Dukinfield, at some convenient and
commanding confluence of its streets, ancient and
superannuated men will be found assembled morning
after morning to survey and savour circumambient
Dukinfield as Dukinfield, and not as Manchester, nor
as Ashton-under-Lyne, its larger neighbour to which
it is slightly sycophantic, nor even yet as Staly-
bridge, with which it joins in a Member of Parlia-
ment. Its proudest institution is an inter-denomi-
national cemetery, and by force of having this
cemetery it is suddenly promoted at the most
supreme and solemn moments of life to be the
centre, capital and destination of a widespread com-
munity. In the possession of this cemetery it has
the pull over even Ashton-under-Lyne, which is
tributary to it, and the way up to the cemetery is
processional so many times a day, that, though a
residentiat thoroughfare, it has the air of being a
long elastic tentacle to the voracious pallid organism
at the top of the hill. Such is Dukinfield,

CHARLES \V. MACARA

with the perpetual throbbing of its machines
and the powerful downdraught of smoke on
its wet afternoons, and yet is there no
place in Lancashire, or in the spilling over
of Lancashire into Cheshire which occurs here,
where the contrast is so sharp between the secular
street and its successive interiors, sanctimonious
with steel fenders and china dogs, or any town in
all the sisterhood of towns where tea-time occurs
every afternoon with a more pungent fragrancy of
back-stone muffins, or where "th' master's" rock-
ing chair, with the crimson rep cushion, is more
happily situated in regard to any possible draught,
or where there are more harmoniums.

And Stalybridge is yet another climate. It is
at Stalybridge l that the far eastern frontiers of
the cotton trade grow faint on the margin of the
Yorkshire moors, and the smoke from stone
chimneys rides processionally towards the country
of the grouse. It is one of the towns in which
the cotton trade has blossomed into much
personal eminence and sustained ruling families.
Among the green hills which slope almost to its

i. The town is nnrripd as typical of the ne\v times in Disraeli's
" ("oningsby. "

64

THE OPERATIVES

back doors, there is a number of very large houses,
and these houses in the days before limited liability
had devitalised the soil, were the homes of a
powerful manufacturing aristocracy, some members
of which had stood for Parliament, and others
travelled much in Italy. Their carriages — driven in
the more splendid instances by fur-tippeted men-
flashed through the streets of Ashton and Staly-
bridge any afternoon in the week, and their habit
of placing " notes" in collection boxes on Sunday
mornings made the district a classical " auxiliary "
of the London Missionary Society. There are
people living who can remember seeing the hounds
process through its main streets in charge of a
faded, yet nevertheless authentic, huntsman. A nd yet
Staly bridge, for all its glimpses into country life,
and the over-lordship of its " Priories " and " East-
woods," its " Woodfields " and its " Staveleas,"
with their turrets and gables, and blue domestic
smoke dimly discernible among trees, has been one
of the volcanic regions of the cotton trade, and has
germinated distinguished strikes. It is one of the
towns which exhibits — perhaps it exhibits better than
any other — the combination of a slight industrial

65

CHARLES W. MACARA

turbulence with an almost servile respect for the
House of Lords, the bench of bishops, the Union
Jack, the bull-dog, and every institution disliked
and distrusted by the soul of John Bright.

This is at first sight a perversity, but it is historic,
and shares the respectability of all historic things.
It is the operatives' rejoinder to the opposition of
Radical manufacturers to the successive Factory
Acts, which have always been a leading object with
the trade unions of cotton operatives. The defeat
of the Liberal party in Lancashire in 1874 was
attributed at the time to Professor Fawcett's speech
on a Nine Hours' Bill in the Parliament which had
then been dissolved, nor was there any part of the
country in which Lord Randolph Churchill's half-
defined and nebulous programme of Tory Democracy
which was understood to mean — so far as it could
be understood to mean anything — a better time for
the masses, always, however, within the established
order of Church and State, met with a readier
acceptance. Not that the Conservative em-
ployers, who won elections out of this state
of things, were any more in favour of Fac-
tory Acts than their Radical brethren. They

66

THE OPERATIVES

had, however, a larger share of original and
mundane humanity; they had redeeming vices, and
their names slipped easily into the diminutives of
Dick and Harry and Tom, Ashton-under-Lyne, for
example, being represented for many years by a
genial obscurantist whom all the mill and all the
town knew gloriously as " Tommy Mellor." No
one would ever have thought of abbreviating the
name — even if any possible abbrevation had
suggested itself — of Hugh Mason, and John Bright
remained "John Bright" to the end, majestic,
stark and formidable — somewhat frowning I

It was at the Brunswick Mill in Ancoats that
Charles Macara had his first conflict with the
operatives of Lancashire. The affair occurred in
1884, four years after he assumed the management
of the firm of Bannerman, and it was one of those
sudden and savage outbreaks which were then
climatic to the cotton trade; one of the inter-tribal
vendettas between a master and his men which used
to occur in the days before Federation ; before the
organisation of the two great armed states of
employers and employed, under which, though war

contemplates extermination, peace has some security

67

CHAKLKS \\. MACAIIA

as peace. At the Brunswick Mill there was in 1884
a renewal of machinery. A temporary adjustment
of wages was proposed, upon which the minders
and piecers in the mule spinning department went
out on strike. Nothing less than this was to be
expected, because the mill was then one of the fever
spots of the trade, and had been the scene of eleven
strikes in eight years. On this occasion Charles
Macara, not perhaps without some slight enjoyment
of the experience, took up the challenge, engaged
other minders and piecers in place of those who
had gone out on strike, and announced that »he
machinery would continue to run. Then there
began a savage conflict for which Ancoats was by
training and disposition only too well suited,
though even in the more temperate zones of the
cotton trade, the strikes of this period were bitter
and inflammatory affairs, with the shrill cries of
women, the stampeding of the strike breakers by the
heated community outside, the pursuit of the strike
breakers to the station, and above and through it all,
the blank stare of the ghostly windows of the mill
and the obstinate, unstoppable singing of thr

machines.

68

THE OPERATIVES

Charles Macara bivouacked the strike breakers be-
neath army blankets in the covered mill yard at
night; tales circulated in Ancoats that they enjoyed
the companionship of a savage dog. The strike was
marked by numerous acts of violence, which were
avenged in the police courts. There were rumours
of vitriol, and the Chief Constable of Manchester
warned him that he was in peril of his
life. Nevertheless, he fought on. The unaffected
departments of the mill held on to their work
or were ready to return to it as they were called
on, and in due time the forty-five minders, with
double the number of piecers, who were auxiliary
to them, sued for peace, and finally asked to
be taken back on the old terms. Charles Macara
refused. It was the first sharp taste of him the
operatives ever had that he refused to have these
feverish minders back again on any terms, and that
the mill in which they had struck eleven times in
eight years knew them thereafter no more. Nor
was it, as we shall see, so unhappy a beginning of
the long acquaintance between him and them.

Charles Macara will be remembered in the cotton

trade chiefly for conciliation and compromise, and

69

CHARLES W. MACARA

for many happy efforts in the art of give-and-take,'
But conciliation is the prerogative of the man who
has proved himself strong, and the Ancoats strike
was important as revealing in him a man
who would fight to the end if he felt sure of
his cause, and who, though open to reason, was
impervious to fear. The strike at the Brunswick
Mill in 1884 belongs to past history. Years after-
wards, James Mawdsley, the famous leader of the
Operative Spinners, returning to a room in which
critical decisions were swaying this way and that,
asked Charles Macara to banish from his mind the
strike of 1884. And, indeed, it is of a time and
temper which can never return. It would not burn
in the modern atmosphere of Lancashire. For
it will be observed that he fought the men
without any aid from his brother employers ;
that the men fought him without support
from other workers under the same roof, whose
interests were identical in the long run with theirs;
and that there was no large and impartial authority
to arbitrate between the two. It was before the
reign of law. We shall see how the reign of law
came in, and how he helped to establish and strove
to extend it.

i. Vide Appendix E, p. 276 et «eq.

70

MRS. WILLIAM MACARA

r '-t*

Masters and Men

CHAPTER V

MASTERS AND MEN.

IT would be possible to compile out of modern
history a long list of the things which have failed
to ruin England. Quite half the modern institutions
of the country — education, education which was not
only popular but compulsory and free, the trade
union, the vote, the vote by ballot, and even the
Labour Member — are so much domesticated doom ;
they entered the enclosure wearing the similitude of
lions, but if we leave them and look at them again
in a few years we find them lying down with lambs.
Politics, religion and industry all alike contribute
out of their modern history to the company of
rather sheepish spectres. The extension of the
franchise in 1832 to the sedate middle class of
England was feared and fought as something
that would inaugurate a reign of terror, and,
rather earlier than 1832, bishops in the House
of Lords were voting with prayer and fasting
against all proposals to stop awarding the
penalty of death for stealing from clothes-lines. The

73

CHARLES W. MACARA

Nonconformist has mixed so well with society that
it is difficult to believe how he also has been a
spectre, warned off the premises for many years,
and regarded even in modern times, and by modern
intelligences, as a danger to faith and morals,
whether trying to take his B.A. at Cambridge or
to get himself interred in a churchyard.

Popular education, again, was greatly feared as
likely to obliterate the precious distinctions between
class and class, and is still generally blamed in the
South of England, and in the more secluded and
unruffled backwaters of society in the North, for
the scarcity and the puffed-up demeanour of parlour-
maids, a charge of which it is partially acquitted by
the evidence of Addison and the essayists that ladies
in the age of Queen Anne were complaining of
exactly the same thing. As the deluge, each one of
these things failed. The first fruit of the
Reform Act of 1832 was the new Poor Law, which
ruined the profession of pauperism, and set up as
unsanguinary and unfanatical a social engine
as the modern Board of Guardians. Further
extensions of the franchise brought to light,
to the astonishment of everybody except Disraeli,

74

MASTERS AND MEN

who foresaw it, the phenomenon of the Conservative
working-man, and free education, though it has
taught the people to read, has not yet done very
much in the far more dangerous direction of teach-
ing them to think.

It is, indeed, the characteristic of great reforms
that they let down almost as many hopes as fears,
and if we compiled a list of the things which have
failed to ruin England, it would serve equally well
for a list of the things which have failed to redeem
her. The trade union is a distinguished example
of this. It has done much, but has failed at once
of final evil and of final good. It began as a
seditious conspiracy, and ten hard years of Radical
faith and work were needed to legalise it. Church
and State still intact, the trade union turns up
again at a later period of history as a menace, not
this time to law and order, but to the shivering
sanctity of capital. Again it figures as a bogey.
It was the common talk of upper class Lancashire
in the eighties and the early nineties that trade
unions, no longer isolated clubs of crack-brained
Chartists meeting in the upper rooms of public-
houses, but powerful amalgamations, with trained

75

CHARLES W. MACAKA

leaders at their head, and funds in the bank, were
rapidly making life intolerable; that they were
driving capital out of the country, and that manufac-
turers would for two pins remove their machinery
to some place (not specified) where they could be at
peace, and do what they liked with their own.
Men who had stood for Parliament as Liberals,
and others who habitually stood as Liberals for
Town Councils, and had strongly approved of the
working-class being consulted as to whether Mr.
Gladstone or Mr. Disraeli should be the Prime
Minister a long way off in London, drew a very
decided line against their being consulted as to
whether wages should go up or down five per cent,
in Lancashire, and whether a glut of yarn should
be met by a complete stoppage or regulated short
time; while a much-harassed Mayor of Rochdale,
towards the end of the great strike of 1893, fell,
and dragged all his audience with him, into the
common philosophical blunder of blaming the
agitator for the agitation.1

i. " It was a sad sight to witness the operatives begging in the
streets of Rochdale. On him who was to blame for the present
deplorable state of affairs rested a very great responsibility. He
could not help feeling that that responsibility rested very largely
on the shoulders of that man." — Report of a speech by the Mayor
of Rochdale, Manchester Guardian March i8th, 1893. James
Mawdsley, without hesitation, took these dark observations to
himself, and made a spirited reply.

76

MASTERS AND MEN

So matters proceed, and then, Church and State
and even Capital still intact, we look a little later
into history and we find this same trade union, its
methods and its objects quite unchanged, its funds
still greater, and its leaders even stouter, counted
definitely among the conservative forces of society.
Leaders of industry, like Charles Macara, operating
the negotiation clauses of the Brooklands Agree-
ment, planning Industrial Councils as a final court
of appeal between masters and men, assume and
count on (he trade unions as part of the mechanism
of peace. It is within the scheme of their states-
manship. Their anxiety about the trade union is
not that it should be too strong, but lest it be too
weak. For already the law of flux and re-flux has
followed it even to this, that while all have lost
their fears of it, some have lost their hopes.
The pure trade unionist is now the Conservative
of the Labour movement. He is the old gang; the
sedative rather than the stimulant. In the volatile
and fiery composition of the annual conference of
the Labour Party, the orthodox trade unionists,
and particularly those who represent the textile
unions of Lancashire, are a solid glutination of

77

CHARLES W. MACARA

unenthusiastic common-sense, hardly distinguish-
able from a board of directors. But no longer in
any sense le dernier cri! Already they are thought
slow, and in the eyes of State Socialists, syndicalists,
and those who strike against advice, the spectre of
the eighties and the nineties is voted mainly
sawdust. Such is the slow, sure progress of our
state — from groundless fear to groundless fear;

from the hope of a lot to the realisation of a little.

# * # * * * *

From the breaking of the bale of cotton to the
bleaching or printing of the completed cloth the
Lancashire cotton trade travels many stages, but
the major processes are those of blowing and
carding, by which the raw product is redeemed of
its original sin and the staple is evolved, and of
spinning and of weaving, and we shall find that the
protective organisation of the worker follows the
technical outline of his trade, carding, spinning and
weaving forming three large and assembled armed
camps which co-operate on occasion, but are inde-
pendent. The correspondence is nearly complete,
but not quite. The ring-spinners, all of whom are

women, are in the same association as their

78

MASTERS AND MEN

sisters of the card and blowing room, and the
piecers, big piecers and little piecers, whose style
and title is the most ultramontane thing in
Lancashire, are organised separately under the
tutelage of the mule spinners or minders.

The piecers, big and little, furnish the classical
example of the failure of trade unionism to flourish in
a soil which is short of a perfect class-con-
sciousness and impoverished by social hopes and
ambitions. Being paid by the minders, and there-
fore in the consciousness of the minders a
hostile, or potentially hostile body, they are
ineligible for full membership of the powerful
Amalgamated Association of Operative Cotton
Spinners, and would long ago have formed a trade
union of their own, but for the circumstance that
every big piecer of character and competence hopes
to be in due time a minder himself, and lives in his
probable future rather than his actual present. In
the meantime he is included in a sort of sub-
organisation which the minders keep carefully
under their own control. He is the ward in
chancery of the minder. The winders, warpers and
reelers, another feminine community, are, again, out

7Q

CHARLES W. MACARA

of their proper bearings. They belong to the
hemisphere of spinning, but in weaving districts are
organised with the weavers.

This, then, in its broadest outline is the ground
plan of trade unionism in the cotton trade, and on
this ground plan there grew up local associations of
carders, of spinners and weavers, the unit being
in each case that of locality plus craft. Organisation
according to craft still, as we have just seen,
continues, and though there is a pious opinion in
favour of a single great trade union for all cotton
workers,1 difference of interest and outlook which
has often been sharp and decided ; difference in the
rates of payment, and the mode, the majority being
paid by piece and the minority by time; difference,
perhaps, even of temperament between the mule
spinners, who are olympians, and the cardroom
hands, who are, not infrequently, Celts, has stood
in the way of such a centralisation of authority.
On the other hand, organisation according to
locality, though it also persists, persists only as a

i. A resolution to this effect was passed in 1915 by the United
Textile Factory Workers' Association (a deliberative body). One
of several differences between the Spinners and the Card Room
Workers arose as to the chairmanship of this body, to which the
Card Room does not now belong.

80

MASTERS AND MEN

foundation on which great super-structures of
federation are built up. It is no longer, like
organisation by craft, an expression of the mentality
of Lancashire; it is mechanical rather than spiritual.
The first great amalgamation of local unions was
that of the operative spinners, which was formed in
1853, three years after the birth of the Amalgamated
Society of Engineers which was the earliest model
of the new type. The Amalgamated Society
of Operative Cotton Spinners has its head-
quarters in Manchester. It is governed by
its own quarterly meeting and Executive Coun-
cil, and has its paid secretary, who is chosen
by the unusual method of competitive examination,
rhetoric and dialectics being the minor, and mathe-
matics, in view of the extremely abstruse calculations
by which Lancashire wages are ascertained,
decidedly the major subject of the test. The
parched and sandy arithmetic through which
the cotton trade lias to wade to its results,
the necessity of fighting the battles of his
people in decimals and fractions, the dense
afforestation of the ground by technical and

actuarial detail, has done more than anything else

81

CHARLES W. MACARA

to determine the caste and character of the trade
union leader in Lancashire. An expert and an
accountant, he has not been called very much either
to prophecy, apostleship or the speaking with
tongues, and, unlike the checkweigh-man of the
collier, with whom, though on a much higher level
of accomplishment, he corresponds, and who is in
nearly every case the trained athlete of the pulpit
and the platform and the Band of Hope, he has
given little to public and Parliamentary life.

James Mawdsley, the Secretary of the Spinners,
and one of the strongest forces Lancashire has ever
known, was definitely a man behind a mask. He
was unfamiliar, almost even to sight, to the general
citizenship of the small town in which he lived,
and his candidature, as a Conservative, for Old-
ham, undertaken at an advanced age, was an
enterprise in which he neither succeeded nor very
much wanted to succeed.

More than forty district associations of spinners
pay levies to the Amalgamation. These district
associations reproduce in miniature the constitution
of the central organism. They are identical with it

chemically and structurally ; they also possess their

82

MASTERS AND MEN

Executive Committees and their paid officials, and
the Amalgamated Association, though it does not
indicate this, and, indeed, rather obscures it in its
name — "amalgamation" implying the fusion of
several bodies into one, and the destruction of their
individual identities — answers roughly the political
tests of a Federation in which the constituent
members enjoy the form and substance of self-
government, but are united for common purposes
against the world. That the structure of this
important union was built up slowly, we see from
the circumstance that the Oldham Association did
not join the Amalgamation until it had been formed
some fifteen years, and that for ten years longer
there were within the Oldham province nine rudi-
mentary district Associations, each governing itself,
all competing together by exacting small contribu-
tions and paying large benefits, and thereby
weakening the entire structure of which they were
a part.1

This federal model of the spinners has been
copied in the Amalgamated Association of Card
and Blowing Room Operatives, which was formed

i. The weekly contribution of the individual spinner still varies
according to the town in which he lives, but the differentiation is
a scientific one.

o ,

CHARLES W. MACARA

in 1886, and when we come to the weavers, we shall
find that a rather lighter soil has favoured the
appearance of federations of federations, a sort of
straining after stature and strength which has not
been necessary on the spinning side of the trade.
The Amalgamated Weavers' Association, which is
itself definitely a federation of district unions, is
included in the Northern Counties Textile Trades'
Federation, a body which was formed in 1905, and
embraces, besides the Weavers' Society, several
minor associations which operate in odd corners of
the trade.1

These movements on the part of the operatives
have not failed of the obvious answer from the side
of the masters. Local associations of employers in
the cotton trade are found operating in the sixties
and the seventies. Taught by his experience in the
strike at the Brunswick Mill, Charles Macara took
the lead in forming an Association for Manchester,
and towards the end of 1891 the greater number of

i. This body is not to be confused, though confusion would be
natural, such is the love of the modern trade unionist for mouth-
filling names, with the United Textile Factory Workers' Association.
This body deals only with Parliament and Whitehall. It watches
the Factory Acts, and suggests amendments. All operatives'
associations belong to it, except that of the Card Boom, and an
attempt is being made to bring the Card Room back.

84

MASTERS AND MEN

those local bodies came together in the Federation
of Master Cotton Spinners' Associations.1 Each
one retained its own office, officials and constitution,
but a new body was now created, through which the
employers could act as a single will and intelligence,
the whole trade being able, by virtue of this federa-
tion, to sweep down to the assistance of any one
employer whose case might be judged to be the case
of all. In 1913 fourteen local associations situated
in towns which are satellites of Manchester were
embraced in the Federation. The Federation was,
however, built up slowly to its present level. It
hardly represented half the trade when it entered
in 1892 upon the twenty weeks' struggle with the
operatives, which ended in the famous industrial
treaty known as the Brooklands Agreement. •

It was this strike, and the momentous negotiations
which ended it, that made Charles Macaraa diplomat
and statesman in the vexed affairs of capital and
labour. He entered the prolonged struggle, which
began in the autumn of 1892 and ended in the
spring of 1893, as the head of one of the local

i. There is a separate employers' organisation for the North and
North-Eastern area of the county in which weaving preponderates
over spinning.

85

CHARLES W. MACARA

associations of employers. When it terminated, he
was plainly marked out in the minds both of masters
and men for the Presidency of the Federation, and
the headship both in title and in fact of the
Lancashire cotton trade.

It was at the end of October, 1892 — the trade
being at the time in a state of great irritability and
depression — that the employers gave notice of their
intention to enforce a reduction in wages of five per
cent. Notices to this effect were posted in the
mills, and when these notices matured, the operatives
refused to continue at work, this progression of
events giving rise to a question as to whether what
followed was a strike or lock-out, a point which was
argued in Lancashire during the next five months
with the heat and tenacity which are generally re-
served in human intercourse for points the settlement
of which will leave things exactly as they were before.
The dispute, however, soon widened and deepened
into the much larger question of the right of the
operatives to come, so to speak, of age ; to be admitted
into a kind of moral partnership in the industry ;
to have a mind, and, with a mind, the means of

expressing, and, subject to the equal right of the

86

MASTERS AND MEN

other party in the trade, enforcing it. So far the
dispute enlarged itself, but no further. It tells
us very much of the mentality of Lancashire that
during twenty weeks in which the pressure and
pinch got steadily worse, so that hunger and naked-
ness were at last openly abroad in the land, no mass
meetings were held, no torches lighted, and no
attempt made to point the moral and adorn the
tale in favour of Socialism or any other plan for
the general reconstruction of society. From the
beginning till the end it was cotton, and nothing
else.

Still, a larger question than one of five per cent,
or two-and-three-quarters per cent. — the reduction
which the employers eventually obtained — was seen
to be at issue, and there can be no doubt that from
the time when this larger matter of the joint
managership of the industry definitely emerged,
Charles Macara became a strong fighter within
his own party for wise and constructive compromise..
Accident, rather than predestination, had brought
him into this melee. He belonged by tradition and
relationship to the governing classes of England,
and though a Lancashire employer, was neither of

87

CHARLES W. MACARA

the type, nor, still more to the crucial point which
the industry had now reached, of the caste. He had
discovered a real affinity with James Mawdsley, the
practical and powerful leader of the operatives, and
already his mind was strongly attracted to such a
problem of social architecture as a compro-
mise in this dispute would involve. He had
the organising, settling mind, and cared just as
little for civil war whether at the moment he won
or lost. And these qualities which drove him to
take a line of his own, and made him not only
a name, but a force in the great events of 1892
and 1893, were powerfully assisted in their effect

by an accident which put the management of the

/

employers' case to some extent in his hands.

The President of the Masters' Federation was
Arthur Reyner, who belonged to a family which
had, in a former generation, migrated from haber-
dashery in the city of London to manufacturing in
Lancashire. Arthur Reyner was himself a bachelor of
uncertain health, and lived at Thornfield Hall near to
Ashton-under-Lyne, with a mother whose strength
and stateliness of spirit, coupled with extreme

MASTERS AND MEN

personal fragility, advanced years, and only occa-
sional visibility through the bevelled glass of an
ancient brougham, constituted her one of those
occasional reproductions of Queen Victoria
which appeared during the reign of that
monarch, his life being one in which music,
travel in Switzerland, Gladstonianism, a peril-
ous habit, for one of his weight and build,
of riding to hounds, and the current number
of the Nineteenth Century, played a great
part. In his speeches on the public platform great
fluency of thought and expression struggled with
anguish against a marked defect of utterance. He
had Robert Lowe's inability to perceive the effect he
was making on his audience, and his position as
leader at once of a Liberal organisation which
wanted all sorts of democratic changes, and an
Employers' Federation which wanted a reduction of
wages, was a vexatious inconsistency, and probably
accounted very largely, though it was not suspected
at the time, for the recurrent Conservatism of the
borough in which he lived. Arthur Reyner's name
is the first of the signatures to the Brooklands

Agreement, but from time to time during the

89

CHARLES W. MACARA

progress of the events which concluded in that
treaty, he was incapacitated by illness. His leader-
ship was interrupted, a considerable portion of it
falling to Charles Macara, who shortly afterwards
succeeded him in the leadership of the Federation.
Mr. John Brown Tattersall, who had himself been an
operative and a trade union leader, and possessed
an unrivalled knowledge of the technicalities of the
trade, and Samuel Smethurst, one of the thorough-
breds of Lancashire, a logician, a humourist, and a
keen swordsman in debate, were also prominent on
the employers' side. Among the operatives James
Mawdsley was the central figure.

90

The Brooklands
Agreement and the
Industrial Council

CHAPTER VI

THE BROOKLANDS AGREEMENT.
THE twenty weeks' strike ranks in Lancashire
history with the Cotton Famine some thirty years
before it. It lasted long enough to clear the sky,
and nearly long enough to clean the earth. Distant
objects acquired that startling visibility which in
South-east Lancashire usually signifies nothing
more serious than " the wakes," and the operatives
wandered up and down amid unfamiliar tracts
of morning and afternoon, and were, for all
their faith and fortitude, in the suspended and
deeply disordered state of those who are all dressed
up with nowhere to go. The last chapter of events
was extremely tense and dramatic, and the leaders
on both sides found themselves scrutinised like
Cabinet Ministers in the throes of a crisis. More
than one attempt was made to bring them all
together in a social and even a domestic atmosphere,
and to surprise peace out of sheer politeness.

One of these meetings was held at the house
in Prestwich of Robert Ascroft, M.P., the solicitor

93

CHARLES W. MACAKA

for a section of the operatives, and afterwards
Conservative member for Oldham, and though
terms were discussed both before and after dinner,
neither the one state of mind nor the other had a
favourable result, the minority of the employers still
holding out against the terms which ended the
dispute six weeks later. Meanwhile the growing
margin between raw cotton and yarn was arguing
powerfully for peace. The glut in the yarn market,
which was the original cause, or perhaps, rather,
the occasion of these troubles, had been cured, and
when the leaders, again eluding an almost morbidly
watchful press, again got into conference, this time
at the extremely unconspiratorial Brooklands Hotel,
on the Cheshire outskirts of Manchester, peace was
in the air. Even so, it was only snatched, in the
small hours of the morning of an all-night sitting,
out of the jaws of failure.

It is significant that the mere rectification of
wages was settled early and without great difficulty
at this conference, which began at three in the
afternoon on Thursday, March 23rd, 1893. The
tendency of the market had settled that question
itself, and a splitting of the difference between the

94

THE BROOKLANDS AGREEMENT

two parties indicated itself as the fair thing. But
the larger issue as between the employer and the
trade union into which the smaller question had
widened and deepened, gave more trouble. It was
quite rightly perceived that other suggested terms
of agreement which promoted the trade union far
above the former status of recognition and make it
a joint governing body of the trade, constituted
the end of one age and the beginning of another.
Several times in the course of the night capital and
labour broke away to their separate camps in the
Brooklands Hotel, but each time they were brought
together again by Charles Macara and James
Mawdsley, who had both begun to see that greater
interests were at stake even than those which they
severally represented, and were now acting together
as a powerful party against the anarchy which
threatened the existence at once of masters and men.
It was at five o'clock in the morning of March 24th
that their efforts prevailed, and the Brooklands
Agreement, the first and greatest, and, indeed, the
model of all treaties between capital and labour, was
signed.1

i. Robert Ascroft, M.P.. who acted as solicitor to the Card and
Blowing Room Operatives' Amalgamation, and who drew up the

95

CHARLES W. MACARA

The first clause is a common confession of sins
and a promise of amendment. Both sides admitted
the folly of continual disputation, and joined in a
common prayer for some means of avoiding it. In
this spirit the immediate difference was settled by
a reduction in wages of sevenpence in the pound.
A further clause established a kind of game law
in the trade, a close time within which after each
disturbance wages should remain at peace; a
measure beyond which they should not vary. No
question as to wages, once closed, was to be re-
opened for at least a year, and no alteration of
wages, whether it took the form of a rise or a fall,
was to measure more than five per cent.

These provisions were afterwards amended
from time to time, but whatever their exact shape
and scope, they continued to give a much-needed
stability and repose to the weather of the trade.
But the vital clause was the sixth. It was this
clause which admitted, and, indeed, ushered the

rough draft of the clauses, every one of which was discussed,
modified and altered at conferences both before and at the all-night
sitting, formally assured Charles Macara, that the operatives
would never forget the effort he had made for an equitable
settlement.

96

THE BROOKLANDS AGREEMENT

organised operatire into the seat of authority;
which captured the pure protestantism of the trade
union for a new catholicity ; which took the pyramid
off its apex and set it much more securely on its
base. All this was contained in the provisions which
were made by the sixth clause of the Brooklands
Agreement for the settlement of disputes. They
inaugurated a new reign of law.

The clause set up three courts — a court of first
instance, and two successive courts of appeal, and
provided that no disputes in the trade should go
to the length of a lock-out by the employers, or a
strike by the employed, until each of these tribunals
had tried to settle it, and, having tried, had failed.
The statesmanship of the plan lay in the removal of
each promising bud of difference into two successive
atmospheres progressively unfavourable to its
vegetation. Under the scheme, any difference as
to work or wages arising in a cotton mill and
proving insoluble by the immediate parties to it,
was to go before the secretary of the employers and
the secretary of the trade union of the town in
which it arose. This was the court of first instance,
and if this court failed to settle the dispute,

97

CHARLES W. MACARA

its duty was, within a given time, to call
in three local employers and three local trade
unionists who would examine the matter afresh.
If this tribunal — the first court of appeal —
failed to produce terms of settlement, the dispute
may be conceived of as a thing of definite size and
shape, and ready for the much severer ordeal known
to the administrators of the trade as " going to
Manchester."

In the final court of appeal, which, like the one
below it, was to be summoned within a stated time,
the dispute passed out of the hands of the first partici-
pants and their immediate friends and relations ; it
was lifted out of the inflamed area, and brought
before the brows and conscience of the assembled
trade. This last court was larger than the one belo\r
it ; like the one below it, it was composed of equal
numbers of employers and employed, with the
special provision that those who had already adjudi-
cated on the case should be swamped in a majority
of fresh minds. Not until this court also had
dissolved without a favourable result could either
side proceed to extremes, and so effectually did the

mechanism work that in the twenty-one years

98

THE BROOKLANDS AGREEMENT

during which the Brooklands Agreement remained
law, there were only two general stoppages of the
trade, one of them occurring in 1908, when the
Agreement was sixteen, and the other in 1910, when
it was eighteen years old.

Both these years belong to that period of acute
industrial irritability which was only allayed by the
counterirritant of the European War, and by this
time much of the authority and some of the structure
of the Brooklands Agreement had been corroded
away. The stoppage in 1908, for example, was an
outbreak of the inveterate sectionalism of the trade.
In that year the employers claimed a reduction of
wages, and obtained the assent of the operative
spinners. The Card Room refused to agree, with
the result that the spinners found themselves
conscripted in a costly campaign of seven weeks
to which their corporate will had not consented.1

The stoppage of 1910 immortalised the obscure
personality of George Howe, who belongs to that
company of historical personages of whom we catch

i. In this instance the employers very handsomely allowed the
spinners to take bark their formal agreement to the reduction.
By this act the employers preserved the solidarity of the trade at
their own expense.

99

CHARLES W. MACARA

only one single glimpse. He is one of the flies in
the amber of history. George Howe was dismissed
from the Fern Mill at Oldham because, at the
bidding of his union, he refused to perform certain
duties which were held to be " new work." In
the opinion of the employers, this raised the vital
issue of internal authority in the mills, and
though it was found easy enough to refer the
immediate point to arbitration, another crack was
opened in the surface by the question whether the
cotton trade should start again with or without
George Howe in his accustomed place as a grinder
at the Fern Mill. In the result he was reinstated,
not at the Fern Mill, but at another not noticeably
further from his doorstep, and, on this compromise,
the trade of Lancashire proceeded on its way. The
strike has its place in Lancashire history as the
first occasion on which the cotton trade submitted
to the manipulations of a Government official.1
Even so, the duty of the peace-maker did not go
beyond patiently and perpetually leading the horse
to the water of reconciliation. It drank finally of its
own free will.2

i. Sir George Askwith, then Controller of the Labour Depart-
ment at the Board of Trade.

i. This dispute also brought about a stoppage of the industry,
but only for a few days.

100

THE BROOKLANDS AGREEMENT

These were the only two occasions between the
negotiation of the Brooklands Agreement on March
23rd, 1893, and its repudiation on January 3ist,
1913, on which the parties to the Agreement pro-
ceeded to actual civil war. Its failure, in the
opinion of the operative spinners, to settle with
sufficient promptitude disputes arising out of the
supply of bad material for their work — " bad
spinning," a cause of grievance which has been
ingeniously compared with that of the Hebrew
brick-makers in Egypt who were required to make
bricks without straw — was the cause of its final
cancellation, but the apparatus of conciliation was
expressly preserved, an agreement being ratified
on December nth, 1914, that notices to cease work
should not be posted in any mill till the matter in
dispute had been considered by the joint committee,
local and central, of the organised employers and
the organised employed.

The Brooklands Agreement and Charles Macara's
presidency of the Employers' Federation are coeval
in the history of the Lancashire cotton trade. His
long and eventful period of office began in 1894,

the year after the agreement was signed, and before

101

CHARLES W. MACARA

the conciliation clauses had yet been put to any
trial, and concluded in the year after its repudiation.
During this period of twenty-one years he was
unanimously voted into the chair at every confer-
ence between employers and employed, in what we
have called the final court of appeal of the trade.
The cotton trade, whether masters or men, preferred
him in that capacity to any outsider on this side of
mortality, for, besides that cotton has a strong
prejudice against the stranger that is without its
gates, all outsiders, even the most eminent K.C.'s
who have drifted at one time and another into the
affairs of the trade, have been visibly nigh to
foundering and going down altogether in the sheer
stress of incomprehensible details. He was, too,
the born chairman of heated and momentous debate.
In another sphere of cotton trade administration
he was called on time after time to preside over
international conferences which, but for his
authoritative physique, resonant voice, and power
of assuming a complete impartiality in affairs
in which he had himself an interest, as they
swayed this way or that, would have degenerated
at moments of excitement into mere babel, and

102

THE BROOKLANDS AGREEMENT

these same qualities were an immense help to the
cause of industrial peace in Lancashire, over many
critical years.

It was estimated in 1910 — when the Brooklands
Agreement was seventeen years old— that against
one reduction of five per cent. — secured by the
employers in 1908 — the operatives generally had
thriven under its patronage, and the employers had
equally benefited by the great reduction in the
number of strikes and lock-outs. But in his long
experimental administration of the Agreement
Charles Macara came to perceive its sins, and more
particularly its shortcomings, and began to look
beyond it to something larger which would cover
all coverable contingencies in the vexed affairs of
masters and men. For one thing, the clause in the
agreement which closed all questions of wages for
a definite period after each re-opening had been
found to work both ways. The express " Thou
shalt not " was found to reveal itself as a sort of
implied " Thou shalt " the moment the prohibition
lifted. As it is apt to do in all law-giving, the
definite illegalisation of one thing implied the

authorisation of something else, and, by limiting

103
H

CHARLES W. MACARA

the frequency and extent of wage fluctuations, the
Agreement offered a strong temptation to the
disturbance or attempted disturbance of rates when-
ever the opportunity came round.1

Although, as we have seen, the parties to the
Agreement only twice within the period under
review came to a full stop, grave crises had the
periodicity and punctuality of comets.

But it was not so much the sins of the Brook-
lands Agreement, as its definite shortcomings,
that exercised Charles Macara's mind. He began
to see more and more clearly that the Agreement
failed the trade just at the moment when it was
most needed. It accompanied the trade faithfully
to the brink of disaster, interposing a number of
invaluable regulations and checks on the method
and speed of getting there, but, the brink once
reached, it left the trade to its fate. It was all very
well to compel the two parties into conferences
intermediate and final, to put them into a room and
turn the key on them, but how, if after all this
management, they still refused to agree ; how if, to

i. In 1910 the period within which wages could not be disturbed
was altered from one year to two years. At the same time a
demand for a five per cent, reduction being then withdrawn, a
bargain was made that there should be no demand for an advance
or reduction for five years.

104

THE BROOKLANDS AGREEMENT

use again the metaphor we employed a minute ago,
the horse, though repeatedly led to the water, still
refused to drink ? There was no means of resolving
the situation after it had reached the stage of
deadlock. Arbitration was never acceptable to
either party in the trade, or, rather, it was never
acceptable to both parties at the same time.
Having in 1897 got the entire employing class
into line, in a dispute which was pending at the
moment, and recoiling from the use of the tremen-
dous power over the life of Lancashire which such a
state of things placed in his hands, Charles Macara
offered settlement by arbitration, but the proposal
was wrecked on a reef of minor issues. Accord-
ingly he turned his attention to an ingenious scheme
of impersonal and self-acting arbitration, or arbitra-
tion, as he himself called it, without an arbitrator.

In 1899 and 1900 many conferences were held in
the cotton trade on a scheme for the regulation of
wages according to the state of trade. At this time
it was part of the scheme that the operatives should
supply their own estimate of trade profits, and the
plan came to grief on the refusal of the operatives
to submit their estimates to impartial investigation.

CHARLES W. MACARA

Five years later — in 1905— the scheme was revived,
with the benefit this time of an ingenious method
of ascertaining the normal return on capital in the
cotton trade at any given time. A small committee
of the Liverpool Cotton Association was appointed
to decide twice a week, and week by week, the exact
market values of standard grades of raw cotton, and
to communicate these values to a firm of chartered
accountants in Manchester. A firm of yarn agents
in Manchester was engaged to send to the same
firm of accountants the exact market prices of
standard counts of yarn on the same days in each
week. The accountants, on receiving the two sets
of figures — each set supplied without missionary
purpose, and in the spirit of cold scientific truth —
would have before them, and would be able to
tabulate for use in the event of a dispute as to
wages, the gross economic margin week by week
between the raw material and the finished product of
the spinning trade, and, in order that truth might be
still more delicately sifted, two firms of accountants,
one acting for the employers and the other for the
operatives, were appointed to examine the tabulation

in the light of actual experience at selected mills.

106

THE BROOKLANDS AGREEMENT

This scheme, founded on the co-operation of so
many sets of independent experts, has only been
called into employment to settle matters of emer-
gency during the war, but the record at the time of
writing is still being made, employers and employed
both paying for the continuance of the process,
and Charles Macara regards these figures, locked
as they are in the security of a Manchester
safe, as almost the best legacy he has helped to
provide for the trade.

Such, then, were the earlier designs for adding
walls and a roof to the arrested structure of the
Brooklands Agreement. One of them, built into
the original plan of the Agreement in 1911, was a
small but ingenious expression of the constructive
spirit. This was the arrangement proposed and
agreed to in that year for keeping the mechanism of
conciliation running even after it had failed in the im-
mediate object with which it had been set in motion.
It became the enacted law of the trade that when the
leaders of the two parties had parted and gone their
ways on a final disagreement, and a stoppage had
accordingly begun, the plenipotentiaries should,

within a fortnight of the beginning of actual war,

107

CHARLES W. MACARA

meet again at the same hour and place — a curiously
sentimental piece of precision such as we might
expect from two lovers who have parted, but do not
really mean it — and at intervals for as long as the
trouble lasted, should continue to meet, always at
the same hour and place until no doubt one or
other, or both, broke down under the sheer pathos
of the situation.

The year in which the cotton trade bound itself
by this new regulation belongs to the period of
Vhat was called, because it spread so far and so fast,
and was carried from one fertilisation to another on
the wings of sympathy and imitation, by the
name of "industrial unrest" — a new name for a
phenomenon which was felt to be essentially new.
By strikes which spread rapidly in 1911 from
seamen to dockers, from dockers to carters, and
from carters to railwaymen — every stage in the vital
function of transport being successively affected —
the motor nerves and muscles of the country were
paralysed ; in the coal strike which followed, energy
was cut off, and social and industrial England went
cold. The country was made to realise that services

every bit as vital as defence by land and sea were

1 08

THE BROOKLANDS AGREEMENT

liable to be stopped because a few thousand work-
men could not agree with a few hundred employers
about a shilling.

The great Third Party to these continual indus-
trial disputes began to emerge. Even politics were
put en one side, and " intervening," another new
thing in English public life, under another new
name, brought fresh and grateful chances of lime-
light into the thirsty lives of pushful politicians.
For years Charles Macara had been pointing to
what he called the interdependence of industries.
During the twenty weeks' strike, nineteen years
before the period at which we are now arrived,
letters written to him as one of the protagonists
whose names were occurring in the newspapers,
reflected the effect of short commons in Lancashire
on the farms and market-gardens of the most
distant shires of England and Ireland. In 1911
the nail needed no hammering. Even London,
which does not as a rule think — even London,
threatened by a dock strike with semi-starvation by
day and total darkness by night, realised dimly that
it was a member of one body having several

members, and Lancashire, with its raw material

109

CHARLES W. MACARA

piling higher and higher in Liverpool, and Its
spindles running down like unwound watches,
needed no convincing at all.1

The social unrest of 191 1 and 1912 is now dwarfed
by the European War, which immediately succeeded
it in the programme of England's modern troubles.
We look at it now, so to speak through the wrong
end of a telescope, but at the time it sounded and felt
like upheaval, and it was while it was still proceed-
ing— a moment highly favourable for one who had
anything more to contribute than the rending of
garments and the wringing of hands — that Charles
Macara came forward with the complete plan of an
Industrial Council 2 and succeeded by dint of energy
and persistence, in adding it, temporarily, to the
institutions, and permanently to the ideas of
England.

Ever since 1908 the Board of Trade, authorised

i. " Truth to tell, Londoners had something more intimate,
more urgent, to think about (than the Parliament Bill). They
were informed on good authority, and even that lacking, their own
commonsense was informant authoritative enough, that, given a
few more days' continuance of the deadlock, and semi-starvation
would be installed among some seven millions of people ; semi-
starvation, and, in all human probability, something else, and
perhaps something worse than that. The stoppage of the coal
supply involved the stoppage of the water supply, of the supply
of gas and electricity. It meant London in darkness." — Extract
from the Sunday Chronicle, August 2oth, 1911.
2. Vide Appendix E, p. 253 et »eq.

Iio

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

by the Conciliation Act of 1896, had been dabbling
in industrial disputes. It was willing to hold
inquiries, appoint arbitrators, frame agreements,
and generally to mother .the contending parties into
a better frame of mind in all cases wherein these
services were invited. But the work was carried
out under the supervision of the political head of the
Board, and was suspected of the party spirit.
Charles Macara's plan was the creation of a
department ad hoc — a court for the hearing of
industrial cases which should be as independent of
the political executive as the Chancery Division or
the King's Bench. For the headship of this body
he proposed the appointment of an official, whom in
his earlier expositions of the scheme he called an
" Industrial Judge," and this functionary was to
have his permanent staff, and the service of an
Advisory Council, composed of an equal number of
the leaders of capital and labour, this Council
either to furnish experts for the hearing of causes,
or to sit in grand assembly, according to the nature
and magnitude of the call upon its services. These
cardinal virtues — independence of party and just

composition of the body as between employers and

ii i

CHARLES W. MACARA

employed — being made sure, there remained the
much more difficult question of the powers of the
Council. Was the Council to be clothed with any
powers of compulsion? Was it to have the right
of entry upon any industrial dispute ? Was it, once
entered either by right or invitation, to have the
power of enforcing its decisions? On this latter
point there was neither doubt, nor room for doubt.
The crack of the whip was not to be thought of.
The legal enforcement of awards is one thing in
New Zealand, where the number of workmen in a
dispute seldom exceeds a few hundreds, and quite
another thing in England, where in conceivable
cases the malefactors might approach a quarter of
a million, a mouthful from which the jaws and
appetite of the ordinary criminal law would recoil.1
There was a rather stronger case for compulsion
at the other end of the process. Vast armies of
workmen could not be compelled, short of some-
thing like civil war, to obey the verdict of an
Industrial Court. Could they, on the other hand, be

i. " Nobody knowing what it means enters upon a strike lightly,
but just as certainly no trade unionist can think of giving up the
right to leave work if he believes there is a just call to do so." —
Mr. WILLIAM MULLIN, Presidential Address to the Trade Union
Congress, 1911.

112

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

compelled to listen to an Industrial Court? On
this point Charles Macara was pulled this way and
that. The Canadian plan of operations was to
preserve intact the right to strike, provided that the
strikers had first submitted to all the forms of
arbitration, and the right of the employer to lock
out his men was made subject to the same
condition. Every dispute was, on the motion of
either party, to be brought, with its full array of
witnesses and documents, before the Board of
Conciliation and Investigation. Until this Board
had formed and expressed its opinion, the right to
proceed to a lock-out or a strike remained dormant,
but awoke again when the Board issued an award
to which both parties could not, or would not
agree. A bill framed on the Canadian model was
offered to the judgment of the country by the
English Labour , Party about the same time as
Charles Macara's plan. By this Bill the Arbitration
Court which it proposed to set up was given the
right to hear and adjudicate, and both parties were
preserved in the right to fight if the finding was
not satisfactory.

Charles Macara would not hear of compulsion at

CHARLES W. MACARA

either end of the process. He was aiming at the
creation of a great moral force, and he declined
to compromise it with the questionable company of
physical coercion more capable of being threatened
than applied. The Industrial Council which he
asked the Government to set up would be
impartially composed of capital and labour, and
would be known by its name and habitation to all
men. Each industry which had its own judicial
system would retain it in full working order. The
Industrial Council would be there to act when the
trade in which any given dispute had arisen had
exhausted the means of grace. Its entrance would be
a further use of the patent device of the Brooklands
Agreement — the removal of the dispute out of the
hands of those who started it. The Council was, in
fact, the completion, body and soul, of the
Brooklands Agreement ; and it was to act only by
the consent of both parties. It was to have the
imperious authority of those who do but stand at
the gate and knock. It was to be a moral force;
the delimitation on the map of a new pale of civilisa-
tion. No group, whether of masters or men — so

his argument ran — would care to face the great

114

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

Third Party after a refusal to carry their case before
a court in which their friends numbered as many as
their foes, while any group — whether of masters or
men again — which persisted in its course after the
Council had declared against it, would be outlawed
— proscribed ! pilloried !

Charles Macara introduced his scheme to England
in a letter to the Lord Mayor of Manchester
(Mr. Charles Behrens x) on July loth, 1911.
In the course of this letter he informed the Lord
Mayor that the scheme was the result of some years'
thought and experience. The measure had long
been ready in his mind ; the moment for submitting
it to the country had come in this summer of
industrial anarchy. As the practical scheme of a
practical man, it immediately caught the public eye,
while a certain constructiveness which was in it
gained it much attention in the studies of social
thinkers. It was a sort of Hague Convention, set
up, not in international but in industrial affairs — a
much more hopeful atmosphere, because while a

i. Afterwards Sir Charles Behrens. His Lord Mayoralty was
distinguished for its successful avoidance of the use of the military
arm in Manchester at a time when other centres of unrest were
employing it freely.

"5

CHARLES W. MACARA

strong nation can defy international law and live
piratically, no body of masters or men in the country
could long support the moral and physical horrors of
outlawry. And so, while the Manchester Guardian
referred to Charles Macara's " almost unequalled
experience in the conduct of difficult disputes in
the cotton industry " and found in the scheme " the
germ of a great and valuable reform," the Yorkshire
Post — the two voices representing the call of deep
unto deep — welcomed it strongly, albeit without
much hope, as a possible check upon the world's
rapid progress to the dogs.1

The scheme was further advertised in the House of
Commons by a question by Mr. George N. Barnes,
M.P., which drew from the Prime Minister, Mr.
Asquith, the announcement that the Government
would consider the establishment of an Industrial
Council on Charles Macara's model if it could
be shown to have behind it the right quantity
and quality of support. Thus challenged, Charles
Macara proceeded to agitate the country. Support

i. The Yorkshire Post pointed out that the scheme would in no
way interfere with the full working of the 262 permanent Boards
of Joint Committees already settling disputes in various trades.
Of these, 153 were already possessed of automatic machinery for
dealing with deadlocks.

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

was invited and readily obtained from the over-
wrought mayoral parlours of England. Many
great capitalists signified their assent, and much
support came from the Labour Party, the scheme
harmonising at once with the larger constructive
intentions of Labour doctrinaires and the oppor-
tunism of old trade unionists. Charles Macara
weighed in himself with an article in the Financial
Review of Reviews,1 which is interesting for the
complete conversion it notates to collective bargain-
ing between employers and employed. The trade
union is no longer the pestilence, but the postulate
of ordered society. It is to be static as well as
dynamic, and passages occur in this article
which point clearly to the co-operation of
labour in the general control of industry, a
principle he had often acted upon informally in
Lancashire. There was a clause in the Brook-
lands Agreement recommending joint action by
employers and employed in all matters which
either threatened evil or promised good to the trade
at large. The clause died in the letter, but Charles
Macara acted constantly on its principle, and

during his presidency of the Federation he frequently
i. October, 1911.

117

CHARLES W. MACARA

addressed meetings of the assembled trade and
inaugurated great philanthropic movements for the
benefit of Lancashire with one trade union leader
at his right hand and another at his left. He now
called upon labour definitely to cross the floor and
join in the government of industry, thereby antici-
pating curiously a scheme which, as we shall see in
a moment, was put forward as a part of the social
reconstruction to follow the War.

Shortly after the publication of this article the
Industrial Council was established,1 the Board of
Trade notifying its formation on October loth, 1911.
The scheme was borrowed without amendment,
the passages in which the Council's duties were
limited, no less than those in which they were
defined, being taken almost verbally from his pub-
lished advocacy of the scheme. Each point which
he had made in the press was merely underlined
in the official memorandum which introduced the
Council to the world— the adverse effect of industrial
war upon the general public ; the necessity of
encouraging and fostering such voluntary methods
of conciliation as were already in force ; the necessity
i. Vide Appendix E, p. 267 et seg.
118

SIR HENRY CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN.

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

of adding to these some means of releasing the
condition of dead-lock; the decision against legal
power either, as in Canada, to hear, or, as in
Australia, to bind. Charles Macara was among the
thirteen great employers appointed by the same
instrument to balance an equal number of eminent
trade unionists. The Government did not over-
acknowledge its rather staggering indebtedness to
the author of the scheme, but the author of the
scheme had got his way, and was momentarily
content.1

But only momentarily ! The subsequent history
of the Council is little more than a chapter in social
waste. It is possible that the Council excited the
jealousy of the purely political mind; that the
tendency of some of the staple trades to close like
oysters against the touch of the outside hand was
against it from another side. It held, at the request
of the Government, a long and interesting inquiry
into the growing industrial lawlessness of the times,
but in the great strikes which came after its establish-

i. Sir George Askwith, K.C., K.C.B., who was then Comptroller
General of the Labour Department of the Board of Trade, was
appointed Chairman of the Industrial Council, with the title of
Chief Industrial Commissioner.

"9

CHARLES W. MACARA

ment — the last of a long series — it was very little
employed; in the coal strike of 1912 only inter-
mittently ; in a dispute in the cotton trade — a very
favourable occasion for its services, since it raised
the important industrial question of the use of
unorganised labour — not at all. The outbreak of the
European War in 1914 rolled up the map of English
institutions, but Charles Macara held that a state of
war, so far from stultifying the Industrial Council,
should have been its accepted day. Its twenty-six
members represented the capital and labour em-
ployed in all the great staple industries; it was a
collection around one table, not too large, of the
practised brains and hands of organisation, and in
a series of strong memorials to the Government
and letters to the press 1 he urged that it should
be employed in the mobilisation of industry which

i. When the war broke out there was in existence in England
an Industrial Council. It was appointed by the Government in
1911 to deal in a broad spirit, and with a strong hand, with
disputes between Capital and Labour. It was equally representa-
tive of Capital and Labour ; it had the whole industrial system of
England under its eye, all the industrial practice and custom of
England at its finger tips. At the moment the war broke out the
industrial mobilisation of England was necessary and even vital —
as necessary and as vital as the mobilisation of an expeditionary

I 20

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

was, in his own words, " a part of the vital strategy
of war." It was the voice of one crying in a
wilderness of improvised Government offices; of
machines constructed on a vast scale and at an
enormous expense to pick up pins ; of acreages of
wooden shanties, erected, painted, plumbed and
furnished ad hoc.

Ideas, however, do not die so easily, and three
years after the beginning of the War — in 1917 — the
collective direction of industry by the whole body
of workers engaged in it, which was at the root of
Charles Macara's proposal in 191 1, was recommended
by a Government Committee of Enquiry as the line
which industrial progress must take after the War.
In recommending the formation of National Indus-
trial Councils for all the highly -organised industries,
with District Councils and Works Committees
rilling up a scheme of moral partnership between
capital and labour, the Whitley Committee was

force. The Industrial Council was there, a perfect engine of
organisation, every part in working order, capable, within a few
hours, of getting up the steam pressure for war. It was not used.
(Sunday Times, April 19, 1917.)

121

CHARLES W. MACARA

saying an almost exact ditto to what was either
stated or implied in Charles Macara's agitation in
the summer of 191 1 . It was his fate, as an industrial
organiser, to be a little ahead of his times.

I 22

Internationalism

International Cotton Federation.
International Institute of Agriculture*

CHAPTER VII

INTERNATIONALISM.

AMONG the great industries of England the cotton
trade, second only to primordial agriculture in its
importance and the mass of human life which it
sustains, is an exotic. It has not grown of its own
roots, but has been grafted. It is not spontaneous
like ships and seafaring, nor is it like the industries
of coal and iron and wheat, and even the sister
industry of wool, the turning of man to his mother
earth so that in the sweat of his brow he may eat
bread. It is the supreme accident of English
economic history ; the great departure. To account
for cotton as an English craft at all, to account for it
as the second in size and importance of all the
English crafts, we go neither to the land of England
nor to the waters that are about the land.1 Not one
particle of its raw material could possibly be grown
in an English summer ; its finished product is not
recommended for the English winter, and in juxta-
position to the human frame is frowned upon
i. Vide Appendix A, p. 191 et seq., " Cotton : its Early History."
1*5

CHARLES W. MACARA

definitely in proverbial wisdom for all seasons of
the English year. Situated in about the bleakest and
wettest diocese of evangelical England ; inextricably
entangled in Wesleyan circuits; lodged in the
smooth enfoldments of hills that go up with a shout
of pulpit oratory and Sunday School cantatas, the
trade of Lancashire yet ministers in the intimate
necessity of calico to all the idolatries of earth ;
springing out of rectangular streets of brick or
stone, which twinkle with the brass tablets of the
Refuge and the Prudential, and are harsh with clogs
and early rising ; blackening a sky which was already
grey, its dealings are with the lotus lands of East and
West, and those who swoon in the sun. It trades
under foreign flags; under strange gods.

Manchester cannot even in imagination follow
the tremendous and awful destination of Manchester
goods. They lie out on sun-blistered quays, and are
carried by rivers into forest twilights; they are
heaped in bazaars and round the feet of minarets,
and from these emporiums they pass on to un-
fathomable domestic mysteries behind high white
walls ; they travel on the backs of camels, and are

worn by philosophers at the mouths of tents ; they

126

INTERNATIONALISM

stream from the shoulders of fierce horsemen, and
go with the pitcher down the steps of the well.
Lancashire exists by the tropics and the sub-tropics.
The weaver who flourishes her washleather in John
Bright Street on Friday night, and calls " James
'Enry " home out of the piercing draught, and the
overlooker who "has his tea and washes 'im,"
always in that order and chronology, and proceeds
to the choir practice, where they will rehearse the
Whitsuntide hymns, are represented by time and
piece in the hangings of Arabian nights. The
bitterest memory of John Bright Street is a war for
the liberation of oleographic slaves, and even the
haughty and intolerant province of Oldham, which
treads on a new fashion as Rome used to tread
on a new thought, and only removes its hat for
the National Anthem or the funeral of a Major in
the Territorials if it thinks no one is looking, is
inextricably involved for its daily bread with people
who do not scruple to cry Allah, and to prostrate
themselves publicly upon their faces.

This state of affairs can be demonstrated by
statistics. Lancashire buys and brings three

thousand miles across the Atlantic one-fifth of the '

127

CHARLES W. MACARA

cotton crop of the Southern States1; she brings from
the Mediterranean mainly for the more eclectic
trade of Manchester and Bolton about one-half of
the longer stapled crop of Egypt ;2 she spins
and weaves and dyes and prints it; she keeps
about one-quarter of the final product for the English
market, and sends the rest, representing about one-
third of the total exports of English manufactures,
abroad. Since the greater part of the raw material
comes from America, and the greater part of the
finished product is sold in India and China, the
fabric passes through the fingers of Manchester on
a journey almost completely across the world. It is
not one of the native arts of England, like the
building of ships and the breeding of horses, but
England's greatest artifice ; a gigantic and incredible
technique. For, not only does Lancashire clothe the
inhabitants of one tropic with a fabric which has
grown in the other, but she does a considerable trade
in her finer goods with European countries which
have cotton spinning industries of their own, and
a noticeable amount of the crop which was grown

1. Vide Appendix B, p. 209 et seq., Address at Atlanta, Georgia,
U.S.A., 1907.

2. Vide Appendix C, p. 222 et seq., Address at Alexandria,
Egypt, 1912.

128

INTERNATIONALISM

in America goes back again across the Atlantic, and
finds its way once more into America round an.
adverse tariff of sixty per cent. It is like the piano,
or an eye for the fast balls at cricket, and just as these
things, if they are consummate, will turn the course
of a man's career, and carry him wide of his pre-
ordained destiny in the counting house or the shop,
so cotton has shaped and determined the history of
England. England has thought cotton.

Men have risen up from time to time, and have
sworn in their hearts that the English market should
belong to English men, and behold there was
Lancashire, compromised hopelessly with half the
attractive strangers of earth, and unable to sell to
them, or, at any rate, to obtain payment for what she
sold, unless they in their turn sold to us. The idea of
a self-contained island died in course of time, and
reappeared in the dream of a self-contained Empire,
and again Lancashire, with a population larger than
Scotland or Ireland or Australia, has been got into
the scheme with about as much painful contrivance
and discomfort as it cost the Mad Hatter and the
March Hare to insert the dormouse in the tea-pot.1

i. " Greater Manchester " alone is twice as great in population
as New Zealand.

129

CHARLES W. MACARA

Even the considerable amount of manufactured
cotton which comes into England is found on
examination to be largely composed of small goods
to which Lancashire herself has applied the first
and most profitable processes. It is an industry
which refuses to climb upon the knees of England
and be nursed, and all the rest of the country has
had to live up to its spirit, just as a whole family
has to inure itself to open windows because there is
a consumptive in the house. Consequently, men
have been known to turn upon the cotton trade and
deny it the name of English. They have sworn
in their wrath that it is an excrescence ; a bad habit ;
that South-east Lancashire is not national in the
sense in which Lincolnshire and Wessex and
Oxford and Salisbury, and even Liverpool and the
Potteries, may be allowed to be national.

Neither, indeed, is it ! Like Palestine, Lancashire
belongs to everybody. It is a part of human experi-
ence ; the messianic corner of earth in which the new
world was announced ; the region in which steam and
mechanism first happened to man.1 And the cotton
trade, being chosen and dedicated for this great

i. " What Art was to the ancient world, Science is to the
modern ; the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men the useful

130

INTERNATIONALISM

revelation, and having indeed a mission to England
which succeeded, and a mission to the world which
has so far failed, always abounded in definite
dogmatic teaching. If it was not actually born of a
new theory of life and politics, a new theory was
certainly necessary to its growth. It had to argue
England out of being an island; to plant a more
prosaic and temperate conception of the foreigner as
a customer in disguise, and to spread the belief, still
not universally held, that customers are on the
whole more desirable when they have much to offer
in exchange than when only little ; to clear away
out of our own system tons of mediaeval debris. It
over-did its mission, as all good missionaries do.
Knowing no municipal government except that of
the parish beadle, and no national government
except that of landlords in one House and their
nominees in the other, it was almost totally desti-
tute of the Greek conception of the State, and

has succeeded to the beautiful. Instead of the city of the Violet
Crown, a Lancashire village has expanded into a mighty region
of factories and warehouses. Yet, rightly understood, Manchester
is as great a human exploit as Athens. The inhabitants, indeed,
are not so impressed with their idiosyncracy as the countrymen
of Pericles and Phidias. They do not fully comprehend the posi-
tion which they occupy. It is the philosopher alone who can
conceive the grandeur of Manchester and the immensity of its
future." — BENJAMIN DISRAELI in " Coningsby," 1844.

'31

CHARLES W. MACARA

though Cobden was himself an Alderman, the no
less Greek conception of the city, and the low and
ill-bred gait of one Manchester street into another,
the furtive shambling of Blackfriars Street from
Salford into Manchester, as though it would do
anything in the world but get there, being now
incurable, will last for ever, as a lesson against the
awful consequences of the Manchester theory of
letting everybody do as he likes— one of those
sermons in stones of which the world is full to those
who have ears and eyes. It miscalculated badly the
future of the British Empire and its zeal for freedom
of contract led the country into the unforgettable
morass of the early factory system.

On the other hand, the charge against the
Manchester School that it cared for nothing but
material progress is untrue, and is refuted by its
splendid and rather pathetic belief in self-education
and self-improvement — exhibiting itself in a rich crop
of Mechanics' Institutes — and its famous refusal to
be coerced, even by ruin and starvation, into siding
against President Lincoln and the North.1 It gave

i. " He had begun life with the idea that the great manufac-
turers and merchants of England should aspire to that high direct-
ing position which had raised the Medici. to a level with
the sovereign princes of the earth. Through all his public course
Cobden did his best to moralise this great class." — " The Life of
Richard Cobden " by Lord MORLEY.

132

INTERNATIONALISM

to English history the heroic story of the Anti-Corn
Law League, and it enriched the genius of England
with Cobden's almost lyrical logic and the pure and
noble eloquence of Bright. Its international senti-
ment, though still denied with strong drink and
raving, is a thing to which the children of men will
yet come. The best praise of the Manchester School
is that it had to be, in order that other things might
come after it, and that all social building in the
future will have to be laid on the work which it did
in its own time among English institutions and in

the English mind.1

******

In this significant community of Lancashire
Charles Macara has an historic place. He is in

i. Much interest was taken by England in 1916 in the defeat
of the Free Trade party in the Manchester Chamber of Commerce.
Shortly after this incident, the Indian Government imposed a
protective duty on Lancashire goods entering India, a liberty which
England could only disallow to India on the condition of remaining
a Free Trade country herself. The newly-elected directors of the
Chamber, though remaining in favour of Protection as a theory,
objected to this example of it as a practice, and headed a great
deputation of the cotton trade, which went to the India Office
to be heard against it. This protest by the new directors against
receiving a small instalment of their own policy is an incident to
which no parallel could be found in the life of Alderman Cobden
who brought about the original conversion of the Manchester
Chamber of Commerce to Free Trade.

133

CHARLES W. MACAR.A

the apostolic succession of Manchester men, and we
might almost say that the twenty-one years in which
he was at the head of the organised cotton
employers was not only his reign but — and
it is a much rarer phenomenon in history—
his epoch and his age. We have seen what
a large share he had in shaping over many
critical years the relations between employers
and employed, but the labour question was only one
of a company of questions which had closed in upon
the trade. They, were not the questions which had
troubled the early days of Manchester. The landscape
had completely changed. Classical Manchester had a
virtual monopoly in cotton manufactured goods.
All the world was at its feet, if it could only get
its feet free. To the " Manchester School "
this universe presented itself as divided sharply
between England vibrant with machinery on
the one hand, and all the other countries of
the world teeming with food and raw material
on the other, and the problem was to bring
about such an opening of gates that the
things which England made could be exchanged
for the things which other communities grew. The

circumstance that we could not enforce the opening
of their gates was no reason why we should not
open ours. Once admit the grown produce of the
foreigner into England, and it followed — unless,
indeed, the foreigner was a philanthropist and also
a fool — that he must take in exchange for it the
product of English machines, and the fact that he
allowed his government to intercept a portion of his
just price was his affair, and not ours. This was
the proposition which Lancashire had to prove in
order that it might grow.

In Charles Macara's day the problems which
encircled the trade were quite different. The ailment
of Lancashire was not so much the growing pains
of youth, as something very like the gout of mature
age, and in the few years which preceded the
opening of the Manchester Ship Canal there were
slight but unmistakeable symptoms of early senile
decay. It was common knowledge arnong the men
who spread themselves in Daniel Adamson's
drawing-room on June 27th, 1882, and began the
superhuman struggle for the Canal, that Lancashire
was stationary like Spain. Liverpool was chiefly
blamed for it. Liverpool, and the railways which

J

CHARLES W. MACARA

served to and from Liverpool, were said to be slowly
strangling the trade of South-east Lancashire.

But there were deeper troubles even than this. The
great bulk of the world's raw cotton comes from
America, India and Egypt. There are wide differ-
ences between the several crops of these three
countries, the product of the first serving one set of
manufacturing processes, that of the second another
set, and that of the third yet another.1 These are
the three main vertical divisions of the world's crop,
and the horizontal divisions cutting across them,
and distinguishing one part of the same crop from
another part of it are few in number, fixed and
precise. All raw cotton falls instantly into its
classification, and the result of this was that the
market for raw cotton, turning on its own axis year by
year, unperturbed like the soap market, for example,
or even its own relative, the cloth market, or any
other market which is in contact with the incalculable
humours of the consuming laity, by changes of
fashion, and the birth and death of new ideas, had
developed habits of its own, and a strong and

i. The Lancashire cotton trade, for example, makes very little
use of Indian cotton, which is well suited to continental spinning.
The Egyptian crop, on the other hand, is extremely serviceable
and, indeed, indispensable to the fine spinning of Manchester and
Bolton.

136

INTERNATIONALISM

complicated bodily structure which was largely
independent of the productive trade which it existed
to serve.

Nor was this all. Lancashire had been
content to depend very largely for her raw
cotton on the United states. In the age to
which we have now come America, with more
than 30,000,000 spindles of her own, was using
every year more and more of her cotton crop,
and it was beginning to be a question whether the
world's consumption of calico, the extent of which
can be dimly appreciated when we reflect that what
fur is to Petrograd in winter, calico is to the
fabulous millions of Asia and Africa nearly all the
year round — climatic, characteristic — was not get-
ting beyond anything which the cotton fields of
earth could supply. These were among the prob-
lems which Charles Macara helped Lancashire to
meet. It was he who largely incorporated the
Lancashire cotton industry, and went a considerable
way towards incorporating the cotton industry of the
world. He gave Lancashire new organisations;
still more to the point, he helped to give her the
spirit and the habit of organisation.

'37

CHARLES W. MACARA

The opening of the Ship Canal was the re-birth
of Manchester. It stopped, and, indeed, turned into
the opposite direction the migration of engineers,
chemical manufacturers, and all their tribe and
kindred, from Manchester to the Clyde and the
Tyne. It made Manchester the greatest engineer-
ing city in the world ; it Americanised Trafford
Park. But it did not immediately make its mark
on the cotton trade. Seventeen days after it was
opened — on January 27th, 1894 — tne first cargo of
cotton sailed processionally into Manchester from
the United States, and thirty-one cargoes — twenty
from Egypt and eleven from the United States —
had arrived when the Canal was fifteen months old.
But this progress, though it did not stop, did not
accelerate. Many spinners and spinners' managers
were unable to break themselves of the Liverpool
habit which had an enjoyable social aspect, and the
forces which had been actively against the Canal fell
back after defeat upon passive resistance, the Liver-
pool Cotton Association solemnly excommunicating
all unappropriated and still unbought raw cotton
lying in Manchester.1 Manchester might be a

i. The exact process was to make cotton lying in Manchester
untenderable against contracts for future delivery.

138

INTERNATIONALISM

channel, but Liverpool was still to be the reservoir.
It was to meet this state of things that the Man-
chester Cotton Association was formed on November
6th, 1894. Charles Macara, then comparatively
young in his office of President of the Employers'
Federation, presided in the Victoria Arcade at one
of those black-coated and felt-hatted Manchester
meetings which are so much more than they seem
to be, and took the directing headship of an Associa-
tion which was immediately joined by 265 spinners
representing 14,000,000 spindles.1 The main objects
of the Association were to promote the importation
of raw cotton by the Canal and to establish a cotton
market in Manchester. The Association had more
success in the first than in the second of these aims.
The market had been removed from Manchester to
Liverpool by the opening of the railway in 1834, and>
though a number of brokers have now returned to
Manchester, the Canal has not brought the main
organisation back. But the use of the Canal for
cargoes of raw cotton was forwarded with striking
results. Charles Macara, working in close associa-
tion all the time with J. K. Bythell, an old friend

i. Vide Appendix D, p. 249 et teg.
'39

CHARLES W. MACARA

from the days of Grosvenor Square Church, held
the presidency for six years, and, when he passed
on the work in igoo to other hands, the seasonal
importation of cotton by the Canal had grown from
64,000 to 550,000 bales, having increased by 150,000
bales in the last year of the period. Larger even
than the direct saving to the Lancashire cotton trade
on this traffic was the indirect saving caused by
competition and the disestablishment of a monopoly.
At the same time Liverpool, in accordance with the
mysterious and beneficent law of compensation,
gained more than she lost. Supply was found, as
it often is, to create demand.

Thiswas by no means the end of Charles Macara's
dealings with the momentous question of transport.
In 1902 Lancashire was seriously alarmed by the
rapid strides made by the American cotton trade in
the Chinese market. Transport rates were suspected
of having something to do with Lancashire's loss of
this trade, and, on an examination of the matter, the
surprising discovery was made that whereas it was
three thousand miles further from New York to the
Far East than from Liverpool, the American rate of

carriage was about half the English rate. This intelli-

140

INTERNATIONALISM

gence was communicated to Lancashire. It was one
of the instances of his habituat practice of addressing
himself not only to capital but to labour, and, since
the charges applied not alone to coarse cotton
goods, but to other classes of our trade with China,
including machinery, he brought practically all pro-
ductive and inventive Lancashire into one compact
protesting body. Distributive Lancashire was less
easy to manage. The agitation was discounten-
anced by the powerful shipping fraternity of Man-
chester, and the Chamber of Commerce on this occa-
sion gave little help.1 The struggle with the Ship-
ping Companies was a short one. A fortnight
after Charles Macara made his exposure of the
striking disparity between American and English
rates to the Far East, a powerful deputation of
masters and men under his leadership paid an
important call on the Shipping Companies in Liver-
pool, and in another fortnight the rates from Liver-
pool to China were placed on a level with the rates
from New York to China. The saving to the
Lancashire cotton industry alone effected by these
storming tactics was estimated at ;£ 100,000 a year.

i. John Thomson, the President of the Chamber, assisted
the cause powerfully, but unofficially.

141

CHARLES W. MACARA

It was shortly after this incident — in the year
1904 — that Lancashire formally renounced the
divine right to the cotton trade, and proclaimed it
a commonwealth which was to overlie trie boun-
daries of some twenty-one civilised countries of the
world. The step was not suggested by the shrink-
age of Lancashire which, in the years following
the establishment of the International Federation,
increased its spindles by very nearly the
equivalent of the whole cotton trade of Germany,
and by more than the equivalent of that of
Russia or France, but by the unmanageable
expansion of the world. Practically every inch of
the unredeemed world won for civilisation is won
for calico. The 250,000,000 inhabitants of the world
who are still content with the state of nature are
all of them potential customers for cotton, while the
750,000,000 who are partly clothed buy little of any-
thing else, and as their code of etiquette assumes
further complications, will buy more and more.
Added to all this is the enormous consumption of
calico in the temperate zones of earth. To ask
Lancashire alone to feed a market such as this would

be to ask her to abandon all her other occupations, to

142

INTERNATIONALISM

forego all the arts and solaces of life, and even the
distinction between night and day, and still fail ; and
those who were uneasy because the Lancashire
cotton industry did not grow upon itself in the same
ratio of growth as the juvenile spinning industries
of Europe, were forgetting that maturity will not
grow as fast as youth — it is enough if it consoli-
dates and develops character.

The troubles which came to a head in 1904 were
not due to any inability to sell manufactures but

to an increasing inability to buy raw materials.
America, with a growing manufacturing industry,
was retaining more and more of her own cotton
crop, and the day was beginning to be imaginable
when she would retain it all. For what was left,
England had to compete with the developing cotton
industries of Europe and Asia, and the narrow
margin between the world's demand and the world's
supply was breeding a rampageous speculation.
The " cotton corner " was becoming a more and
more usual phenomenon. The extreme danger of
Lancashire's almost complete dependence upon the
weather and the whims of the Southern States had
become apparent, and, about this time, the British

H3

CHARLES W. MACARA

Cotton Growing Association, which had its origin
in a movement by the Oldham Chamber of Com-
merce, and of which Charles Macara afterwards
became a Vice-President, began the important work
of opening up fresh sources of supply in Africa
under the British flag.

But the crisis of 1903 and 1904 would not wait
for Africa. It was Sully 's year. The shortage
of raw material together with the operations of
a single speculator brought Lancashire to a state of
things which recalled, if it did not repeat, the experi-
ence of the Cotton Famine in the sixties. Lanca-
shire escaped final disaster by adopting and faith-
fully working Charles Macara 's plan of short hours.
The working hours in the Lancashire factories were
reduced from 55^ to 40 per week ; the operatives
went on a regimen which in the following summer
spelt Blackpool again instead of Paris or Lucerne,
which were growing in favour.1 The call upon the
raw cotton market was eased, and Sully was broken
in pieces. Lancashire had saved the cotton trade
of the world, but it was clearly felt that the sacrifice
must not be asked of her again. The mass meeting

i. Charles Macara was always against complete stoppages of
the trade, even if they were short ones, and preferred what may
be called the rationing of work and wages.

144

INTERNATIONALISM

of employers and employed which pledged itself to
Charles Macara's proposal at the end of 1903 was in
telegraphic communication with the American and
European spinners, and was attended by a repre-
sentative of the French trade, and so strong was the
rapport found to be already existing, that an inter-
national movement of the cotton trade was felt to
be at least possible.

An appeal to the English Government to call an
assembly of the cotton spinners of all countries to
discuss the difficulties of the trade, met with a good
deal of departmental sympathy but no practical
response, and in March, 1904, the Employers'
Federation of Lancashire, acting with the
Swiss Association — the two bodies represent-
ing the whale and an exceedingly gallant
minnow in these waters — summoned an inter-
national congress. Switzerland not only joined
in convening the assembly, but acted as its
host. The congress met at Zurich on May 23rd,
1904, and out of its deliberations grew the Inter-
national Federation of Master Cotton Spinners'
and Manufacturers' Associations, which was for-
mally established at a second congress in Man-
US

CHARLES W. MACARA

*<

Chester in 1905. Lancashire, although by far the
largest interest included in the Federation, wisely
abstained from every attempt to count for too much
in its management. The annual conferences which
followed were held at Bremen, Vienna, Paris, Milan,
Brussels, Barcelona, and the Hague, and the com-
mittee met twice a year in some central city of
Europe. Manchester gave the Federation its home
and headquarters, and it is not too much to say that
in Charles Macara, who was elected President in
1904, and held the office till 1915, it gave the move-
ment life and soul.

Every question affecting the cotton industry,
except the labour question, came before these annual
meetings of the International Federation. It was,
however, called into existence by the crisis of 1904,
and until 1914, when the floor fell out of these
international structures, its best mind went into
projects for widening the world's harvest of cotton.
Accordingly, we find it encouraging and superin-
tending in the tropical colonies of European
countries the work which was being done in English
colonies by the British Cotton Growing Association.1
On India the Federation made a lasting mark. The

i. Vide Appendix C, p. 233 et aeq.
I46

• INTERNATIONALISM

Indian cotton crop is degenerate. It was the source
of the priceless Indian hand-woven muslins, and a
pound's weight of the yarn from which these
fabrics were produced has been estimated to be
two hundred and forty miles long. Indifferent
cultivation has cost it all this eminence of quality,
and it is now the characteristically short-stapled
cotton of the world, though, as such, it serves very
largely on the continent of Europe for the manufac-
ture of rough and ready goods, and performs the
valuable economic function of relieving the pressure
on the American crop. The activities of the Inter-
national Federation lifted the Indian crop from
three million to nearly six million bales, and an
important project for the planting of American and
Egyptian seed on a large tract of irrigated land in
India had advanced considerably when it was
temporarily set back by the outbreak of war.1

The International Federation did much to
improve the cultivation of cotton in America and
to civilise the American cotton bale. It was the
characteristic of the American cotton bale that it
never seemed to get properly out of bed in the
morning. A most ungroomed and down-at-heel

i. Vide Appendix D, p. 249 et seq.
'47

CHARLES W. MACARA

object of commerce, it loafed and loitered away
many misdirected hours in shanties and on quay
sides, and showed up in England at an advanced
hour of day still in the same convalescence of
slippers and dressing gown. The whole cotton
growing industry of America was suffering from
this Bohemianism, and inattention to small things
was beginning to count, as it will, in the large result.
The yield acre by acre was steadily declining, and
American cotton might have gone the way of Indian
had not a Private Investigation Commission
organised by Charles Macara visited the Southern
States in 1906 at the time of planting, and again
at the time of picking, and made many
suggestions as to the treatment of soil and the
selection of seed, startling the dilettanti with prosaic
recommendations about bringing the gathered
cotton in out of the rain. The advice had the
unusual experience of being taken. Charles
Macara, leading another international delegation to
America l in the following year, was surprised,
accustomed as he was to the majestic deliberation

with which English officialism proceeds from know-

1. This delegation travelled 4,600 miles in a special train
through the cotton growing States.

148

INTERNATIONALISM

ing about a thing to doing it, to find experimental
farms already set up and spreading knowledge, and
large warehouses erected for the proper storage of
cotton.

The International Cotton Federation had a sister
in the service of agriculture. It was drawn into
relationship with the International Institute of
Agriculture partly because cotton, like wheat, is an
annual harvest, and the fortunes of all who live
by it rest ultimately with the seed which falls into
the ground and dies, and partly because Charles
Macara, while he gave life to the one, saved it to the
other. In the early years of the present century
David Lubin, an American citizen, travelled the
world with an important scheme for setting up an
observation post from which all the harvests of the
world could be surveyed and signalled, bad results
here be set off against good results there, and all
the growing fields of earth put, so to speak, under a
single stewardship. The main object was to thwart
the speculator who thrives on the kind of ignorance
which David Lubin's scheme was to dispel. It was
intended to give the world eyes in the back of its

head.

149

CHARLES W. MACARA

After much journeying to and fro, David
Lubin got a hearing from the King of Italy, who
called together the governments of the world to
consider the scheme in a Conference at Rome.
The Conference was a success, but a work of this
kind, being everybody's business and therefore
nobody's, depending on a large number of people
willing the same thing at the same time, and doing
it, no sooner gets afloat than it gets becalmed. It
overcomes mere obstruction, but perishes of inertia.
It gets mislaid in pigeon-holes, and David Lubin 's
scheme was dying of asphyxia when its author
sought out Charles Macara in Manchester. Full of
sympathy for a brother organiser in distress, full
of the idea itself, he went to London in the
interests of the scheme, saw one of the English
officials who had been to Rome, and so worked
upon him that he modulated his advice to the
English Government out of the minor into the major
key, and ended his report, as he had not begun it,
with an imperative "yes." Having convinced the
English Government he went on to Paris and con-
vinced the French Government, and hurried back to
London to keep Whitehall up to the sticking point.

'5°

MAJOR GENERAL SIR ARCHIBALD GALLOWAY.

INTERNATIONALISM

t

It was the saving of David Lubin's scheme. The
international Institute of Agriculture was set up in
Rome. Alone, or almost alone, among the appliances
for the peace of the world it has had the distinction
of surviving even the European War. Its bulletins
continue to supply invaluable information.

The International Cotton Federation enjoyed a
considerable social prestige. It was received every-
where. Charles Macara and the members of the
International Committee talked business not only
with Ministers of State, but in all the palaces of
Europe — with King Edward at Windsor ; with the
German Emperor on board his yacht in Kiel
Harbour ; with the Emperor of Austria in Vienna ;
with the King of Haly in Rome ; with the King
of the Belgians in Brussels ; with the President of the
Provisional Government of Portugal in Lisbon ; with
the King of Spain in Madrid ; with the Queen of the
Netherlands at the Royal Palace of Loo ; and with
Presidents Loubet, Fallieres, and Poincar£ at the
Elys£e, Paris; with the Khedive of Egypt and
Lord Kitchener1 away at the outposts of the
empire, and with the Governors of the Cotton States

i. Vide Appendix C, p. 239 tt stq., »nd H, p. 327 et teg.

CHARLES W. MACARA

of America. They talked cotton, and above all they
talked peace. Never for a moment did Charles
Macara unhitch his waggon from that beckoning
star, or lose the faith which was so strong in earlier
Manchester that commerce must ultimately civilise
and pacify the earth. Since these conversations the
world has gone the other w&y, but it will return to
the appointed path, and the work of internationalis-
ing Europe will be the easier for these first attempts.
The channels have been dug, and habit will find
them and run in them again. Habit — even long
intermitted habit — always does.

'52

War : Cotton Reserve.

Cotton as Contraband.
National Register.

WAR.

v

THE International Cotton Federation and the

Industrial Council were Charles Macara's chief con-
tributions— larger and more practical contributions
than most men have the good fortune to make — to
the ideas and institutions of his age. But the whole
of his Presidency of the English Master Cotton
Spinners' Federation was a gift not only to Lanca-
shire, but to society at large. It was a totally new
efBore|cence. He had shaped a new type
of career, and almost, we might say, lived a
new kind of life. Success in business is liable in
England to two processes of degeneration. It
either remains an affair of mere accumulation and
becomes stagnant, or it is run off into the futilities
of sport or party politics, feeling its sandy way, if it
takes the latter course, through interminable division
lobbies to final evaporation in the House of Lords.
Charles Macara made business a public career. He
moralised it, and made it stand before kings. His
room in York Street, Manchester, was not only the

'55

CHARLES W. MACARA

wheel-house from which a large private enterprise
was navigated, but more and more as his own busi-
ness answered the lightest touch of the helm, it
became the workshop of a public economist. At
the most critical moments in the history of the
cotton trade he was freely accessible to the press;
calling the needy journalist in ; instructing him in
technical processes ; inculcating his favourite theory
of the inter-dependence of industry; rejoicing greatly
over every ounce of this teaching which percolated
into print ; sorrowing, as those that are without hope,
over the failure of the London press to understand
cotton. Himself, he pamphleteered and indoctri-
nated without ceasing, preferred voluntary work
to any of the number of directorates he might have
had, and not only thought out in principle, but
carried through in detail, scheme after scheme for
organising industrial England, and bringing men,
in one of his own favourite phrases, " into line."

This organising activity made itself felt chiefly in
the relations between Lancashire and the outside
world, and, within Lancashire, in the relations
between masters and men. But it had other mani-
festations. The Cotton Employers' Parliamentary

156

WAR

Association was formed in 1899 to consider Acts of
Parliament affecting the cotton industry. It was
the counterpart on the employers' side to the United
Textile Factory Workers' Association on the side
of the operatives, and it was the combination of
these two bodies which intervened in 1903 with such
decisive results in the fiscal controversy raised by
Mr. Chamberlain. Charles Macara presided at
the joint conference in which the two bodies spoke
the mind of the cotton trade, and, keeping the agita-
tion then lighted at white heat, made himself per-
haps the most powerful opponent of Tariff Reform
outside Parliament.1 In the three controversial years
which followed, the name " Macara " became an
argument, if not a clincher in itself, and could be
heard employed in that capacity in any railway
carriage or smoking cafe* in Lancashire.2

Larger in its scope, if not so decisive in its results,
was the Employers' Parliamentary Association

1. Vide Appendix F, p. 289 et seq.

2. Speaking at Bolton at the height of the Tariff Reform Con-
troversy, Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman said : "I have some
words here which I have reserved to the very close of my remarks,
in order to give more emphasis to them. They are the words
which were used by a friend of mine, Mr. Macara, President of
the Cotton Employers' Federation. He said : ' It may, I think,
be taken that intelligent and fostering legislation, harmonious
relationship between capital and labour, enterprise to secure a

'57

CHARLES W. MACARA

which grew out of his profound discontent with the
details of the Insurance Act. In the hope of post-
poning the operation of that Act,1 he organised a
deputation to the Prime Minister which represented
two thousand millions of capital.2 The deputation
was refused a hearing.3 The Employers' Parlia-
mentary Association was formed to give industry
and commerce ana the managing mind generally
their due weight in public affairs. The Association
was a success. It attracted to itself forty Employers'
Federations and Associations, and a great number

plentiful supply of raw material, energy, ability, and skill on the
part of both employers and workpeople, and economy in the cost
of production, are the main factors that will enable us to continue
to secure a fair share of the world's trade. I venture to express
the opinion, at all events, that these conditions form the most
secure basis any great commercial nation can rest upon which is
dependent upon foreign trade for such a large proportion of its
employment.'" — Times October i6th, 1903.

1. One of the provisions of the Act was that its operation could
be postponed for six months.

2. Charles Macara presided over the largest protest meeting
held in Manchester, and as it was impossible to find any hall large
enough to accommodate the whole of those who wished to take
part in it, he asked for signatures to the protest, 18,000, embracing
the names of many leading firms in the north of England, the
midland counties, and in the north of Ireland, being secured in
four days.

3. The working of the Act has proved that many of the fears
which it excited were well founded, and a Committee of Investiga-
tion was appointed (1916) on which Charles Macara was requested
to serve, but, being unable to do so, he nominated Mr. John
Haworth, the Secretary of the Employers' Parliamentary Associa-
tion, to act in his place.

'58

WAR

of important firms which still stood alone in the
increasingly severe industrial and financial weather
of the times, and thus constituted, it concerned itself
actively in the legislation and science of industry.

For some five years Charles Macara carried the
day to day work of the Association on his own
shoulders, and retired from his office of President
early in 1917 on the ground that the Association in
the process of amalgamating- itself with another
body of the same character was shifting from the
democratic basis on which it had been built up.1

In 1911 Charles Macara was created a baronet
of the United Kingdom. Three years before — in
1908 — France had given him, as the founder of the
International Cotton Federation, the Legion of
Honour, the Consul-General of the Republic in the

i. Firms and associations of firms were to be eligible for
membership of the new body on a flat rate payment of £100 a
year for three years. Charles Macara was in favour of levies on
members pro rata, but as the majority decided in favour of the
flat rate, he declined to accept further responsibility for the
management of the Association. The five Annual Reports of the
Employers' Parliamentary Association show the magnitude and
importance of its work. The last report, issued in January, 1917,
dealt with industrial unrest, industry and finance, alien indebted-
ness, scientific research, patents, transport facilities, a ministry of
commerce, the National Insurance Act, federation of British
industries, etc.

CHARLES W. MACARA

West of England investing him with the Order in
the Manchester Town Hall. In the same year he was
presented with an address by the representatives of
fifteen nationalities.1 In the travels of the Federa-
tion throughout Europe he received decora-
tions from Belgium, Spain, Germany and Italy ; and
an acknowledgment of his work from the United
States of America. The baronetcy met with the full
approval of Lancashire, and it is significant that the
congratulations of the cotton trade came both from
employers and employed. The Employers' Federa-
tion, in a resolution adopted on January 6th,
1911, referred to "untiring and devoted ser-
vices rendered so willingly and cheerfully to the
cotton industry, not of this country only, but of the
entire cotton-using world," and to " devoted labours
on behalf of international peace and goodwill,"
while the Secretaries of the two great trade unions
of South-east Lancashire — that of the Cardroom
workers and that of the Operative Spinners — wrote
warm personal letters, and forwarded the good
wishes of their members. The Operative Spinners
afterwards framed their congratulations to Sir

i. Vide Appendix C, 245 tt seq.

WAR

Charles and Lady Macara in an illuminated address.
In presenting this address, Mr. Thomas Ashton,
the veteran President, spoke of the belief which the
cotton operatives generally, no less than their
leaders had in Sir Charles Macara's fairness of
mind. " We have always found him striving to
be just, to hold the balance evenly between em-
ployers and employed, and to promote those peaceful
relations which are so essential to the welfare of the
cotton industry." l

But the world was coming to the parting of the
ways. August 4th, 1914, was at hand. The great
dividing line in time behind which the old world
seems even now antediluvial was about to be drawn.
To Sir Charles Macara, as, indeed, to everyone who
had cherished and promoted large public objects,
the war came as a great disolvent. Within
a few days of its outbreak he, already visited
by two representatives of the Government, was
actively assisting in that financial clearing of
decks and fastening of hatches which was the

i. It was in receiving this address that Sir Charles Macara
lamented that no monument had been erected in Lancashire to
James Mawdesley, perhaps the greatest figure which the trade
unionism of the county has produced.

161

CHARLES W. MACARA

need of the moment, and, the first crisis being safely
passed, and the Liverpool Cotton Market temporarily
closed, he offered his gratuitous services to any
department of the Government which cared to call
for them. In the first winter of the war a difference
of opinion with the Cotton Employers' Federation
on the strategical management of the world's cotton
supply brought to an end, after a twenty-one years'
eventful history, his headship of that great body. He
preferred to retain his liberty of action during the
national crisis. The following year — 1915 — he
retired also from the presidency of the Inter-
national Federation, the work of which was
practically suspended by the war. The war
was, however, the occasion of all occasions
for the use of an organising faculty like his.
Almost as important in August, 1914, as the
despatch of the expeditionary force was the
industrial mobilisation of England. Two adminis-
trative achievements of the highest workmanship,
swiftly, silently and strongly done, were, as we shall
see, among the results of his offer of service to the
Government. But larger and more momentous than

the things which he did was one other thing

162

which he wanted to do. He offered England
a plan to secure all the strategical advantages of
making cotton contraband while avoiding all the
inconveniences which attended and for a long time
effectually prevented that course. For the first
twelve months of the war, German textile machinery
ran without interruption. Though this was felt
to be the very negation of our supremacy at sea,
the Government considered itself unable to risk the
results on neutral opinion which would have been
taken by declaring cotton contraband of war. The
German cotton mills accordingly continued to run.
and it was not until scientific evidence was produced
and made public as to the double life which cotton
lives in this world — the Jekyll of towels and sheetings
and the Hyde of propulsive explosives — that the
English Government considered itself to have a
case on which it could act without the risk of com-
plications. Sir Charles Macara presided at a great
meeting at the Queen's Hall, London, in August,
1915. He concluded his speech in the following
words : —

" Allow me to quote from an article which I con-
tributed to the September (1914) number of the

163

CHARLES \Y. MACARA

" Financial Review of Reviews," which was sent
to the members of the Cabinet, and was widely
circulated and quoted from." In that article I
wrote : —

" I will assume that we do neither unexpectedly
well nor unexpectedly ill, but continue making
steady progress, suffering checks perhaps from
time to time, but on the whole maintaining and
consolidating our mastery of the sea. On this
assumption the outlook, although serious, can,
in my opinion, be faced with equanimity if only
the various interests affected — industrial, com-
mercial, financial, scientific, transport, and labour
— assisted by the Government, present a united
front to the common danger.

" The great increase of population during the
period that has elapsed since the Franco-German
war, the enormous development of industry and
commerce, and the intricacies of international
finance, are factors which I think cannot have
been fully realised by those who are responsible
for bringing about the clash of arms on the
gigantic scale of modern warfare. Not only have

these millions of armed men to be fed and other-
164

WAR

wise provided for, but perhaps the more difficult
task is the provision for the many millions who
are as a consequence of the war deprived of work
and the means of livelihood. Any nation engaged
in the present conflict that does not prepare to face
both these contingencies is courting disaster. . . .
I am more convinced than ever that interference
with the supply of food and clothing will be the
prime factor in bringing the present colossal war
to an end."

" Speaking now, after twelve months' experience
of the war, I feel it is an absolute necessity that well-
considered, strong measures must be carried out
which will have the effect of preventing cotton
reaching enemy countries, while, at the same time,
acting fairly in the interests of neutral countries,
and safeguarding the future welfare of a great inter-
national industry."

Sir William Ramsay, the eminent scientist, at this
meeting testified to what he knew about cotton, and
a resolution1 was carried unanimously calling

1. " That His Majesty's Prime Minister 'be informed that in the
opinion of this meeting the protection of the interests of the
Empire and its Allies would be best secured by an immediate
declaration that Cotton is Contraband of War, and that the neces-
sary steps should be taken to protect the interests of neutrals,
both growers and consumers."

165

CHARLES W. MACARA

on the Government to make it absolute contra-
band of war. Shortly afterwards this was done,
and the textile mills in Germany and Austria began
to close down.

But this was not and never had been Sir Charles
Macara's way. His plan constructed more than it
destroyed. It contemplated at once the discomfiture
of Germany and Austria, and the edification, outside
these countries, of the whole trade of growing and
spinning cotton. The plan depended on the
existence of certain statistics tabulated by the
International Cotton Federation, and disclosing
where and in what quantities the world's cotton
supply was grown ; where and in what quanti-
ties it was consumed. This great statistical
structure was not yet complete, but it had
advanced sufficiently to indicate precisely the
normal consumption of raw cotton by each neutral
country, and it was the beginning of the plan that
each neutral country should be rationed with its own
average consumption on its own showing.

The beginning, but not the end ! Still more
to the point, the figures collected by the Inter-
national Federation disclosed the amount of

1 66

WAR

raw cotton which had been normally used by
Germany and Austria. Sir Charles Macara
perceived that the sudden death of this great
consuming appetite would react violently on the
economics of the trade, causing firstly a sharp fall
in prices, which would probably be followed, as the
acreage under cotton was reduced, by an equally
sharp rise. These things happened as he had
predicted, in their order, and in September, 1916,
cotton, which had, at the outbreak of war, fallen
from 7^d. to 4d. per pound, was selling at tenpencet
and in 1917 at considerably over double that price-
It was the second and more constructive part of
his plan that the cotton normally grown and shipped
for the use of the German and Austrian trades
should still be grown, but should be used to form a
cotton reserve. Raw cotton, when properly packed,
is storable for years. The plan was to store this
portion of the supply ; to steady the market during
the period of the war, and perhaps to learn from
the war a lesson which would prove fruitful even
in the days of peace, the greatest need of the cotton
trade being some plan by which the good harvest

of one year may be set against the bad harvest of

167

CHARLES W. MACARA

another. Sir Charles Macara pressed the plan upon
the Government early in the war. It is possible to
speculate how far, by multiplying the immediate
embarrassments of the German people, it might have
helped to shorten the agonies of Europe. But it
was not adopted, and the speculation is now vain.

In the taking of the National Register he
had more of his own way. Faced with the
problem of raising an enormous new army, the
English Government proceeded to raise it by the true
English method of "muddling through," the delicate
considerations which properly arose of a man's
training and temperament and his proper function
in the State — whether of arms in the field, or indus-
try and perhaps invention in the workshop — being
settled much as a bull takes its decisions among the
valuables in a china shop. The sea was not so
much netted for men as dredged. Some who
ought to have gone stayed at home ; many whose
duty was at home went, and no thought
whatever was spared for industries which, walking
in the paths of peace and fabricating neither shot
nor shell, suddenly became belligerent as maintain-
ing England's exports, and, with her exports, her

168

WAR

credit abroad. In order that the fishing might be
equipped with a mesh that would take the suitable
life and release that which was unsuitable, Sir
Charles Macara came forward in May, 1915, with a
scheme for national registration, by which England
was to look into herself, weigh, and, having
weighed, analyse her human resources, and thus
spend her strength on some intelligible plan.

The scheme was taken as the basis of the National
Registration Bill afterwards introduced and carried
by Mr. Walter Long, the President of the
Local Government Board. There remained the im-
portant work of taking the register. Had it been
decided on a little later in our war history there can
be little doubt that a towering and expensive
department would have been created ad hoc. The
orgy of departmentalisation which was afterwards
to cover most of Whitehall with the pavilions of
vain repetition, and to turn thousands of visitors
to London out of their bedrooms to make space for
batteries of new typewriters, had not yet set in. Sir
Charles Macara proposed nothing more fanciful
than that the two thousand municipalities, already

in full working order, each one knowing- its own

169

CHARLES W. MACARA

district and its own people, should take the register.
Though he had stipulated himself against serving
on Committees — one of the most ingenious ways
of wasting time known to self -deceiving man — he
consented, at Mr. Long's request, to join the small
committee which was formed to superintend the
process. The municipalities were accordingly set
to work on a definite plan of operations ; voluntary
workers in each district gave a few evenings to the
work, and the register was taken quickly, smoothly
and without fuss. Some twenty-seven million forms
went out and came back, and the work was finished
before the country quite realised that it had begun.1
During the South African War he had thought out
and offered to the country a scheme to provide for
the dependents of men killed or incapacitated. The
Prince of Wales was to have been at the head
of the scheme and the Lords Lieutenant and the
heads of the municipalities were to have been called
in to operate it. All the branches were to have been
associated with one central fund, with collection
and distribution on a fixed plan to prevent over-

i. Vide press and the use of the nation's man power, as
outlined by Sir Auckland Geddes, Minister of National Service.

170

WAR

lapping. This scheme, which, by this time, had
passed beyond the experimental stage, having been
successfully used in connection with the Lancashire
Indian Famine Funds 1897 and 1900, was again
submitted when the Prince of Wales' Fund was
started in the early days of the European War, and
many authorities regretted that it was not the one
on which the country acted.

In the early part of 1915 Sir Charles Macara was
requested to organise the supply of aircraft cloth for
the Admiralty, a work which required not only a wide
knowledge of the textile trade, but the highest
technicalexpertness. For the management in detail of
this responsible work he was asked to select his own
assistants, who were given rank in the Royal Naval
Volunteer Reserve, and very soon a new depart-
ment was in perfect working order. It seemed
obvious that the agency which was providing cloth
for the naval air service should provide it for the
sister service of the army. It would have been a
simple case of more steam from the same boiler.
Sir Charles Macara accordingly suggested that air-
craft cloth should be collected by a single department

and distributed by this department among all the

171

CHARLES W. MACARA

aircraft services of England and the Allies. The
Government preferred, however, the system of biting
twice at the same cherry, and the suggestion was
not adopted.

A further war service rendered by Sir Charles
Macara took the form of an important intervention
between the Government and the large Lancashire
firms of textile machinists in regard to the terms
for the manufacture of munitions. The Govern-
ment terms were regarded as thoroughly unsatis-
factory. They were modified as the result of this
intervention and firms employing some 50,000 men
fell at once into line.

It was Sir Charles Macara's complaint against
the general war administration of England that it
was hydrocephalic ; that the head developed at the
expense of the members. To him the mobilisation
of England presented itself not as a case for new
mechanism, but for more steam from the old.
More and more, as time went on, Whitehall seemed
to be exactly reversing the terms of the proposition
as thus stated, the signs being the growth of new
departments like the growth of mushrooms, the

172

WAR

creation of a great sacred college of controllers, the
multiplication of Parliamentary Secretaries, Under
Secretaries, and nondescript Secretaries, until they
constituted an impressive public meeting in them-
selves, and the approach by rapid strides of the time
when everybody was to live by taking in everybody
else's washing. Much of the machinery thus
created, notably the machinery for organising
national service, raced prodigiously, but never
gripped ; the screws revolved, but not in the water.
Sir Charles Macara had got the National Register
out of the well-oiled wheels of the English munici-
palities, and, on the same principle, he pointed out
constantly in the press that England abounded in
organisations, each one more or less perfect in its
own drill, and only needing the order to march and
quicken the pace. Labour was organised ; capital
also ; labour and capital were organised together in
the Industrial Council. Finance, transport and
science, each one of these, like labour and capital,
was a corporate personality capable of being fetched.
It was his plan to fetch them. Very largely rejected
in England, the following advice was, at the request
of the American press, forwarded to the United

CHARLES W. MACARA

States for publication in the event of that country

declaring war : —

" My advice to America is — rather use the
organisations already existing in the framework
of peace, than attempt to create new ones. One
of the bodies we should have used for this purpose
here was the Industrial Council. It consisted of
the trusted leaders of capital and labour; it was
already a working mechanism, and capable,
therefore, of dealing powerfully and promptly
with the great questions of employment that
arise with the outbreak of a war. In the
same way I suggested that the municipalities
should take and tabulate the National Register,
and the speed, precision and economy with which
that work was done, proved the soundness of
the plan. By giving definite instructions to
our two thousand municipalities, it was just as
easy to organise the whole country as to organise
one city.

" In other particulars the English Government
has failed to take this advice. New departments
have been created at a speed and on a scale that
has begun, in these later days of war, to cause
great alarm to the business minds of the com-
munity. During recent months especially, every
week has seen some great public building or

WAR

hotel cleared for the accommodation of some new
department of state, which proceeds first to get
itself into working order, and then — after an
interval — to get to work. Such departments are a
hindrance rather than a help in time of war, and
will be a serious embarrassment in times of peace.
" In every highly developed civilisation, almost
every great interest will be found to be already
organised. Labour, capital, finance, transporta-
tion, science, each of these organisations should
be put on a war footing and called on for its
special war work. When this has been done, all
of them should be knit into one strong and sensi-
tive entity, and the whole nation will thus be
efficiently at war. To employ the tried brain,
and the well-oiled wheels, is my advice to America.
The war has definitely proved the commercial
and industrial adaptability of women. But they
would have done much more here if there had
been proper organisation when the great migra-
tion of women into commerce and industry began.
The rush was not anticipated nor directed.
Women were allowed to drift into occupations
largely as they liked, a state of things not at all
necessary, seeing that in the National Register
the country had an inventory of its woman
resources.

'75

CHARLES W. MACARA

" It is on the necessity for national organisation
that I would insist first and last — not organisation
for the sake of organisation, but for the sake of
work. Accordingly, I earnestly counsel you, at
the end, as at the beginning, to make full use
of the means which your country has ready for
use and nearest to hand. My experience has
always been that in great movements the best
work is done with the aid of a small but efficient
staff.

" The great staple industries can only be dealt
with by the organisations of capital and labour,
although minor industries might be dealt with by
the municipalities. It is only those who have
had to deal with strikes and lockouts in great
industries who can understand how to deal with
these industries in emergencies. I have never
tired of telling England that ordering of industry
is a part of the vital strategy of war. In other
words, I would plead with your government to let
its business men organise the nation's industries
on a national scale. And I would plead with
business men, at the same time, to offer their
services freely to the state at the outset, and not
when heavy losses have been incurred. The
business men can carry the nation to undreamed
of triumphs; but they must take the reins

NOW."

176

Rest in Change
of Work

Lifeboat Saturday, etc.

CHAPTER IX

REST IN CHANGE OF WORK.

IT was in 1884 that Charles Macara took a
house at St. Anne's-on-the-Sea, on the bluff and
beaten Lancashire coast. St. Anne's-on-the-Sea was
not in 1884 the polite and polished esplanade which
it has since become, but a weather-beaten, hard-
bitten little town, with the sand in its eyes and the
sting of flying spray on its face, with the star-grass
like a crop of needles in the drifts, and a parliament
of blue-jerseyed senators who looked out to the west
and considered the weather. Thirteen of them
afterwards immortalised themselves. Born almost
within the sound of the sea, he quickly formed
a fast friendship with this breed of Lancashire
fishermen, and the friendship — of Sir Charles
Macara with the men as they went and came,
and of Lady Macara with the women, who neither
went nor came, but only waited — was destined to
have great results on the lives of all who live
in small cottages and dry their nets on the verge

of great waters. Sir Charles Macara, then in

179

CHARLES W. MACARA

the full course of his commercial career, went to
St. Anne's-on-the-Sea to escape from life, and
instead of escaping it he found it. He chose the
place as a retreat, and it gave him, not a retreat,
but publicity, a cause, a mission, a baptism in public
service, and one of the severest labours of a severe
life.

Very soon after his arrival in St. Anne's-on-the-
Sea he began to take part in the practices of the life-
boat, and out of the brotherhood which he thus
formed with the crew arose "Lifeboat Saturday,"
and a great opening of the eyes and heart of
England. But not until after the awful events of
December, 1886. On a stormy afternoon early
in that month, five men, the crew of a small steamer
from Montrose, were seen from the shore at St.
Anne's clinging to the mast of the vessel which
had gone aground on Salter's Bank. The
lifeboat put out to the rescue, and after many hours
of labour and peril returned with its treasure. The
coxswain and sub-coxswain of the lifeboat were
taken to Sir Charles Macara's house, and from there
they told their modest story by telephone to the

newspapers in Manchester. Five nights later, and

180

REST IN CHANGE OF WORK

in the gathered fury of the same gale, the lifeboat

was called out again. The German barque ' Mexico,'

bound from Hamburg to Liverpool, was aground on

the treacherous Horse Bank, in the estuary of the

Ribble. The lifeboat crews of Lytham, Southport

and St. Anne's went to the rescue. The St. Anne's

men, fresh from their recent triumph on Salter's

Bank, were in high spirits, though Charles Tims,

the sub-coxswain, a fisherman of great bravery,

and a famous man on that coast, seemed to hear

in the gale a voice which he had not heard before.

The boat never came back. Its single light was

swallowed up in victory, and only an unintelligible

rocket now and then out of the welter of the night

told the watchers on the shore that there was still

life, but of whom and how faring, no one knew. At

dawn the wives of the lifeboat men gathered at

Sir Charles Macara's house. There was still no

news, but when the morning was a little spent

a lifeboat was seen struggling towards the shore.

It was the Lytham boat, which had rescued the crew

of the ' Mexico.' A horseman rode into the sea to

meet her, and it was he who scattered the suspense

and spread desolation in its place. The Southport

181

CHARLES W. MACARA

boat and the boat from St. Anne's had both
capsized. Of the Southport crew two were cast up
alive. Not a man of the St. Anne's crew returned.
The wives and children they had left looked up
into the faces of Sir Charles and Lady Macara, and
they did not look up in vain. They were friends
at court. All England and all Europe was
made to ring with the doings of that night.
In less than a fortnight ,£33,000 was collected for
the relief of the widows and the fatherless, and their
future being made secure, the memory of the
thirteen lost heroes was saved to future ages in the
chiselled figure which looks out to sea from the
beach at St. Anne's.

It was this event which caused Sir Charles Macara
to look closely into lifeboat politics and finance.
Examining the 1890 report of the Royal National
Lifeboat Institution, the only agency of its kind for
saving life at sea, he found that some 25,000 people
only out of our many-millioned island race were
contributing, either by large gifts or small, to its
income, which in that year was startlingly below its
expenditure. Accordingly, in 1891, being already, as

one of the organisers of the Lifeboat Disaster Fund,

182

LADY MACARA.

REST IN CHANGE OF WORK

in possession of the ear of the country on this subject,
he made a strong appeal l to the British public to
come to the rescue of the National Institution.
Great newspapers passed the word along, and the
response was satisfactory.

But not satisfactory enough. Sir Charles
Macara felt that this was a cause which every
man could be made to understand, and that its
public was not only of those who made solemn
bequests in stately wills and testaments, but of the
much larger body which rattled a week's wages in

i. "I think the British publics generally have very little idea
that one of the noblest of the numerous philanthropic institutions
in the country is in dire financial straits. The record of the Royal
National Life-boat Institution since its formation is one of which
the nation is justly proud, as by its instrumentality over 35,000
lives have been saved at sea, and the many deeds of heroism which
have been chronicled in connection with its operations are the
envy of the whole civilised world. Having a seaside residence on
one of the most dangerous parts of the Lancashire coast, I have
had opportunities of witnessing the conspicuous gallantry of our
Lifeboat men that do not fall to the lot of many. It has also been
my painful experience to be prominently associated with the most
terrible disaster that ever befel the Lifeboat service, when the
whole of the St. Anne's crew were swept away, and all but two
of the brave men who manned the Southport boat returned no
more. The great power of the Press was never better illustrated
than on that memorable occasion, as, mainly by the pathetic
appeals that were made through it, considerably over ^30,000 was
raised for the widows and children of the drowned men. The
late German Emperor, William I., was so much touched with this
disaster that he sent ^250 for distribution amongst the bereaved.
Such a magnificent result has emboldened me to appeal once more
by the same means to the public on behalf of this great national
institution, which is sorely in need of funds. The deficit last year
assumed alarming proportions, and unless the country is roused
to supply the necessary means, the Institution's operations will be
very seriously curtailed." — JULY 23RD, 1891.

M

CHARLES W. MACARA

its pockets. It was to get at the small change
and the coppers of the country that he
originated " Lifeboat Saturday." l Manchester, the
harassed mother of all new causes, was the scene of
the first experiment in the October of 1891. For
two days before the appointed Saturday, two life-
boats with their crews — reserve lifeboats and reserve
crews, but still the genuine article — were dragged
through Manchester and Salford to create the right
atmosphere. The appointed day was processional,
and culminated in the launching of the lifeboats at
Belle Vue Gardens in the presence of 30,000
spectators. The fullest advantage was taken of
Sir Charles Macara's organisation for collecting
subscriptions and donations, and the city was
dredged of its spare cash ; money was shaken from
upper window-sills and from the tops of tramcars,
and at the end of the day Manchester and Salford,

i. In an article entitled " The Life-boat Saturday Movement
Rapidly Developing," published in " The Life-boat Journal " of
the Royal National Life-boat Institution on August ist, 1894,
the following reference was made to the work of the originator
of the Fund : — " We cannot but specially mention Mr. and
Mrs. Macara, both of whom have thrown themselves heart and
soul into the work, and have done wonders in developing the
Lifeboat Saturday and Ladies' Committee movements, of which
they were respectively the originators."

184

REST IN CHANGE OF WORK

which had been contributing £200 per annum to
the saving of life at sea, had given ,£5,500.

"Lifeboat Saturday" spread. By the end
of 1893 it had become a feature of English
life. It raised the annual average income of
the Royal National Lifeboat Institution directly
and indirectly by ,£40,000, thereby making it possible
to increase the remuneration of the lifeboatmen.
Incidentally it revolutionised the methods of collect-
ing money in England. It brought charity into the
streets and the streets into charity. As the first of
many consecrated "Saturdays," it was the beginning
of a great humanization of the common life by
the breath of generous causes. For some five
years, though his public responsibilities in
the cotton trade were becoming greater each year,
Sir Charles Macara bore the main burden of the
Lifeboat Saturday Organisation, retiring from the
work finally in 1896 when he dissented strongly
from the removal of its headquarters from Manchester
to London until a scheme of organisation which he
had been perfecting was in order. He continued,
however, and still continues, to be, Chairman of
the St. Anne's-on-the-Sea Branch of the Lifeboat

185

CHARLES W. MACARA

Institution — taking a practical interest in the work—-
and a friend of all sailors' societies, particularly
the British and Foreign Sailors' Society,1 which had
assisted him in the working of the Lifeboat Saturday
Fund.2

In all the work on behalf of the Lifeboat Sir
Charles had the untiring help of his wife. It
was Lady Macara who, in 1892, formed the first
of those Ladies' Auxiliary Committees which,
designed to further the cause on the higher social
levels were found indispensable in every town
which started a Lifeboat Saturday. Lady Macara
became the Honorary Secretary of the first com-
mittee of the kind set up in Manchester. In the

t
service of the Lifeboat her assistance to her husband

was active, and was given with voice and pen, but
all the great work of Sir Charles Macara's life in
the fields of industry and commerce was submitted
to her judgment, and step by step, and stage by
stage, had her understanding and assent.

1. Vide Appendix H. p. 324.

2. Guided by the experience gained from lifeboat work, Sir
Charles Macara took a leading part in the organisation of the
Lancashire Indian Famine Funds of 1897 and 1900, by which
large sums were sent to India. The contributions were drawn
not only from Lancashire mill-owners and merchants, but from
the workpeople. Notwithstanding the claims made upon society
by the South African War, the amount subscribed for the Indian
Famine Fund of 1900 was almost as large as that contributed in
1897.

1 86

REST IN CHANGE OF WORK

The home which grew up around them was
warmed and illuminated by public spirit and in-
vigorated by public duty. William C. Macara,
Sir Charles Macara's only son, is second in com-
mand in the management of the house of Banner-
man, and takes his share in public duty in Man-
chester as the honorary secretary of the Home Trade
Association, which embraces in its membership all
the well-known home trade firms. All Sir Charles
Macara's daughters belong to that new efflorescence
of womanhood which insists on its right to be useful
and to serve the world. To gratify the taste of his
four daughters, who all took high diplomas in
agricultural and horticultural subjects, he took a
model farm in Herefordshire, where they put their
training into practice. Soon after the beginning of
the war an exceedingly important and successful
social experiment was inaugurated in another part
of the country by one of them, in training women
for work upon the land.1 Another daughter, after
the outbreak of the war, was able to undertake
duties in her father's business in Manchester, where
it became necessary to employ a large number of

i. Vide Appendix G. p. 321.

187

CHARLES W. MACARA

women to replace men who had joined the colours.

******

The past of Lancashire is a brilliant achievement
of energy and of thought. Her future is at the
moment uncertain, and some think it is definitely
dark. A community which buys from one hemi-
sphere of earth and sells to the other — her interests
are on far horizons, involved in the shifting sands
of world politics. A new Europe has to arise out
of ruins, and a new creed may actuate the govern-
ment of England in which there will be no room
for full economic Lancashire. Much of fashionable
society, and a whole school of statesmanship
momentarily exalted at once by the passions and
the necessities of war, hate the gospel for which
Lancashire has stood in history, and by virtue of
which she still draws the full breath of life. Hitherto
she has not lacked men, each generation serving
her according as the true service was more liberty
or more law. And few, even of her own born sons,
have loved her better, and served her more practi-
cally, or helped her over a longer and more critical
span of time than Charles Macara, whom she took
to herself in his youth — and brought up for her own.

188

Appendices

APPENDIX A
THE COTTON INDUSTRY.

A COMPREHENSIVE SURVEY FROM THE EARLIEST

TIMES.1
COTTON — ITS EARLY HISTORY.

By Sir CHARLES MACARA, Bart.
The use of cotton in its various forms is, in the
present day, so universal that very few ever trouble
to enquire into its origin and history, yet the story
of cotton from the earliest times in which any record
of it can be found is an intensely interesting one.
The earliest mention of it that can be traced is in the
form of a fable in which the cotton plant as a
vegetable lamb existed in western Asia. We learn
that at a time very obscure in its remoteness, the
cotton plant or tree grew in a country then known as
Scythia or Tartary, and that the inhabitants appear
to have made use of the fleecy fibres to weave
materials for clothing. The knowledge of this
remarkable vegetable product gradually spread to
regions where the wonderful plant was unknown,
but in travelling a great deal of fiction was added
to fact, the result being that many strange stories
were spread abroad, all of them identical in one
feature, but with variations of detail. It was always
a lamb that grew on a tree, but there were differences

1. A paper prepared at the request of the Belgian Government,
and delivered at the Ghent Exhibition, 1913. Beprinted from
the " Revue Economique Internationale," Brussels, July 1913.

191

THE COTTON INDUSTRY

in the way in which it presented itself. In one form
of the fable we have " a tree bearing fruit or seed
pods, which, when they ripened and burst open,
were seen to contain little lambs, of whose soft white
fleeces eastern people wove material for their
clothing."

Passing from the region of fable to that of more
or less clearly ascertained fact, there can be no doubt
that cotton as first made known to us in Europe,
was a product which had gradually made its way
hither from Western Asia, where the plant was
indigenous. The peoples of the world have always
in the first instance provided themselves with cloth-
ing from the raw materials most ready to their
hands, and while in other countries these took the
forms of flax, wool, hair, or silk, certain Asiatic
populations were availing themselves of the plant
whose fleecy fibres were finer than those of wool.
At what period these cotton cultivating Asiatics first
learnt to spin and weave their vegetable wool it is
impossible to say, but in the sacred books of India
there is evidence to show that cotton was in use
eight centuries before the Christian era. Herodotus,
the father of history, who wrote about the year
445 B.C., is the first to mention cotton in its oriental
use. Writing of India, he says : " They possess
likewise a kind of plant which, instead of fruit,
produces wool of a finer and better quality than
that of sheep ; of this the Indians make their
clothes." That civilisation reached a very high
standard among the Hindus seems undoubted ; onlj
the other day Dr. C. Muthu, physician, Mendip

192

THE COTTON INDUSTRY

Hills Sanatorium, Wells, England, speaking before
the Royal Society of Medicine, said the Hindu
civilisation was the most ancient in the world.
Their literature dates back to about 40006.0.
Their medicine is as old as their civilisation. They
excelled in materia medica, and chemistry ; they
were amongst the first to practice the dissection of
the human body. Many centuries ago they under-
stood the germ theory, circulation of the blood, and
inoculation for smallpox. Their treatment of leprosy
was most efficacious, and their treatment of snake
bites astonished Alexander the Great. Their surgery
was bold and skilful, they set bones, performed
internal operations, trephined the skull, and gave
anaesthetics in serious operations. Surely those who
have travelled extensively in ancient countries must
have come to the conclusion that there is nothing
new under the sun ! But to return to our subject,
when Alexander the Great had become master of
Persia, he pushed forward his conquering forces to
that part of Northern India known to us as the
Punjaub, and being compelled to return to Persia
he proceeded by descending the Indus to the sea.
As an outcome of this a good deal of information
was collected and given to the world in a written
form. The Admiral who brought the fleet down
the river reported that " there were in India trees
bearing, as it were, flocks, or bunches of wool, and
that the natives made of this wool garments of
surpassing whiteness." Coming down to a later
period we find mention about the year 25 A.D. of
the progress of cotton cultivation as far westward

THE COTTON INDUSTRY

as the Persian Gulf, but as late as A.D. 1203 the
Egyptians grew cotton only as an ornamental plant
in their gardens, and up to the beginning of the
seventeenth century they were importers and not
cultivators of cotton.

So far it has been with the cotton plant of the
eastern world with which we have dealt, and for
many centuries of the Christian era none other was
known to what is called the old world, but in 1492,
when Columbus sailed westward in search of a
sea passage to India and first reached land, the
natives who came out in their canoes to meet his
ships brought with them skeins of cotton yarn and
thread for exchange. On proceeding further, to
Cuba, he found the inhabitants clad in cotton cloth.
It was also found that the Mexicans were a people
who relied chiefly upon cotton clothing, having
" neither flax, nor silk, or wool of sheep." The
Greeks are said to have been acquainted with Indian
calicoes two centuries before the Christian era, and
the Romans a century later, but as late as the
thirteenth century it was only as candlewick that we
find it used in England, and there is no mention of
its manufacture there until 1641.

THE COTTON PLANT.

Cotton is the most important of the vegetable
fibres in the world, consisting of cellular hairs
attached to the seeds of various species of plants
belonging to the Mallow order, and has been culti-
vated from time immemorial. It is now found
widely distributed throughout the tropical and
sub-tropical regions of both hemispheres, South

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THE COTTON INDUSTRY

America, the West Indies, tropical Africa, and
Southern Asia are the homes of various members of
the family, but the plants have been introduced with
success into other lands, as is well indicated by the
fact that, although no species is native to the
United States of America, that country now pro-
duces five-eighths of the world's supply of cotton.
This consideration should be an incentive to the
extension of cotton growing in any part of the world
where it can be carried on successfully. Under
normal conditions in warm climates many of the
species are perennial, but in the United States, for
example, climatic conditions necessitate the plants
being renewed annually, and even in the tropics it
is often found advisable to treat them as annuals
to ensure the production of cotton of the best
quality, to facilitate cultural operations, and to keep
insect and fungoid pests in check. As the plant
advances towards maturity the hairs are flattened
and twisted, which is of great economic importance,
the natural twist facilitating the operation of
spinning the fibres into thread or yarn. Cotton
requires for its development six or seven months of
favourable weather. It thrives in a warm atmosphere,
even in a very hot one provided that it is moist. In
about eight days to a fortnight after sowing the
plant shows itself above ground, and shortly after-
wards cultivation of the plant commences. As it
grows it throws out flower stalks, at the end of each
of which a flower bud develops. The blossom differs
in colour in different kinds of the plant. In some,
like that of the Sea Islands, it is pale yellow, but

THE COTTON INDUSTRY

in others of the American kind it changes consider-
ably, being first straw colour, then white, and after-
wards pink ; in two or three days the bloom is gone
and a capsule appears, called a boll. Within this
boll are cells, sometimes three, as in Egyptian, and
in other four, as in American. This boll increases
until it is about the size of a filbert, the outer case
gradually becoming brown and hard, until at last
it bursts into sections and is seen to contain in each
cell a quantity of tufted cotton wool which is found
to be growing around and attached separately to
each seed contained in the boll. During the grow-
ing time the cotton plant encounters many risks
arising from drought, excessive rain, or insect pests.
Some idea of the enormous damage wrought by the
attacks of these insect pests alone may be gathered
from the fact that a low estimate made a few years
ago placed the loss due to this cause in the United
States at the astonishing figure of ;£i 2,000,000
annually. Stringent measures are being taken to
try and combat this pest. When the harvest time
arrives and the white fleeces are ready to drop from
the bolls the cotton must be picked, which is done by
hand. A picker can pick from loolbs. to 200 Ibs. of
seed cotton in a day. This operation is the most
expensive in cotton production. The work is light,
and can be effectually done by women and children,
as well as men, but is tedious, and requires care.
The plant continues to produce blooms as the
earliest-formed bolls are ripening, so that it bears at
the same time flowers and ripe bolls, and this
necessitates the fields being picked over three times.

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THE COTTON INDUSTRY

The loss from careless work is very serious. The
cotton falls easily or is dropped ; the careless gather-
ing of dead leaves and twigs, and the soiling of the
cotton by the earth or by the natural colouring
matter from the bolls injure the quality. Great
efforts have been made to devise picking machines,
but as yet complete success have not been attained.
There is little doubt that an efficient machine will
ultimately be perfected, and this would probably
lead to a great development of the cotton growing
industry. One of the greatest difficulties the planter
has to face at present is the insufficiency of labour
at the picking season. This consideration always
weighs with him in deciding the amount of cotton
he is to sow. As the picking goes on the cotton
gathered is taken to the ginneries where the fibre is
separated from the seed. Up till 1870, or there-
abouts, the cotton seed left over from what had to
be saved for the next year's sowing, was regarded as
a positive nuisance upon the American plantations.
It was left to accumulate in vast heaps about the
ginhouses to the annoyance of the farmer and injury
to his premises. Cotton seed in those days was the
object of so much aversion that the planters, after
using a certain amount as manure, burned it or
threw it into running streams as was most con-
venient. Now, the products of cotton seed have
become important elements in the national industry
of the United States. The main product is the
refined oil. The residue after the oil is extracted is
manufactured into cotton seed cake, or meal, and
forms one of the most valuable feeding stuffs for

197

THE COTTON INDUSTRY

cattle. But this does not exhaust its possibilities.
Cotton seed hulls constitute about half the weight
of the ginned seed. These hulls were found to be
an excellent substitute for hay, no other feed being
required, the only provision necessary being an
adequate supply of water and an occasional allow-
ance of salt. Many thousands of cattle are fattened
annually in Memphis, New Orleans, Houstan, etc.,
in this way at a remarkably low cost. ' The seed is
far heavier than the cotton, and experience shows
that 1,000 Ibs. of seed are produced for every 500 Ibs.
of cotton brought to market. When the cotton
leaves the ginning press it is in a very loose
condition and has to be compressed into bales for
convenience of export, large bale presses being
worked by hydraulic power. Bales from different
countries vary greatly in size, weight, and appear-
ance, the American bale weighing 500 Ibs., the
Egyptian 700 Ibs., and the East Indian 400 Ibs.,
some being as low as 200 Ibs. After being graded
and further pressed the cotton bale is ready for
export to the various countries where it is spun and
manufactured into cotton goods of an infinite variety.

GROWTH AND SPREAD OF THE INDUSTRY THROUGHOUT
THE WORLD.

One of the most notable features of the cotton
industry is the remarkable development that has
taken place in comparatively recent years. We
have seen that its use has been known in India
from time immemorial, and in various other eastern
countries for many centuries, but it is impossible to
ascertain with certainty the first beginnings of the

198

THE COTTON INDUSTRY

trade in Europe. It existed in Spain in the tenth
century, and no doubt quite as early in Italy and
Greece. The first recorded import of cotton into
England was in the thirteenth century, and quite as
early imports took place into France through
Marseilles. The first mention of the industry in
connection with Germany, Holland and Switzerland
was in the sixteenth century, and in Russia in the
eighteenth. The first piece of British-made calico —
that is, a fabric made entirely of cotton, was
produced in 1783 ; prior to that date cotton yarn was
used only for weft, the warp being supplied by flax
or wool. The inventions in 1738 of Kay's "fly
shuttle," in 1 764 of Hargreaves' "spinning jenny,"
in 1769 of Arkwright's "water-frame," and in 1770
of Crompton's " mule," resulted in the industry
advancing in England by leaps and bounds, followed
very soon by a similar advance in other European
countries. This development has gone on until now
the world's cotton spinning spindles number about
142,000,000, of which Great Britain possesses over
one-third, the remainder being distributed among
the other twenty-one cotton manufacturing countries.
The weaving branch of the industry has also
increased correspondingly, with the result that at the
present day cotton forms much the largest and
cheapest portion of the clothing of the people of the
world, and its manufactures include all grades of
material from heavy coarse sailcloth to the finest
lace.

COTTON CROPS.

WEST INDIES. At the close of the eighteenth

199

N

THE COTTON INDUSTRY

century the West Indies supplied 70 per cent, of the
cotton imported into Great Britain, but owing to the
competition occasioned by the rapid expansion of
its culture in the Southern States of America, the
imports gradually decreased, the plantars rinding it
more profitable to employ their labour and capital
in the production of sugar and other articles.
During the American War there was an increase in
the number of bales imported from the West Indies,
but after the close of the war the import rapidly fell
away. It is, however, again increasing.

EGYPT. After the West Indies the chief supply
a century ago came from the countries bordering on
the Mediterranean, Asia Minor, Cyprus, etc., which
has been largely increased since 1820 by the develop-
ment of cotton growing in Egypt. Egyptian cotton
has certain characteristics which cause it to be in
great demand. These special qualities are its
fineness, strength, elasticity, and great natural twist,
which, combined, enable it to be used for very fine,
strong yarns suited to the manufacture of the better
qualities of hosiery, for mixing with silk and wool,
and for making lace. It also mercerises well — a
process by which cotton goods can be made to
closely resemble silk in appearance. Nothing could
be more conducive to the extension of cotton grow-
ing iri Egypt and in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan
than the recent visits of various delegations to that
country, the last one being under the auspices of the
International Cotton Federation. The reports of
these delegations which have been issued show the
great possibilities of improving the quality and

200

THE COTTON INDUSTRY

greatly increasing the cotton crop of North-East
Africa. The information given in these reports has
been specially valuable at a time when the British
Government has under consideration the guarantee-
ing of the interest on a loan of ,£3,000,000, to be
raised by the Sudanese Government for the develop-
ment of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan — a proposition
which it is practically certain will be carried out. In
his recent report on Egypt Lord Kitchener paid a
high tribute to the value of the visit of the Inter-
national Cotton Federation to that country.

SOUTHERN STATES OF AMERICA. The first import
of cotton from the Southern States of America to
England took place in 1784, and consisted of eight
bags weighing about 1 2,000 Ibs. In 1793 Eli
Whitney invented the saw-gin, a much improved
machine for detaching the cotton fibre from the
seeds, and the cultivation of the plant increased
rapidly, but it took America ten years to produce
a crop of 100,000 bales, and thirty-five years to reach
1,000,000 bales. About thirty-five years ago the
American crop was six and a half million bales, last
year it had reached the vast total of 16,000,000 bales,
so rapid has been the increase in more recent
years. During this period there have been
fluctuations in the crop of between two and three
million bales, and the fluctuations in the price
have been enormous. The American bale has been
described in a standard American book on cotton as
" the clumsiest, dirtiest, most expensive, and most
wasteful package in which cotton or any other
commodity of like value is anywhere put up."

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THE COTTON INDUSTRY

Suggestions for its improvement were made by the
Lancashire Private Investigation Commission, which
visited the Southern States of America in 1906,
which, if carried out, together with the consequent
reduction in the cost of transport, would, it is
estimated, result in a monetary saving of millions of
pounds sterling annually. President Roosevelt, in
referring to this Commission and to the subsequent
International delegation which visited the cotton
growing States the following year, said, that a great
awakening has taken place as regards the cultiva-
tion and handling of cotton, and as a result reforms
had been initiated. These reforms would probably
have made much greater progress had they not been
retarded by the opposition of trusts. Now, however,
determined effort is on foot to prevent these organi-
sations interfering with the legitimate development
of trade, and it is fully expected that the movement
for the improved handling and baling of the
American cotton crop will ere long be much more in
evidence.

EAST INDIAN. There has also been an immense
extension of the East Indian crop within the last few
years, and it is now nearly half as large as the
present average American crop. The Secretary of
the International Cotton Federation, who recently
has made two extensive tours in India, reports that
in a comparatively few years the Indian crop might
possibly be doubled. In India everything needful
for this increase of cultivation exists, suitable land
and climate, an immense poulation, and excellent
means of transport. Possibly a more speedy increase

202

THE COTTON INDUSTRY

might be obtained from India than any other
country. Indian cotton as grown at present is not
suitable for the goods so largely produced in
Lancashire, but if the staple were improved this
might be altered. If there were even a great exten-
sion of the present quality of cotton it would be
of advantage to the cotton using countries of the
European continent where there might be a much
larger consumption of it than at present. Sixty
years ago the most beautifully fine muslins were
exported from India made from cotton which must
have been both spun and woven by hand and of
necessity from a quality of cotton much superior
to that at present grown there, but which has
deteriorated so much that it would be quite impos-
sible to produce such fine fabrics from the cotton
now grown. There is very little doubt, however,
that cotton of longer staple and better quality can
be produced in India by careful seed selection and
improved cultivation.

PRESENT POSITION OF THE WORLD'S SUPPLY OF
COTTON.

The average cotton crop of the world may now be
estimated at considerably over 20,000,000 bales of an
average weight of 500 Ibs. each, or three times the
quantity that was produced forty years ago, but still
it is not enough for the world's ever-increasing
requirements. It is of supreme importance that
the supply of cotton should be increased, and it
matters little from what country that supply comes
so long as it is ample for the needs of the industry
as a whole. The British Cotton Growing Associa-

203

THE COTTON INDUSTRY

tion and similar Associations in the other European
countries are all working to obtain these much-
needed supplies from their colonies and dependen-
cies.

ORGANISATION AND FEDERATION.

It will readily be understood that an industry of
such enormous dimensions and complexities, and
employing in one way or another vast numbers of
people, could not be carried on without conflicts
between capital and labour. The disastrous results
of these complications gradually led the way to
combinations for self defence, first on the part of
the workpeople by their Trade Unions, and more
slowly of the employers with their Associations and
Federations. In this way may be traced the first
glimmerings of that sense of the need for co-
operation and of the interdependence of the one
upon the other upon which the whole welfare of
the industry depends, a sense which is rapidly
developing, as is evidenced by the extension of these
amalgamations to International Federations which
have more recently been formed — again the work-
people taking the lead.

Towards the end of 1903, and in the early part of
1904, the cotton industry of the world was brought
face to face with a serious shortage of the raw
material complicated by excessive speculation. It
was strongly felt that this position could only be
adequately met by general short-time working in
mills in all parts of the world. The Swiss Associa-
tion" of Cotton Spinners readily consented to act
along with the English Federation as joint conveners

204

THE COTTON INDUSTRY

of a Conference, and in May, 1904, the opening
meeting was held at Zurich, delegated representatives
of the principal countries engaged in the European
cotton trade being present. After serious discussion
of the problems which had arisen it was soon
apparent that community of interest demanded the
establishment of a permanent organisation. The
following year a second International Conference
was held at Manchester and Liverpool, at which the
delegates formally adopted the proposals of the
Committee appointed at Zurich for the establishment
of an International Federation with its headquarters
in Manchester, whose object should be "to watch
over and protect the common interests of the
industry, and to advise Associations of the action
to be taken against any common danger."

Other conferences of delegated representatives of
the countries included in the International Federa-
tion have since been held in Bremen, Vienna, Paris,
Milan, Brussels, Barcelona, and at The Hague.
The work of the, Employers' International Federa-
tion has proved more than anything else the
necessity for providing for the continued develop-
ment of this industry through the increase of
population, and also the march of civilisation, there
still being a very large proportion of the inhabitants
of the globe that are only partially clothed, or not
clothed at all. The work of the International Cotton
Federation has been of incalculable benefit from an
educational point of view, indeed, it is difficult to
realise how this industry could have been conducted,
especially during recent years, without such an

205

THE COTTON INDUSTRY

organisation. Its educational work has brought
home most forcibly to all the absolute necessity for
international co-operation, the interdependence of
the nations of the world, and the hopelessness of
conducting successfully international industry and
commerce unless by the friendly co-operation of the
peoples of the world.

When the representatives of the cotton trade first
met at Zurich many people thought such a Federa-
tion an impossibility on account of the diverse
interests of the various nations assembled, but not
only have all cotton using countries now either
joined the Federation or co-operate with it, but the
same enthusiasm which was displayed at the first
meeting still continues, and the greatest harmony
has always prevailed. It has also been proved that
the interests of all these nations with regard to the
industry are the same so far as general principles
are concerned, and that if the interests of one
country suffer the interests of the others will also
suffer more or less.

The year after the International Cotton Federation
was established another important organisation
came into existence, the International Institute of
Agriculture, which was initiated by the King of
Italy on the recommendation of an American citizen,
Mr. David Lubin. The world is greatly indebted to
His Majesty for the bold initiative of summoning
an International Conference for the purpose of
founding this International Institute. The building
in which the work is carried on is in Rome, and was
erected at His Majesty's personal expense, and was

206

THE COTTON INDUSTRY

formally opened in 1908. The Committee of the
International Cotton Federation took an active
interest in the Institute of Agriculture from its
inception, and through its members did much to
enlist the support of the Governments of the
countries they represent in contributing to the
annual cost of carrying on the work of the Institute.
Its main purpose is to keep the world accurately
informed of the condition of crops, in order that a
deficiency in one quarter may be made good, and a
surplus in another put to the best use. It has
already been successful in issuing reliable statistics
regarding the available supply of foodstuffs, and
there is little doubt that in time it will be in a
position to deal in the same manner with the raw
materials of the textile industries. The International
Cotton Federation has for some time collected and
published statistics concerning the annual consump-
tion of cotton and of the stocks of cotton in the
hands of spinners, and in this way these two
important international organisations work along
similar lines, and a close bond of sympathy unites
them in their work. Many notable receptions have
been held by Heads of States in the countries where
the annual meetings of the Federation, and meetings
of the Committee have taken place. In addition to
this numerous other important functions have also
taken place ; one of the most notable of these was a
luncheon given by the British Government, at the
House of Commons, in 1910, representatives of the
cotton trade of the world being present, and a
quotation from the address, delivered on that

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THE COTTON INDUSTRY

occasion by Sir Edward Grey, who has rendered
such invaluable services during the recent inter-
national complications, forms a fitting conclusion to
this paper. Sir Edward said :

"The cotton industry is indeed one of the
greatest industries in the world, great in size and
importance. Great, I think, from whatever point
of view you look at it. This Federation empha-
sises, not competition, not rivalry, but great points
of agreement which this industry has promoted.
As an International Federation of Cotton Spinners
and Manufacturers you are perhaps doing, or at
least contributing to, a greater work than you
know. Your immediate object is the prosperity
of the cotton industry, but I would hope that the
ultimate end to which your thoughts are tending
is to make felt among the nations a greater sense
of the interdependence of the nations upon each
other. I believe financial circles are feeling that
already, and when all those connected in
industry feel that also, then I think we may agree
that the peace of the world is being assured."

APPENDIX B

INTERNATIONAL DELEGATION TO
AMERICA, igo;.1

SPEECH ON OPENING DAY OF CONVENTION AT
ATLANTA.

Mr. C. W. MACARA : I am quite unable to give
adequate expression to our appreciation of the mag-
nificent hospitality we have received from the
moment we landed on the shores of America, and
I can assure you that we are all deeply touched by
the cordiality of our reception in your splendid city
of Atlanta. This Conference, in which we have
a representation of the whole of the cotton users of
the world, will take a prominent place in the history
of the cotton trade.

We Europeans have come here believing that by
holding out the right hand of fellowship to the
spinners and manufacturers of America and by
joining with them in greeting the growers of our
raw material much permanent good will result.

The position I have had the honour to occupy
for many years in connection with the English
Federation of Master Cotton Spinners' Associa-
tions, and, during recent years, in connection with
the International Federation of Master Cotton
Spinners' and Manufacturers' Associations, has
rendered it necessary for me, in conjunction with
my colleagues on the Committees of these two

1. Reprinted from the official report of the International
Convention of Cotton Growers, Spinners and representatives of
the Cotton Exchanges, held at Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.

209

DELEGATION TO AMERICA

organisations, to devote much careful attention to
the solution of many difficult problems as they have
arisen in connection with the carrying on of the
cotton industry as a whole. The results accom-
plished have been most encouraging ; and a perusal
of the reports of the four International Cotton Con-
gresses, which were held successively in Switzer-
land, England, Germany, and Austria, will show
what the International movement has effected. I
venture to express the opinion that no commercial
movement in the past has commanded, in so short
a time, so much attention in Government circles.
The possibilities of commercial energy, enterprise,
and organisation, aided by the support of the
Governments of the countries interested, are un-
limited. The Report of the Fourth International
Cotton Congress is just issued both in America and
Europe. A copy of this highly-interrsting docu-
ment has been provided for each delegate to this
unique Convention of Cotton Planters and Spinners,
and will, I hope, materially facilitate the discussion
of the numerous important subjects which are to be
dealt with. Such being the case, it is unnecessary
for me to enlarge on these subjects.

The International Cotton Federation was formed
to further the welfare of the world's cotton industry,
and includes within the scope of its operations
everything in which interests common to all are
involved. An organisation with such aims cannot
be successfully carried on except by working on the
broadest lines, and with due regard to the legitimate
interests of all who are engaged in the industry,

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DELEGATION TO AMERICA

whether they be the growers of the raw material, the
legitimate middlemen who are responsible for the
distribution of that raw material, the spinners, the
manufacturers, or of any other interests that are
dependent upon them.

All these are entitled to a fair remuneration for
their labour and enterprise, and anything that inter-
feres with the smooth working of an industry that
concerns the welfare of many millions of people
ought to be energetically dealt with by united action
and removed.

Those I have just enumerated are necessary
factors in the conduct of this great industry ; but
there are, unfortunately, people who are not engaged
in any of these departments who are using the raw
material of the industry as a counter for gambling
operations.

Simultaneously with the Second International
Cotton Congress, which was held in England in
May, 1905, there .met in Rome, at the invitation
of the King of Italy, an International Congress of
the representatives of many nations delegated by
their Governments to discuss a scheme for bringing
the agricultural interests of the world into line.
The idea was conceived by Mr. David Lubin, an
American citizen, who succeeded in getting the
energetic and far-seeing King, of Italy to take the
initiative in a movement, the success of which is,
I think, now practically assured. The International
Cotton Federation, which is kindred in its aims, has
cordially co-operated in the movement. In the
light of what has been achieved, there is a fixed

211

DELEGATION TO AMERICA

conviction in the minds of all who have taken part
in the work that it is by international combination
alone that the interests of any world-wide industry
can be adequately safeguarded.

The first practical work of the International
Cotton Federation was to endeavour to secure
thoroughly reliable statistics of the annual con-
sumption of the raw material and stocks in the
hands of spinners at the middle and end of each
cotton season, and as there are already returns
obtained from the owners of about 100,000,000
spindles, it is expected that it will not be long ere a
complete return from all the spindles in the world
will be available. The International Institute of
Agriculture has similar aims in view as regards
furnishing reliable statistics of the supply of agricul-
tural products, including, of course, cotton. When
these two sets of statistics are available it is obvious
that the work of the outside manipulator of prices
will be rendered extremely difficult, if not impossible

The American cotton crop plays such an important
part in the supply of the world's needs that opera-
tions which affect it practically affect, more or less,
the entire crop of the world, and when consideration
is given to the colossal dimensions of the world's
cotton crop, and to the fact that the raising of the
annual average price by illegitimate speculation by
even one cent per pound represents ,£18,000,000
($90,000,000), it must be obvious that it is time that
some determined effort was made to rid the industry
of this serious and unnecessary burden.

It is impossible to imagine any more important
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DELEGATION TO AMERICA

work, or one in which growers and spinners can
more readily join hands, as it is inimical to the
interests of both that such colossal sums should be
extracted by those who neither grow cotton nor
manufacture it, nor, indeed, render any actual
service in the distribution of the raw material or
its manufactured products.

Cotton planters have been urged from time to
time to hold for extreme prices, but it is doubtful
if the adoption of such advice would in the long run
be to their advantage. It must never be lost sight
of by the growers that this staple supplies the
clothing for the poorest people of the world in
every country, and that applies more particularly
to the 700,000,000 in India and China, to whom a
great rise in price certainly means a limitation of
their purchasing power, with a consequently
reduced employment for the spinners and manufac-
turers of the world, upon whom the growers of
cotton are dependent. It has been the aim of all
engaged in the manufacturing of cotton for many
years to reduce the cost of production by taking
full advantage of science and invention, and great
economies have been effected. I think it would be
well if this example were followed by the growers of
our raw material.

In addition to the saving which might be effected
by the suppression of outside manipulation, very
great economies might also be effected in the cost
of growing, handling, and marketing cotton, as is
made evident in the Report issued by the Lancashire
Private Cotton Investigation Commission, which

213

DELEGATION TO AMERICA

will be found in the appendix in the Report of the
Fourth International Cotton Congress.

The great majority of people who are engaged in
the growing of cotton and its manufacture are too
much occupied with the concerns of their own
business to have followed the enormous development
of the cotton industry. Thirty years ago the total
crop of the United States was only about 4,500,000
bales. Now America herself is using annually
5,000,000 bales out of a crop of 13,500,000. The
crops of the other cotton growing countries have
also increased largely and all the cotton has gone
into consumption.

With the spread of civilisation, coupled with the
success of the efforts which are now being made to
reduce the possibilities of war, it is not, I think,
taking too sanguine a view to assume that the
progress of the next thirty years will be in a much
greater ratio than that of the past thirty years.
With such prospects before us, it is essential that
we should encourage, in every way, the enterprise
of all who are endeavouring to make provision for
the ever-increasing demand for the raw material of
an industry that plays so important a part in the
clothing of the people of the world.

Great efforts have been made during recent years
to develop cotton growing in the Colonies and
Dependencies of European nations, and many
enthusiastic views are expressed with regard to the
progress that will be made in these new countries.
Although I am of opinion that the experience of
America in the early years of the cotton growing

214

DELEGATION TO AMERICA

industry will probably be repeated, and that the
progress will be slow, there is little doubt that any
attempt on the part of the American growers to
maintain prices at ai abnormally high level will
have the effect of giving an increased stimulus to
these efforts, and progress may consequently be
much more rapid than under normal conditions.

What is equally important, however, in the
interests of the cotton industry as a whole, is that
prices of the raw material should not be reduced
to a level which will not adequately remunerate the
growers. We shall certainly have, as in the past,
bad seasons alternating with good, but as cotton,
unlike most other agricultural produce, can be stored
for years without deterioration, it would surely be
wise and prudent, in times of over abundance, to
establish a reserve for years of partial failure, which
would also have a steadying effect on prices.

I should like to emphasise that taking into con-
sideration the magnitude of the interests involved,
the risks to which the cotton plant is exposed, and
the prospects of the continued development of the
world's cotton industry, we should be short-sighted
indeed if we did not take energetic measures to
increase our supply of the raw material, to broaden
the basis of that supply, and likewise give attention
to the establishment of a reserve in years of
abundance as an insurance against years of partial
failure and all the suffering which this entails. I
quite appreciate the great difficulties which surround
the creation of a reserve, but when difficulties are

215
o

DELEGATION TO AMERICA

resolutely faced it is wonderful how they can be
overcome.

I quite agree with His Excellency the Governor
of Georgia, Mr. Hoke Smith, that this part of the
world is specially suited to grow cotton, but we
must see that we have a sufficient quantity of it.

In 1904, it was my duty to lead a movement by
which the cotton industry of England reduced the
hours of labour in the cotton mills from 55^ to 40
per week. The reduction was continued for twelve
months. Our operatives heartily co-operated with
us, and by our action we saved a disaster of the first
magnitude. Had we not had the foresight and the
organisation to take this step, there is no doubt that
by the month of May there would not have been a
bale of American cotton available for the mills of
England. By our action we reduced the price of
cotton which had been raised to a fictitious figure by
speculation, we tided over a year of a short crop,
and we prevented a great disaster. I estimate that
including cotton operatives, operatives of subsidiary
industries, and the dependants of both, 2,500,000
people would have been deprived of the means of
livelihood had this organised reduction of working
hours not been adopted. With such an experience
I urge that we must have a great increase in the
supply of our raw material wherever that increase
can be effected.

In conclusion, important as are the objects of this
Convention which has brought the men of so many
nationalities together, it is even more important as
affording- another demonstration of how much the

216

DELEGATION TO AMERICA

interests of all nations are bound up together. The
more fully this can be realised, the greater will be
success of the efforts which are happily being put
forth by exalted personages, and the governments
of the world, to remove international jealousies, to
settle international disputes by arbitration, and to
promote peace and goodwill among men.

217

APPENDIX B i
ROOSEVELT CORRESPONDENCE.

The White House, Washington,

October i8th, 1907.
My Dear Sir,

I feel a very deep personal interest in the important
matter which has brought to our shores so large and
distinguished a body of cotton manufacturers from
the principal nations of Europe. So far as I under-
stand the plans and purposes of the International
Federation of Cotton Spinners, of which you are the
President, you aim to promote stable conditions in
your great industry throughout the world ; and your
visit to the United States more especially aims to
bring the world's cotton manufacturers into closer
touch and sympathy with our own cotton producers,
upon whom you depend for three-quarters of your
supplies of raw material. It seems to me an
elementary truth that if our cotton planters can
learn more definitely and at first hand, as your trip
proposes, the exact needs of the manufacturer, in the
matter of the preparation and shipment of the raw
cotton, and can aim to conform thereto, the result
will be quite as much to their benefit as to yours.
You will find great changes in progress here, and
an almost universal interest throughout the cotton
belt in the matters that interest you ; and I hope and
believe that you will return to your homes not only

218

ROOSEVELT CORRESPONDENCE

pleased with our country, but encouraged to believe
that your visit will bear immediate fruit.

It is a source of regret to me that engagements
made long since rendered it impossible to receive
your delegation during your sojourn in Washington,
and to say to you by word of mouth what I now
take great pleasure in writing.

Sincerely yours,

THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

Mr. C. W. Macara, President,

International Federation of Master Cotton
Spinners' and Manfacturers' Associations.

22, St. Mary's Gate, Manchester,

November 6th, 1907.
The Hon. Theodore Roosevelt,

President of the United States of America.
My Dear Sir,

I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your valued
letter of October i8th.

The interest which you have shown in the aims
of the International Federation of Master Cotton
Spinners' and Manufacturers' Associations, under
whose auspices the Delegation, representing the
cotton-using countries of Europe, visited America,
will be a matter of intense satisfaction, not only to
the Delegation itself, but to every member of the
International Federation.

The Convention which was held at Atlanta on
October yth, 8th, and 9th, was the most remarkable
gathering ever held in connection with the cotton

219

ROOSEVELT CORRESPONDENCE

industry, as it embraced Representatives of American
and European Spinners, of the Cotton Exchanges
of the world, and of the Cotton Planters of the
Southern States of America. It undoubtedly marks
an epoch in the history of the cotton industry.

As stated in your letter, the International Cotton
Federation aims at the promotion of stable condi-
tions throughout the world for the cotton industry,
and I feel certain that it is impossible to overestimate
the benefit which will accrue to one of the greatest
international industries by the frank interchange of
opinion which took place at the Atlanta Convention.

The opportunities afforded of receiving and
imparting information, throughout the tour of the
Southern States, must also be productive of great
benefit both to the producers of the raw material and
to the cotton spinners and manufacturers.

We certainly found wherever we went in the
United States that great changes are being in-
augurated, and we have returned home feeling that
your wonderful country possesses unlimited re-
sources in many respects, and especially in regard
to the production of cotton. We believe our visit
will have in some measure stimulated the Cotton
Planters to take fuller advantage of their splendid
opportunities.

We shall always remember with pleasure the hearty
welcome accorded to us wherever we journeyed. The
hospitality and kindness of the American people
were overwhelming.

Our chief regret on leaving the United States was
220

ROOSEVELT CORRESPONDENCE

that we had not the honour and pleasure of meeting
you, whose services to humanity have evoked so
much admiration throughout the world.
I am,

Yours faithfully,

C. W. MACARA,

Chairman of Committee : International
Federation of Master Cotton Spinners'
and Manufacturers' Associations.

Extract from a letter addressed to Mr. C. W. Macara,
from His Excellency the Right Hon. JAMES
BRYCE, O.M., British Ambassador at
Washington.

" The international importance of the Cotton
Federation, and the fact that the centre of organisa-
tion is Manchester, gives it a claim on the repre-
sentatives of my Sovereign, King Edward, who has
personally on more than one occasion expressed his
interest in the objects of the Federation. I have
instructed His Majesty's Consuls in the cities to
be visited in your journey to extend every assistance
to the delegates.

" October 4th, 1907."

APPENDIX C

EGYPT, 1912.

ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE INTERNATIONAL
COTTON FEDERATION AT ALEXANDRIA.*

Sir CHARLES W. MACARA, Bart., said : This Inter-
national Delegation2 which has come to visit your
wonderful country is representative of one of the
most remarkable commercial movements the world
has ever seen. The International Cotton Federa-
tion was founded in 1904 in a crisis brought about
by the inadequate supply of the raw material, and
since then my colleagues and I have been received
by the Head of every State in which Congresses or
Committee meetings have been held, as well as by
many of the principal ministers of state. I think
it is a very hopeful sign that the highest personages
in the world are devoting their attention to the pro-
motion of the peaceful pursuits of industry. I have
been surprised by the amount of information on
commercial subjects which is possessed by those
who occupy the highest positions, and perhaps their
knowledge is to some extent attributable to the fact
that our reports are forwarded to them under the

1. Keprinted from the official report of the visit of the
Delegation of the International Federation of Master Cotton
Spinners' and Manufacturers' Associations to Egypt, Oct. — Nov.
1912.

2. The Delegates travelled by a special train through the
Nile Delta.

222

EGYPT, 1912

auspices of the British Foreign Office. That has
given to our movement a prestige which no other
commercial movement has ever had.

INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRY AND COMMERCE.

I now propose to deal with the consideration of
international trading from the standpoint of practical
experience. Many discussions are conducted by
those who have not had opportunities for gaining
the practical experience that my public work during
the past 20 years has enabled me to acquire. This
public work has necessitated the taking of a compre-
hensive view of the international industries which
provide the main factors in the two essentials of
existence, viz., food and clothing, and the two are
inseparably bound up together.

When King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra
received and entertained the Committee of the Inter-
national Cotton Fedration at Windsor Castle in
1906, his Majesty, in referring to the establishment
of the International Institute of Agriculture, ex-
pressed the hope that it would, when fully developed,
be of service to the cotton and kindred industries
which were so dependent for their raw material
upon the tillers of the soil. This hope is being
realised.

INTERNATIONAL CO-OPERATION IN AGRICULTURE AND
INDUSTRY.

It has been my privilege to be associated with the
inauguration of two international organisations
which have played an important part in bringing

223

EGYPT, 1912

the nations of the world into friendly co-operation,
the first being the International Federation of
Master Cotton Spinners' and Manufacturers'
Associations, initiated at Zurich in 1904, with its
headquarters in Manchester, and embracing, either
in its membership or in co-operation with it, nearly
all the countries where cotton is grown or manufac-
tured; the other is the International Institute of
Agriculture, which, on the recommendation of an
American citizen, was initiated and promoted by the
King of Italy, and has its headquarters in Rome.
In the International Institute of Agriculture no
fewer than 49 States are co-operating. As presi-
dent of the International Federation of Master
Cotton Spinners' and Manufacturers' Associations
I was appealed to in the initial stages of the Inter-
national Institute of Agriculture to render whatever
assistance was possible towards the promotion of
this world-wide movement, an appeal which I at
once responded to, recognising that it would be of
immense service to all the textile industries of which
cotton is the chief. I feel pleased that France,
England, and Germany were among the first of the
great nations to support, in the order named, the
King of Italy's scheme to promote the welfare of
the agriculture of the world. Since then these two
international organisations have worked hand in
hand, and each succeeding year emphasizes the view
that they are destined, not only to promote the
material welfare of the inhabitants of the globe, but
by the dissemination of a vast amount of informa-
tion regarding the conduct of the industries, which,

224

EGYPT, 1912

as I have said before, provide the essentials of life,
an educational work is being carried on 'which is
demonstrating most forcibly the entire interdepen-
dence of the nations of the world. When the Com-
mittee of the International Cotton Federation was
entertained by the British Government at the House
of Commons in 1910, Sir Edward Grey* Secretary
of State for Foreign Affairs, in commending the
work of the International Cotton Federation, said
that when the interdependence of the nations was
fully realised the peace of the \vorld will be assured.
It is impossible to estimate the value of the wide
distribution of the reports of the work of these inter-
national organisations, which has been done most
extensively, the annual reports being published in
the best known languages and circulated throughout
the world. In all the countries in which Con-
gresses, or meetings of the International Cotton
Committee, have been held, the work has received
the personal recognition of the heads of the States,
and the cordial support of prominent statesmen.

In this connection I might say that another inter-
national movement which is rapidly assuming large
dimensions has been established. prefer to the
International Federation of Textile Workers, a
movement that is equally demonstrating the inter-
dependence of the nations.

THE CLOTHING OF NINE-TENTHS OF THE WORLD.

In a paper which was read at the seventh Inter-
national Cotton Congress held in Brussels in 1910,
the magnitude of the possibilities of the cotton in-
dustry was brought out. This industry supplies

225

EGYPT, 1912

nine-tenths of the clothing of the world's inhabi-
tants, and it is estimated that out of a
population of 1,500,000,000 only 500,000,000 are
completely clothed, 750,000,000 are partly clothed,
and 250,000,000 are not clothed at all. Such figures
show the vastness of this international industry and
the possibilities of its development. It is obvious
that this can only be effectively carried out by inter-
national enterprise, and the educational process
which is being prosecuted is showing the growers
of the raw material the immense possibilities of the
development of their industry to meet the ever-
increasing demand for cotton clothing. In address-
ing the cotton planters of the Southern States of
America at the International Convention held in
Atlanta, Georgia, in 1907, in order to counteract the
view they took that the higher the price they could
get for cotton the better their interests were served,
I pointed out to them that the consumers of cotton
goods were adversely affected by a great enhance-
ment in the cost of their clothing, which had the
further effect of reducing the consumption of cotton
goods and the employment for the cotton mills of
the world. 1 further pointed out to the planters
that their best interests lay in the scientific cultiva-
tion of the soil, thus increasing the yield per acre,
which would enable them to secure adequate re-
muneration and yet to sell cotton at a considerably
lower price. This, together with better handling
and marketing, which further reduces expenses,
would ultimately tend to the prosperity of the
growers, the manufacturers, the workers, and the

226

EGYPT, 1912

users of cotton clothing. The mere enumeration
of these considerations proves what can be accom-
plished by friendly discussion among the repre-
sentatives of the nations, demonstrates the inter-
dependence of the nations, and shows how each can
contribute to the prosperity of all. In writing to me
subsequently, President Roosevelt referred to the
great awakening that was taking place in the United
States as a result of two previous visits of a Lanca-
shire Commission of cotton experts, and of the Con-
ference with the cotton planters at Atlanta.

THE OPEN DOOR.

Under normal conditions the demand for cotton
productions is practically unlimited. During
recent years the supply of raw cotton has been short
of the world's requirements, and the price has conse-
quently ruled high. Although England holds so
commanding a position in the cotton trade of the
world, yet her policy has always been to maintain
the open door wherever her influence extends. All
nations are thus placed on an equal footing with
England in meeting the demand for these commodi-
ties. Among the principal aims of the International
Cotton Federation are the development of the culti-
vation of cotton in all parts of the world where it
can be grown successfully and on a commercial
basis, compiling statistics regarding the industry,
and establishing Courts of Arbitration to promote
the smooth working of international trading.
Panels have already been appointed in most of the
countries included in the Federation. The Inter-
national Institute of Agriculture encourages the

227

EGYPT, 1912

more scientific cultivation of all crops, and also
publishes reliable statistics regarding the crops of
the world and their consumption.

The interests of all who cultivate the soil, as well as
of all who manufacture raw materials into clothing,
the distributors and consumers, have to be con-
sidered. For example, the cotton planter must get
an adequate price to remunerate him for his labour
and enterprise, but this does not necessarily mean
a high price. Scientific methods of cultivation
may enable the grower to sell his commodity at a
moderate price, which will pay him for his increased
production just as well as a high price did formerly.
A moderate price of raw cotton enables th& manu-
facturer of cotton goods to sell his productions also
at a moderate price, and this in its turn results in a
greater consumption of cotton clothing, which in-
creases the employment for the cotton mills of the
world.

THE VISIT TO EGYPT.

It is obvious that if the industries which provide
the essentials for the human race are to be conducted
with the breadth of vision necessary for their suc-
cess, the nations of the world must work together
for greater efficiency, and in doing this there need
be no greater rivalry between nations than there is
between individuals. Individual and national
rivalry have always existed, and with nations, just
as with individuals, it is those who display the
greatest energy and resource who are the most suc-
cessful. This delegation, representing the principal
European nations and Japan, is visiting Egypt for

228

EGYPT, 1912

the purpose of encouraging by its presence the work
which is being carried on by the Khedive, the
Egyptian Government, and by that able administra-
tor, Lord Kitchener. Primarily, this work is in the
interests of the Egyptians themselves, but all cotton-
using countries will also benefit.

All other industries are supplementary or sub-
sidiary to those which provide food and clothing,
and upon the successful conduct of industry depends
the provision for the defensive forces of the nations
of the world.

INDUSTRIAL AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS.

From many years' experience in dealing with the
relationship between capital and labour, I am firmly
convinced that strong and efficient organisation on
both sides is the best means for promoting mutual
respect and for dealing successfully with industrial
disputes. There is no doubt that where such
organisation exists disputes are more likely to be
settled harmoniously than where one side is weak
and the other strong, or where both sides are im-
perfectly organised. I consider also that the inter-
course which takes place between the representa-
tives of capital and labour tends to a better realisa-
tion of the difficulties of each, and, above all, to
bring home forcibly the fact that their interests are
not antagonistic, but that they are identical, and that
many difficulties can only be surmounted by co-
operation. On the other hand, it becomes apparent
as time goes on that industrial strife is against the
interests of both capital and labour.

What applies to the conduct of industry applies
229

EGYPT, 1912

equally to the relationship between the nations of
the world. Here again practical experience is of
the utmost value, and the working of the two inter-
national organisations with which I have been
associated has proved conclusively that it is possible
for the representatives of the numerous nations of
the world to meet together in friendly conference,
discuss problems that concern the welfare of all, and
that are impossible of solution except by the co-
operation of all. The successful and harmonious
work of these organisations shows that, notwith-
standing the great increase of armaments, the
peoples of the world are friends at heart.

International trade demonstrates the dependence
of the nations upon one another. I may quote, as
an example, the trade between England and Ger-
many, which approaches, in round figures,
,£ 1 20,000,000 annually; that between England and
France is about ^"80,000,000 annually. Then Eng-
land uses about half the crop of cotton which is
grown in Egypt, the other half being distributed
amongst the other cotton-manufacturing countries
of the world.

So far as finance is concerned, the interests of all
countries are also closely interwoven, but these con-
siderations, colossal as they are, would be far
exceeded in dire consequences in other directions
should there be other serious complications. In-
deed, to anyone who fully realises the basis on which
industry and commerce exist, it must be apparent
that it would be impossible to emerge from war
without irreparable loss, not only to combatants but

230

EGYPT, 1912

to non-combatants. I fear, speaking generally, that
statesmen and diplomats have little opportunities
for gauging the terrible effects war would have
upon the ever-increasing intricacies connected with
the carrying on of industry and commerce, and the
absolute chaos that would be produced. It would
be well if there were more intercourse between them
and the leaders of industry and commerce, so that
they might by this means realise more fully the vast
issues that are involved, which would certainly tend
to the exercise of greater care in the discussion of
difficulties as they arise. In the carrying on of the
international movements to which I have referred,
all the nations have worked perfectly harmoniously.
At these international gatherings it is impossible to
detect racial jealousies or that the delegates belong
to so many different nations. Indeed, the delibera-
tions are animated throughout by a desire to deal
with the industries as a whole, it being fully realised
that each nation is simply carrying on its own part
of international industry, and that all should com-
bine in facing problems which can only be success-
fully dealt with by combination.

THE VALUE OF ROUND TABLE CONFERENCES.

With such experiences I am at a loss to under-
stand the constantly recurring jealousies and mis-
understandings between nations, which I cannot
help feeling are magnified by writers who do not
realise the gravity of the issues with which they are
dealing. Mischief is so often brought about by
want of thought in dealing with industrial strife,
which in a minor degree has the same disastrous

231
P

EGYPT, 1912

results as would be brought about by war, that it is
earnestly to be desired, for the welfare of humanity,
greater care will be exercised in the future.

Having presided over numerous conferences that
have taken place in connection with the disputes
which have occurred in the cotton industry of Eng-
land during the past 20 years, I can testify to the
immense value of the round table conference, both
in the settlement of disputes and the prevention of
industrial strife, and I feel certain that the adoption
of a similar course, pursued assiduously in inter-
national disputes, would generally lead to a settle-
ment and prevent recourse to war.

I do not share the Utopian views which are fre-
quently expressed regarding disarmament, much .as
their realisation is to be desired. Changes in the
existing state of affairs, in my opinion, cannot be
brought about rapidly or without much patient
educational work. As an advocate of the thorough
organisation of capital and labour, I am also an
advocate of thorough efficiency in the defensive
forces of the nations. At the same time I firmly
believe that eventually, with the advance of science
and the spread of civilisation, together with inter-
national co-operation to promote greater efficiency
in carrying on the world's work, ample employment
will be found for all, which would tend to remove
national jealousies, and thus help materially to
ensure the peace of the world.

232

APPENDIX C i
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SUDAN.

BRITISH GOVERNMENT REQUESTED TO GUARANTEE A
LOAN OF ,£3,000,000.

A Deputation of the British Cotton Growing
Association waited upon the Right Hon. H. H.
Asquith, Prime Minister, in London, on January
23rd, 1913, for the purpose of requesting the Govern-
ment to guarantee a loan of ,£3,000,000 for the
development of the Sudan. The Prime Minister
was accompanied by the Right Hon. Sir Edward
Grey, Bart., K.G., Secretary of State for Foreign
Affairs, the Right Hon. D. Lloyd George, Chan-
cellor of the Exchequer, and the Right Hon. Sydney
Buxton, President of the Board of Trade. The
Deputation was introduced by the Earl of Derby,
G.C.V.O., C.B., President of the Association, and
the other speakers were the Duke of Marlborough,
K.G., and Sir Charles Macara, Bart., Vice-Presi-
dents, Mr. J. Arthur Hutton, Chairman of the
Council of the Association, and Mr. A. H. Gill,
M.P., one of the members of the Council, repre-
senting the operatives in the cotton industry. The
speeches were businesslike and impressive. Sir
Charles Macara, who dealt with the subject from an
international standpoint, said : —

233

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SUDAN

The position I have occupied in the cotton indus-
try during the last 20 years, both nationally and
internationally, has necessitated a careful study of
all the problems that have to be faced in carrying
on this great industry, which plays such an im-
portant part in clothing the people of the world.
Since the British Cotton Growing Association was
inaugurated I have taken a very deep interest in the
work it has carried on, and although it has been
quite impossible for me to share in carrying on its
every-day work I have never lost an opportunity of
advocating its claims, and have done what I could
to secure financial support from the Members of the
Federation of Master Cotton Spinners' Associations,
of which I am the President. The British Cotton
Growing Association has appealed to me in a variety
of ways, perhaps none more forcibly than its having
given an object-lesson to the world of friendly co-
operation between the representatives of capital and
labour in promoting a movement for the benefit of
the industry, upon the success of which both are
equally dependent. I have on many occasions
referred to this with pride in addressing meetings
of business men in numerous parts of the world.
Moreover, in connection with the work of the Inter-
national Cotton Federation, one of the aims of which
is to develop the existing cotton fields and to open
up new cotton fields in any part of the world where
this can be done successfully, the work of the British
Cotton Growing Association has always had a
prominent place in the annual reports, which have
been printed in the best known languages and circu-

234

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SUDAN

lated throughout the world. In this connection
it has been a source of much satisfaction to me in
meeting Ministers of State in the countries I have
visited to hear from them the great assistance they
have received in developing cotton growing in the
colonies of these countries from the experience1 they
have gained by perusing the reports of the Inter-
national Cotton Federation.

THE PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED.

Any narrow views that I may at one time have
entertained have been completely dispelled by the
experience I have gained in visiting the principal
countries that share with England the carrying on
of the cotton industry of the world, and I have
come to the conclusion that it matters little where
cotton is grown, but the great problem that has to
be solved is that there should be sufficient cotton
to meet the rapidly-developing requirements brought
about by the march of civilisation and the increase
of population. It must be remembered that still a
large proportion of the people of the world are only
partially clothed or not clothed at all. The price
of raw material for carrying on the cotton industry
is a most important factor, and when I state, what
I have frequently stated before, that an increase of
2|d. per pound on the world's cotton crop means
,£100,000,000, it will be seen that this is a serious
factor in the prosperity of the industry, as it reduces
the consumption of cotton clothing, which is the
clothing of the poorest people of the world, and by
so doing it is obvious that the employment of the
mills is also reduced. The position to-day is that

235

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SUDAN

cotton, through anticipated, scarcity of supply, is
over 2d . a pound above what it was 1 2 months ago. It
must also be remembered that scientific cultivation
is a great factor in increasing the yield and so
reducing the price at which the planter can sell his
cotton and retain a satisfactory profit. It was
decided by the Committee of the International
Cotton Federation in June last that a delegation
representing the countries included in the Federa-
tion sho.uld visit Egypt in November to study the
conditions under which the Egyptian crop is grown,
handled, and marketed, and the developments that
are going on. This delegation was on the same
lines as the one which visited the cotton-growing
States of America in 1907. The report of the dele-
gation to Egypt will be issued very shortly, but I
may say that all the delegates were immensely im-
pressed with the splendid agricultural methods
which are in vogue in Egypt, and the magnificent
resource that is displayed by the Khedival and the
British agricultural societies by taking advantage
of scientific methods and also in reclaiming land,
this work being carried on under the direction of
Lord Kitchener, who, I may say, is enthusiastic
about the possibilities. My colleagues and I were
immensely impressed with what is going on, and
are convinced that an early and considerable in-
crease in the supply of Egyptian cotton is practically
assured.

THE MAGNITUDE OF THE COTTON TRADE.

In addition to meeting Lord Kitchener and his
staff and some large agriculturists, I also met in

236

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SUDAN

Cairo, Sir Reginald Wingate, the Sirdar, and had
a most cordial invitation from him to visit the
Sudan, which unfortunately I was unable to accept.
It was arranged, however, that the Secretary of the
International Cotton Federation shoulcf go to the
Sudan, and his report is now being printed and will
be issued shortly ; it will amplify and endorse every-
thing that the Chairman of the British Cotton
Growing Association has said. Indeed, I have the
utmost confidence, with such men as Lord
Kitchener, Sir Reginald Wingate, and others, that
the development of cotton growing in Egypt and
the Sudan will solve more rapidly the problem of
increasing the supply of cotton than could be done
in some of the other parts of the world where new
cotton fields are being developed, and at the same
time will be of immense benefit to these countries.
I hope that a broad view will be taken by the British
Government of the proposition that has been placed
before them to-day. It must never be overlooked
that although other countries are developing their
cotton industry, England has developed much more
rapidly than any of them, and that practically all
the countries of the world are customers of England
for cotton goods, that England's cotton industry
depends for about three-quarters of its employment
on export trade, that cotton goods represent about
one-third of the total exports of manufactures, that
the cotton which can be produced in Egypt and the
Sudan is of the utmost importance to England, as
she consumes more of this class of cotton for her
fine manufactures than all the other countries of the

237

DEVELOPMENT OF THE SUDAN

world combined. I would like to mention that the
British cotton industry provides directly the liveli-
hood for millions of people and indirectly for
millions more. In conclusion, I would like to
emphasize that Egypt has spent enormous sums in
the development of the Sudan, and the time has
certainly come when England must materially assist
in this direction. I hope that all these matters will
receive the serious consideration that they certainly
deserve.

218

APPENDIX C 2

RECEPTION BY VISCOUNT KITCHENER
AT THE BRITISH AGENCY AT CAIRO.1

On Nov. 4th, 1912, the delegates drove to the
British Agency, on the banks of the Nile, where they
were received by Field-Marshal Viscount Kitchener
of Khartoum, British Agent and Consul-General.

After having a private conversation with Sir
Charles Macara in his room, and after receiving the
members of the Committee, Lord Kitchener led the
way to the terrace, where the whole of the delegates
were introduced to him. At the conclusion of this
ceremony, Lord Kitchener, after offering a hearty
welcome to his visitors, said : —

I hope your inspection of the cotton industry in
its centre here will be profitable not only to your-
selves but to Egypt also. Your secretary last
year gave us a very valuable report on his visit.
In that report there were many hints which have
done a great deal to improve the work out here
in regard to cotton cultivation. I am sure we all
owe him a debt for the trouble he took in making
that report. I hope your present visit wrill in-
crease our knowledge. You have had oppor-
tunities of seeing the qualities of the fellah who
cultivates the soil, and I think if he would pay a

1 Reprinted from the official report of the visit of the

Delegation of the International Federation of Master Cotton

Spinners' and Manufacturers' Associations to Egypt, Oct. — Nov.
1912.

239

VISCOUNT KITCHENER

little more attention to the cotton when it is being
picked and being stored, and would discriminate
a little better in the seed which he uses, we
should have more improvements. I have no
doubt that will come. I think it will come per-
haps through the small purchaser in Egypt, who
goes round and buys in the various places where
cotton is produced. If we can get the fellaheen
to take their cotton to more general centres, and
the small merchant to know better the quality of
the cotton and to buy only the best, the fellah
will know it is -no use to produce an article which
is inferior. That experience will teach him much
better than we can tell him. The small mer-
chant now buys up all he can, regardless of
quality, but if we can get a better price for the
good cotton, and encourage means of discrimi-
nating between good and bad, it will be good for
the fellah ; he will learn that it is worth his while
to cultivate the best article.

As regards seed, the Director-General of the
Agricultural Department is making experiments
in new seed, and we should like your advice as to
two new qualities of seed which we have got. I
am sure if we know exactly what you want we
shall be able to produce it. We have only got
a very small quantity of the seed so far, and it will,
I think, take five years, during which the greatest
care will have to be paid in our Agricultural
Department, to enable the seed to go out freely
into the country, and to be of use to you. It is
just as well to know at once that we are on the
240

VISCOUNT KITCHENER

right lines. I hope some of you will give us an
opinion as to whether these two products of our
work for some time now in seed cultivation are
really what you want. I hope you will give a
better price. One of the great requirements of
Egypt is a good price for cotton, and we look to
you to keep it up. If we do all we can to pro-
duce the article which you require we ask you to
keep it at a good price, so that our people shall
be happy and anxious to produce the cotton
which you require.

Sir CHARLES MACARA said : On behalf of my col-
leagues and myself, I want to thank your Lordship
most heartily for the reception which you have
accorded us to-day at a time when heavy responsi-
bilities, arising from a disturbed state of Eastern
Europe, rest upon you. Since we arrived in Egypt
we have had the most hospitable reception. The
arrangements have been splendid. Everything has
passed off without a hitch. Here we have seen
exactly the opposite of what we saw in America in
1907, when we travelled 4,600 miles through the
Southern States. We were distinctly disappointed
to find that America, which we all thought was an
up-to-date country, was very far behind in agricul-
tural methods. In Egypt we have been immensely
struck by your methods, and by the possibilities
that lie before you. And I can assure you that it
is a matter of supreme interest to the cotton industry
of the world that Egypt should extract from the soil
as much cotton as possible. Egyptian cotton is
used for the purpose of making the highest class of

241

VISCOUNT KITCHENER

cqtton fabrics, England taking half the crop and
other nations the other half. This branch of the
cotton industry is developing much more rapidly
than any other branch, possibly because we now
produce cotton fabrics which only an expert can
differentiate from silk. For these fabrics the best
of cotton is required, and where the quality is good
there is no reason why the price should not be good
also.

As for the cotton trade in general, we should like
to see all possible steps taken to improve the culti-
vation of cotton. On experimental farms in America
we saw land which had been producing half a bale
an acre, with very little extra expense, under
scientific cultivation producing three-quarters of a
bale an acre. Our desire is to pay the planter a fair
price, and at the same time to keep the cost of the
raw material moderate. A moderate price encour-
ages a larger consumption of cotton goods than is
the case when the cost is excessively high, as it has
been for the last few years. I do not think there
is anything to which your Lordship can devote your
great abilities more important than the encourage-
ment of the growth of cotton in Egypt. Cotton
growing will largely benefit the people, and we are
very anxious that the natives should have full re-
muneration and full encouragement to cultivate
cotton and to improve its quality as much as they
can. The object of the International Federation is
to promote smooth relationships between those who
carry on the growing of the raw material, and those
who manufacture it. We want to create confi-

242

VISCOUNT KITCHENER

dence, and I think there is nothing more likely to
do that than that those who' spin and manufacture
should come into contact with those who grow the
raw material. There are very great difficulties in
the cultivation — we get to know that wherever we
go — and there are also great difficulties connected
with the manufacture. The more intercourse there
is between those engaged in the industry the more
likely we are to be successful. My motto always
has been " Live and let live." We want all to do
well. I assure you that our reception here to-day
has given great satisfaction to my colleagues and
myself, and we thank you heartily for receiving us.

LORD KITCHENER : I should like to refer to one
other point — the question of drainage. We hear
very often that the land in Egypt has generally
deteriorated. That is not the case. The land is
as good as it was, but in places it has become water-
logged, and a great many acres have gone out of
cultivation or have very much reduced their acreage
under cotton, owing to the water-logged state.

On that account the Government is taking up a
big scheme of drainage. That scheme has to be
on a very large scale, otherwise it would be useless,
and I have no doubt the effect of it will be to add
a very much larger area to the l^nd under cotton
cultivation than there has been in the past. Work
of that sort, of course, takes many years to accom-
plish : four or five years will elapse before the results
will be apparent. If you come again in five years
or so we hope we shall be able to show you a much
bigger aera under cultivation, and perhaps better

243

VISCOUNT KITCHENER

produce than is now being cultivated. The amount
we now turn out per feddan is about live cantars, a
very good proportion. I do not think you will get
it in any other country in the world. This year
we shall have a bumper crop, I think. I don't
think we have ever had as much cotton as we shall
have this year. I do not know exactly what it will
be, perhaps under 8,000,000 cantars, and if next
year we go on increasing I suppose it will help you
all in your manufactures. I am very glad to have
seen you, and hope you will enjoy your visit to
Egypt.

244

APPENDIX C 3.

TEXT OF ILLUMINATED ADDRESS.

To CHARLES WRIGHT MACARA, ESQ.

DEAR SIR,

We, the undersigned, on the occasion of the
assembly in Paris of the Fifth Annual International
Congress of Delegated Representatives of Master
Cotton Spinners' and Manufacturers' Associations,
desire to express to you, and to place on permanent
record our high appreciation of the many invaluable
and voluntary services which you have rendered to
the Cotton Industry of the World.

The experience which you have acquired as
President of the English Federation of Master
Cotton Spinners' Associations since 1894 has
eminently qualified you for leading recent Inter-
national movements, and in referring to these
movements we specially desire to record the
prominent part you took ia the initiation of the
International Federation of Master Cotton Spinners'
and Manufacturers' Associations in 19x34, the excep-
tional ability which you have displayed as Chairman
of the Committee of that Organisation from its
inception ; and your Presidency of the Second Inter-
national Congress which was held in Manchester
and Liverpool in 1905, when the International
Federation was formally constituted.

We desire, further, to record our sincere apprecia-
tion of your compliance with the unanimous wish
of the Committee of the International Cotton

245

ILLUMINATED ADDRESS

Federation that you should organise and lead the
Delegation representing- European Cotton interests
which attended the Atlanta Conference last Autumn,
and which subsequently made the tour of the Cotton
growing States of America. The Atlanta Confer-
ence was, we consider, the most comprehensive
international assembly of the various sections of the
Cotton interests ever called together, there being
present Representatives of the Cotton Planters'
Associations of the Southern States of America ; of
American and European Associations of Cotton
Spinners and Manufacturers; and of the Cotton
Exchanges of the World.

We recognise that. these International Movements
with which you have been so prominently associated,
have been of inestimable benefit to all engaged in
the Cotton industry, that they have not only created
a deep impression upon the Governments of the
Countries specially interested in the personal recog-
nition of Sovereigns and Heads of States wherever
the International Meetings have been held, but that
they have fostered friendly relations amongst the
peoples of many nations and have, in a marked
degree, contributed to the promotion of International
peace and goodwill.

We are, dear Sir,

Yours faithfully,
Paris, June 1908.

JOHN SYZ,

President, First Intei'national Cotton Congress,
Zurich, 1904; Vice-Chairman, International
Cotton Committee, representing Switzerland ;
President, Schweizerischer Spinner- Zweiner- und
Weber-Verein, Switzerland.
246

ILLUMINATED ADDRESS

CASIMIR BERGER,

President, Fifth International Cotton Congress,
Paris, 1908; Joint Hon. Treasurer, International
Cotton Committee, representing France, Syndicat
General de 1'Industrie Cotoniere Franchise, Paris,
France.

C. 0. LANGEN,

Joint Hon. Treasurer, International Cotton
Committee, representing Germany, nominated in
succession to the late Herr Ferdinand Gross,
President of the Third International Cotton
Congress, Bremen, 1906 ; President, Verband
Rheinisch-Westfalischer Baumwollspinner, M.
Gladbach, Germany.

ARTHUR KUFFLER,

President, Fourth International Cotton Congress,
Vienna, 1907 ; Member of the International Com-
mittee, representing Austria ; President, Verein
der Baumwollspinner Oesterreichs, Vienna,
Austria.

HENRY HIGSON,

Member of the International Committee, repre-
senting England ; President, North and North-east
Lancashire Cotton Spinners' and Manufacturers'
Association, Manchester, England.

SENJIRO WATANABE,

Member of the International Committee, repre-
sening Japan ; the Japan Cotton Spinners'
Association, Osoka, Japan.

JEAN DE HEMPTINNE,

Member of the International Committee, repre-
senting Belgium ; President, Association Coton-
niere de Belgique, Ghent, Belgium.

B. W. TER KUILE,

Member of the International Committee, repre-
senting Holland ; Nederlandsche Patroonsvereen-
iging van Katoenspinners-en-wevers, Enschede,
Holland.

JACINTO MAGHALHAES,
Member of the International Committee, repre-
senting Portugal ; President, Associayao Industrial
Portuense, Oporto, Portugal

N. CHR. NIELSEN,

Delegate, representing Norway ; President,
Bomuldsspindernes og Vsevernes Gruppe i De
norske Tekstilfabrikanters Forenung, Christiana,
Norway.

247

ILLUMINATED ADDRESS

COSTANZO CANTONI,

Member of the International Committee, repre-
senting Italy ; President, Associazione f ra gli
Industrial! Cotonieri e Borsa-Cotoni, Milan,
Italy.

EDUARDO CALVET,

Member of the International Committee, repre-
senting Spain ; President, Cotton Section, Fomento
del Trabajo National, Barcelona, Spain.

RUD. PEOWE,

Delegate representing Russia at the Zurich Con-
gress, 1904, Moscow, Russia.

S. M

Delegate representing India at the Bremen (1906)
and Paris (1908) Congresses, Cawnpore, India.

S. A. 0. NORTH,

Director Bureau of the Census, Department of
Commerce and Labor, Washington, D.C., United
States of America.

WM. D. HARTSHORNE,

President, The National Association of Cotton
Manufacturers, Boston, Mass., United States of
America.

THEOPHILUS PARSONS,
President, Arkwright Club, Boston, Massachussets,
United States of America.

JAMES R. MAcCOLL,

President, International Convention of Cotton
Growers, Spinners, and Manufacturers, Atlanta,
Georgia, 1907 ; Past-President, The National
Association of Cotton Manufacturers, Boston,
Mass., United States of America.

S. B. TANNER,

President, American Cotton Manufacturers'
Association, Charlotte, N.C., United States of
America.

HARVIE JORDAN,

President, Southern Cotton Association (Plan-
ters) ; and President, Sea-Island Cotton Associa-
tion (Planters), Atlanta, Ga., United States of
America.

248

APPENDIX D.

DEPUTATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL
FEDERATION OF MASTER COTTON
SPINNERS' AND MANUFACTURERS'
ASSOCIATIONS TO THE MOST HON.
THE MARQUESS OF CREWE, SECRE-
TARY OF STATE FOR INDIA.

Lord Crewe, who was accompanied by Sir
Thomas Holderness, K.C.S.I., Permanent Under-
secretary of State for India, and by Mr. Francis C.
Drake, Secretary of the Revenue and Statistics
Department, received the Deputation in the India
Office on July 22nd, 1913, at three o'clock in the
afternoon.

The Deputation consisted of the following
Members of the International Cotton Federation : —
Sir Charles W. Macara, Bart. (President), J. B.
Tattersall, C. O. Langen, C. Berger, Jean de Hemp-
tinne, S. Watanabe", S. M. Johnson, J. F. Bradbury,
N. M. Gokuldas, Gordohandas Khauta, J. W.
McConnel, S. Newton (Ashton-under-Lyne), J.
Hilton (Oldham), J. Thorpe (Oldham), R. Worswick
(Rawtenstall). And the following Lancashire
Members of Parliament: E. R. B. Denniss, M.P.
for Oldham ; A. W. Barton, M.P. for Oldham ; Dr.
Charles Leach, M.P. for Colne Valley; T. C.
Taylor, M.P. for S.E. Radcliffe ; P. Wilson Raffan,

249

DEPUTATION TO

M.P. for Leigh; Major the Hon. G. F. Stanley,
M.P. for Preston; A. A. Tobin, K.C., M.P. for
Preston; A. H. Gill, M.P. for Bolton ; H. Nuttall,
M.P. for Stretford.

Sir Charles W. Macara, Bart., introducing the
deputation, said :
My Lord Marquess,—

This is the fourth occasion on which an Inter-
national delegation has waited upon the Secretary
of State for India for the purpose of urging as
strongly as possible the necessity for everything
being done that can be done to improve the quality
and extend the cultivation of cotton in India.

The International Federation of Master Cotton
Spinners' and Manufacturers' Associations includes
in its membership, or has, in co-operation with it,
practically all the cotton growing and cotton manu-
facturing countries of the world ; and it has become
increasingly evident that the problems connected
with the supply of. the raw material of the world's
cotton industry can only be dealt with effectually
by international co-operation.

Five-eighths of the cotton crop of the world is
provided by the United States of America, and it
is from India that the next largest supply comes.
The present season's crop of Indian cotton, it is
estimated, will amount to 6,000,000 bales of about
4Oolbs. each, and when I mention that the cotton
crop of the world now averages over 20,000,000
bales of an average weight of soolbs. each, it will
show what an important factor the Indian cotton
crop is in the supply of the raw material for this

250

THE MARQUESS OF CREWE

industry, which plays the chief part in clothing the
people of the world.

The development in the cultivation of Indian
cotton has been very marked during recent years,
and if the present season's crop reaches 6,000,000
bales, as it anticipated, its total value at the present
prices will amount to something like ^50,000,000.

I attribute much of this increased cultivation to
the educational work that has been carried on
throughout the world by the International Cotton
Federation, and which has brought about co-opera-
tion between cotton growers and cotton manufac-
turers and the Governments chiefly concerned in
the welfare of this great international industry.
In this connection I would like to acknowledge
the valuable co-operation of your Lordship's
Department, together with that of the Government
of India.

Statistics show that the cotton crop of the world
is now about three times greater than it was 35 to
40 years ago, but notwithstanding this remarkable
development, it is obvious to those who study
future requirements, that the extension of the cotton
fields of the world must proceed much more rapidly
than has been the case, if the raw material is to keep
pace with the demand for cotton goods. It is
therefore apparent that in India, which, owing to
exceptional circumstances, is capable of much more
rapid development than any other part of the world,
no effort should be spared to bring about this much-
needed development. A study of the Annual and
the special Reports, issued by the International

251

THE MARQUESS OF CREWE

Cotton Federation since its inauguration in 1904,
will show that this important subject has received
a large share of attention, and that an adequate
supply of Indian cotton is a matter of supreme
interest, not only to India itself, but to Japan, Ger-
many, France, Italy, and Belgium, and to a smaller
extent to Lancashire. But no narrow view of the
question must be taken, for the greater the supply
of cotton from India for those countries which can
use it largely, the greater will be the quantity of
those other qualities of cotton more suitable to the
requirements of the English cotton industry which
is engaged in producing a much larger proportion
of the finer qualities of goods than other countries,
which are exported to practically all the countries
of the world.

At the Ninth International Cotton Congress,
which was held in Holland last month, the Inter-
national Committee decided that the International
Secretary should make a third visit to the cotton
growing districts of India during the autumn of
this year. I feel sure your Lordship will again
extend to him the generous assistance which so
facilitated his work on the occasion of his two
previous visits.

252

APPENDIX E
THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL.1

The great industrial upheaval which we have been
experiencing has led to the suggestion of various
remedies for mitigating or preventing a recurrence
of such a state of things. There is no subject of
more vital importance to the national welfare than
that of the maintenance of harmonious relationships
between Capital and Labour.

Those who occupy the foremost positions in our
great industries, on the side of both Capital and
Labour, have heavy responsibilities, and it is
necessary that these responsibilities should be
adequately realised, as the welfare of the nation
depends to a great extent upon these industries
being conducted in a statesmanlike manner,
especially in view of their interdependence. It is
impossible for one of the half-dozen great staple
industries to be paralysed without the others being
more or less seriously affected. Much has recently
been said about the repudiation of agreements
entered into between Capital and Labour, but I
hold that in most cases where repudiation has taken
place it is largely due to the absence of proper
organisation. I think it can be proved that where

1. Contributed by Sir Charles W. Macara, Bart., to the
" Financial Review of Reviews," Oct. 1911.

253

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

the organisations on both sides are efficient it is
exceedingly rare that agreements have not been
loyally kept.

Many years have passed since I first advocated
the establishment of a tribunal for dealing with
deadlocks in labour disputes. Until recently this
advocacy was carried on without publicity, and
although I had had for some time grave misgivings
as to the industrial position, I scarcely expected such
a demonstration as we have recently experienced.

Although for many years I have occupied the
prominent and onerous position of President of the
Master Cotton Spinners' Federation, the proposals
which I have made for the settlement of labour
disputes have been launched in my private capacity.
These proposals were addressed simultaneously to
prominent members of all industries. This I have
done largely through the co-operation of the heads
of the principal municipalities, which have assisted
me in ascertaining the views of leaders of Capital
and Labour in their respective localities.

Except when specially requested to do so, I have
not approached the organisations of either em-
ployers or workmen, as the scheme does not inter-
fere in any way with the public-spirited and abso-
lutely necessary work of those organisations or of
the Conciliation Boards which have been estab-
lished. Its purpose is to deal with deadlocks, and
onlv when all existing'' means of settlement have

J c_5

failed. During my twenty years' connection with
the cotton trade employers' organisations I have
had a wide experience of all the anxieties attending

254

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

industrial disputes in this great industry ; most of
these disputes have been settled, but some have
been fought to the bitter end, involving acute suffer-
ing to the workers, great losses to the employers
and to the community as a whole.

No matter how complete the arrangements may
be for dealing with industrial disputes, they some-
times fail to effect their purpose, and the parties
resort to a trial of strength. When this takes place
each side stands on its dignity, fearing that an
advance towards conciliation may prejudice its
position ; hence the necessity for the creation of a
new, impartial, non-political Government Depart-
ment to deal with these deadlocks.

Let me by way of illustration explain the modus
operandi of dealing with disputes in the cotton
spinning industry. In November, 1892, a dispute
arose which led to a cessation of work of the Federa-
tion Mills for twenty weeks. This was eventually
settled by an Industrial Treaty which has since
been known as the Brooklands Agreement.

This agreement declares in its preamble that
" the representatives of the employers and the
representatives of the employed hereby admit that
disputes and differences between them are inimical
to the interests of both parties, and that it is
expedient and desirable that some means should
be adopted for the future whereby such disputes
and differences may be expeditiously and amicably
settled and strikes and lockouts avoided."

All matters of difference likely to arise in the
carrying on of the industry are provided for with

255

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

much minuteness, yet there is one vital flaw in this
Agreement, viz., that it does not provide for dead-
locks. This Agreement has for eighteen years
regulated the negotiations between employers and
operatives in the spinning branch of the cotton in-
dustry.

As in most industries any lengthened dislocation
arising in one section causes the others eventually
to stop, so in an industry of such magnitude as the
cotton industry, which, in addition to providing
for our home requirements, represents one-third of
our total exports of manufactures, a lengthened
dislocation has a most serious effect upon all indus-
tries, and indeed upon our national welfare.

The Brooklands Agreement has formed a basis
of most of the agreements which have been entered
into, since it was formulated, between employers
and employed in the other staple industries. Sup-
ported on both sides by strong organisations, the
Brooklands Agreement has been faithfully kept,
although differences of opinion as to the reading
of some of its clauses have arisen from time to time.
Where a clause has been shown to operate
inequitably as between one side and the other,
amendments have been made. The satisfactory
working of this Agreement is shown by the fact
that although disputes have frequently reached an
acute stage, only on two occasions has an entire
rupture occurred, both being brought about by one
section of the operatives, but affecting the whole
industry. This is a vast change from the eighteen
years prior to the signing of the Brooklands Agree-

256

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

ment, when strikes and lockouts were very frequent.
Had this state of things continued, there is little
doubt that half the cotton trade of England would
have been lost.

Some particulars of the operation of the Brook-
lands Agreement in dealing with disputes may be
interesting.

If a grievance in any particular mill occurs and
the complaint of the operatives cannot be satisfac-
torily dealt with by the employer, the secretary of
the local Employers' Association and the local
Trade Union secretary immediately take the matter
in hand with a view to satisfactorily settling the
dispute. If they fail, a small Joint Committee of
the local Associations on both sides is summoned.
The meeting must be held within seven days, and
is attended by three representatives from the
respective associations of employers and operatives
along with their secretaries. Should these fail to
arrive at a settlement, the matter is then taken out
of the hands of the local Associations and referred
to the Operatives' Amalgamation and the
Employers' Federation, and a joint meeting, which
must be held within seven days, is arranged, and
the dispute is adjudicated upon by an entirely
different joint committee.

In the case of disputes affecting the trade as a
whole, these are dealt with by the Employers'
Federation on the one hand and the Operatives'
Amalgamation on the other. A joint meeting for
the discussion of the complaint or demand must

257

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

be held after the stipulated month's notice is given
by either side.

With the other regulations which have to be ob-
served a considerable time must elapse before a
crisis is reached either in a local or general dispute.

At the close of a general dispute in 1905, in the
spinning section of the cotton industry, a clause
was added to the terms of settlement which bound
both sides to meet for the purposes of formulating
a scheme for the regulation of wages according
to the state of trade. A scheme for this purpose
was afterwards formulated which provides three
sets of experts, who are not only independent of
the employers and operatives, but are each indepen-
dent of the other, the first dealing with the pur-
chase of the raw material, the second with the sale
of the yarn, and the third with the gross margin
arrived at between the price paid for the raw
material and the price obtained for the yarn, and
from this, to ascertain, after deducting all the
expenses (which vary according to the time under
review), what return is left on the capital employed,
and whether a rise or fall in wages in accordance
with the Brooklands Agreement is warranted. It
will be seen that all speculation for a rise or fall in
the market is entirely eliminated. The Brooklands
Agreement does not admit of more or less than a
5 per cent, rise or fall in wages at a time. After an
experimental test of this scheme had been made at
mutually selected mills, it was agreed there should
be no change of wages for five years from July,
1910, and that v\-hen a change was made, either up

258

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

or down, it should be made for two years, instead
of twelve months as originally provided for by the
Brooklands Agreement.

In an industry so highly technical as that of
cotton spinning only those engaged in the industry
can be expected to have either the knowledge or
the experience which would entitle them to give
an opinion upon technical points of dispute when
they arise, but this last process for dealing with a
dispute regarding the rise or fall in wages from
which the greatest fear of deadlock is to be expected,
would materially assist an Industrial Court to
arrive at an equitable decision. Notwithstanding
everything that has been done there is always a
possibility of a break-off of negotiations, therefore
means must be found for trying to prevent a strike
or lockout beginning, or for bringing the dis-
putants together when this occurs for the purpose
of settling the dispute, and this is where the work
of the proposed Industrial Court would begin. In
the cotton spinning industry the intervention of
third parties has never been popular either with
employers or operatives. Where intervention has
taken place, the good offices of the third parties
have been confined almost entirely to convening a
conference of the disputants when they had broken
off. Disputes have always ultimately been settled
by negotiations carried on between the parties
themselves. The interdependence of industries
and the suffering inflicted by a strike upon such a
large proportion of the community who have no
voice in the dispute renders it necessary that sooner

259

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

or later intervention in a dispute in one of the staple
industries must come if the disputants themselves
will not agree to a settlement. This being the case,
I contend that it would be to the benefit of everyone
— employers, workers, and the community at large,
if an industrial court existed to which reference
could be voluntarily made when a deadlock in the
negotiations has ensued.

In July last, during the dispute in the various
transport trades, I ventured for the first time to
make public the plan which I had, until then, been
advocating privately, to prevent if possible the re-
currence of such an industrial upheaval as that
from which we were then suffering — an upheaval
which completely paralysed the trade of the greatest
commercial centre of the world, involving enor-
mous loss to the community, and causing intense
suffering amongst the poor, the families of the
strikers being perhaps the greatest sufferers.

Briefly, the scheme which I have proposed would
involve the creation of a new department, with a
permanent non-political chairman, deputy, and
staff, together with an advisory body consisting of
the men both on the side of Capital and Labour
who hold the most prominent positions in connec-
tion with the staple industries of the country, men
who have had to deal with the general disputes
which have occurred from time to time in these
industries. Of course the proposed advisory body
would only be called together in the event of a dead-
lock arising in disputes affecting the staple indus-
tries, which are interdependent and which seriously

260

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

affect the national welfare. Smaller disputes would
be dealt with by the permanent official staff.

The work of this new department is not intended
to interfere in the slightest degree with the existing
organisations of employers or workmen or existing
Conciliation Boards. I am, and always have been,
entirely in favour of collective bargaining. I want
to see both the employers' and the workmen's
organisations as strong as possible. What my
scheme suggests is that when efficiently organised
bodies come to a deadlock in negotiations over a
disputed matter they should take their case before
a tribunal capable of giving an impartial decision.
My proposals follow the lines of the Brooklands
Agreement in the cotton industry. The dispute
would be taken for the time being out of the hands
of the combatants. They would be free to accept
the offices of the independent tribunal and state
their case to men representing the widest experience
of both Capital and Labour. There is no sugges-
tion of arbitrarily enforcing that tribunal's deci-
sion. On the contrary, both parties will have per-
fect freedom to reject or accept it, and my proposals
contain nothing to prevent the employers ultimately
declaring a lockout or the workmen coming out on
strike. What the tribunal would ensure is that
the matters in dispute would have calm and dis-
passionate consideration, and as a consequence the
finding of the tribunal would carry great weight.

Before such a tribunal as I suggest, I am con-
vinced that genuine grievances would receive a fair
hearing and exorbitant demands would be con-

261

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

demned. Capital and Labour each has its rights,
which in the interests of both must be respected.

The publicity given to my scheme evoked the
widest support in the press, and there have been
many advocates of its adoption. On July I7th last,
Mr. Asquith (Prime Minister), replying to a ques-
tion by Mr. G. N. Barnes (Blackfriars Division,
Glasgow), said : —

" My attention has been called to the letter1 to
which my honourable friend has referred. I can
assure him that any feasible and properly sup-
ported plan which might tend to prevent or
shorten industrial warfare would receive the
earnest attention of the Government."
With a view to obtaining support for proposals
which I felt sure would commend themselves very
generally, I put myself into communication with
the heads of the great municipalities throughout
the United Kingdom, inviting their co-operation
and through them the support of prominent repre-
sentatives of Capital and Labour in their localities.
In a very short time I found that my proposals
were viewed with sympathy all over the country.
Although this work was begun and has had to

1 The letter referred to was written by me to the Lord Mayor
of Manchester on July 10th last, dealing with the subject. I
was much aided at the commencement of my work by the Lord
Mayor of Manchester (Mr. Chas. Behrens), who not only heartily
endorsed the proposals but lent his great influence to secure their
adoption. The admirable letter which he wrote me in support of
the scheme must have produced a deep impression upon the other
chief magistrates whose co-operation was invited.

262

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

be carried on during the principal holiday season
of the year, the response has been of the most en-
couraging character. The heads of many of our
large municipalities, captains of industry and com-
merce, and many of the best known labour leaders
in the great industries, have signed the memorial in
favour of my proposals, and I am receiving addi-
tional support daily, on the return to business after
the holidays, from those who were unable to
respond on account of absence.

On August 1 5th, by invitation of the Prime
Minister and the President of the Board of Trade,
the Presidents of some of the most important
federations of employers met at 10, Downing Street,
for an informal exchange of views on the industrial
position, and later in the day a corresponding
meeting of leading representatives of the large trade
unions was also held. Although considerable dis-
appointment has been expressed that no announce-
ment of the result of these meetings has yet been
issued, I have it on the highest authority that the
Government is giving the most careful considera-
tion to the whole question of the amicable settlement
of industrial disputes.

Various schemes, including the Bill promoted by
Mr. Will Crooks, M.P., have been brought forward
for the settlement of labour disputes. In most, if
not all of these, there is an element of compulsion.
My long experience has taught me that compulsion
is not practicable. Although by the adoption of
compulsory measures there may have been some
degree of success in the colonies, it must not be lost

263
R

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

sight of that the industries there are of small dimen-
sions compared with those in the United Kingdom.

I have been informed that in Australia, where
a strike had been declared and carried on in direct
opposition to the law, the strikers marched in pro-
cession declaring that they had broken the law with
intent, asking the authorities at the same time to
lock them up. It will be readily seen that even
with a body of 10,000, or perhaps 20,000 men, how
impossible was the situation in Australia. How
much more would it be with industries employing
hundreds of thousands of workmen.

As an illustration of the interdependence of
industries, I might cite the instance of how seri-
ously the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Com-
pany is affected by a prolonged dispute in the
cotton industry, and vice versa. A dispute in the
transport services has recentlr had the effect, not
only of stopping 20 million spindles, but of paralys-
ing two of the greatest distributing centres in the
world — Manchester and Liverpool. The effects of
the dispute are to be found in the enormous
pecuniary loss which the community has suffered.

I have tried to show that the creation of an In-
dustrial Tribunal is a matter of supreme importance
to the national welfare, and it is to be hoped that
everyone will realise the absolute necessity for pro-
viding efficient means for dealing with our indus-
trial position as a whole.

In conclusion, I will summarise the main points
of my scheme and the advantages which would
accrue if my proposals were put into operation : —

264

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

1. The most experienced men connected with the

conduct of the great industries, and repre-
senting both Capital and Labour, would be
brought into close personal contact.

It is clear to me that if we are to main-
tain our industrial and commercial pre-
eminence, those representative men must
take a more prominent position than they
have done hitherto in dealing with the
great problems affecting both industry and
commerce.

2. To the Industrial Tribunal could be referred

all problems for dealing adequately with the
industrial position as a whole.

3. All industries are interdependent, and indi-

vidual industries are frequently paralysed by
disputes arising with one section of that in-
dustry.

4. Efficient organisation, on both sides, being

necessary for the conduct and smooth work-
ing of all industries, it follows that recogni-
tion by representatives of Capital of the right
of workmen to combine and to confer is
essential.

5. Experience in the past has proved that there is

little chance of agreements being repudiated
when both sides are efficiently organised.

6. Conversely, when either the employers' or

workmen's organisations are inefficient the
repudiation of both leaders and agreements
may follow.

265

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

7. It is doubtful if any legal enactment could be

formulated which could compel large bodies
of men to work if they decided not to work,
and, equally, no law could be formulated
which could compel them to keep agreements
entered into between representatives of
Capital and Labour.

8. A fair hearing of a case in dispute by an im-

partial tribunal, and the publicity given, if
necessary, to the hearing and to the award,
would ensure the redress of just grievances
on the one hand, and the resistance of un-
reasonable demands on the other.

9. The great "third party," which includes not

only the organised workers in other trades,
but the army of unorganised workers, and
the innumerable commercial and other
interests which would be seriously prejudiced
by a strike or lock-out, would join forces in
their denunciation of either a strike or lock-
out which was entered upon without the
matter in dispute being referred to the Indus-
trial Tribunal, or in the event of non-accept-
ance of the award, after submission to the
Tribunal.

This power, together with the support
of the Press, exercised against a strike or
lock-out entered into and continued with-
out applying to the Court, or against the
Court's award, would be the most powerful
266

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

influence that could be exerted in termi-
nating such a dispute, and it would go far
to render both strikes and lock-outs un-
necessary.

10. Interference with the right to strike or to lock-"

out would probably seriously militate against
the efficiency of the organisation of both
sides. All that can be done is make it
extremely difficult for the dislocations to
occur.

11. It must always be remembered that the adop-

tion of my proposals would not interfere with
any existing organisation of employers or
workpeople, or with any conciliation board.
The Industrial Tribunal would only be
brought into operation when these had failed
to effect settlements.

C. W. MACARA.

ADDENDA.

After the publication of the foregoing article in
the FINANCIAL REVIEW OF REVIEWS the following
statement was issued by the Board of Trade,1 dated
October loth, 1911 : —

His Majesty's Government have recently had
under consideration the best means of strengthen-
ing and improving the existing official machinery
for settling and for shortening industrial disputes
by which the general public are adversely affected.
With this end in view, consultations have recently

1. Government Blue Book Report on Enquiry into Industrial
Agreements. Cd. 6952. 1913.

267

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

taken place between the Prime Minister and the
President of the Board of Trade, and a number of
representative employers and workmen specially
conversant with the principal staple industries of
the country and with the various methods adopted
in those industries for the preservation of peaceful
relations between employers and employed.

Following on these consultations, and after con-
sideration of the whole question, the President of
the Board of Trade, on behalf of His Majesty's
Government, has established an Industrial Council
representative of employers and workmen. The
Council has been established for the purpose of
considering and of inquiring into matters referred
to them affecting trade disputes ; and especially of
taking suitable action in regard to any dispute
referred to them affecting the principal trades of
the country, or likely to cause disagreements involv-
ing the auxiliary trades, or which the parties before
or after the breaking out of a dispute are themselves
unable to settle.

In taking this course the Government do not
desire to interfere with but rather to encourage and
to foster such voluntary methods or agreements as
are now in force, or are likely to be adopted for the
prevention of stoppage of work or for the settlement
of disputes. But it is thought desirable that the
operations of the Board of Trade in the discharge
of their duties under the Conciliation Act, 1896,
should be supplemented and strengthened, and that
effective means should be available for referring
such difficulties as may arise in a trade to investiga-

268

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

tioii, conciliation, or arbitration, as the case may
be.

The Council will not have any compulsory
powers.

The following gentlemen, in their individual
capacity, have accepted Mr. Sydney Buxton's invi-
tation to serve on the Council : —

EMPLOYERS' REPRESENTATIVES.

Mr. George Ainsworth. — Chairman of the Steel Ingot Makers'
Association.

Sir Hugh Bell, Bt., J. P.— President of the Iron, Steel and
Allied Trades Federation, and Chairman of the Cleveland Mine
Owners' Association.

Sir G. H. Claughton, Bt., J.P. — Chairman of the London and
North-Western Railway Company.

Mr. W. A. Clowes. — Chairman of the London Master Printers'
Association.

Mr. J. H. C. Crockett. — President of the Incorporated Federated
Associations of Boot and Shoe Manufacturers of Great Britain
and Ireland.

Mr. F. L. Davis, J.P.— Chairman of the South Wales Coal
Conciliation Board.

Mr. T. L. Devitt. — Chairman of the Shipping Federation,
Limited.

Sir Thomas R. Ratcliffe Ellis. — Secretary of the Lancashire and
Cheshire Coal Owners' Association and Joint Secretary of the
Board of Conciliation of the Coal Trade of the Federated
Districts, etc.

Mr. F. W. Gibbins.— Chairman of the Welsh Plate and Sheet
Manufacturers' Association.

Sir Charles W. Macara, Bt., J.P. — President of the Federation
of Master Cotton Spinners' Associations.

Mr. Robert Thompson, J.P., M. P. —Past President of the
Ulster Flax Spinners' Association.

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

Mr. Alexander Siemens. — Chairman of the Executive Board of
the Engineering Employers' Federation.

Mr. J. W. White. — President of the National Building Trades
Employers' Federation.

WORKMEN'S REPRESENTATIVES.

Right Hon. Thomas Burt, M.P. — General Secretary of the
Northumberland Miners' Mutual Confident Association.

Mr. T. Ashton, J.P. — Secretary of the Miners' Federation of
Great Britain and General Secretary of the Lancashire and
Cheshire Miners' Federation.

Mr. C. W. Bowerman, M.P. — Secretary of the Parliamentary
Committee of the Trades Union Congress and President of the
Printing and Kindred Trades Federation of the United Kingdom.

Mr. F. Chandler, J.P. — General Secretary of the Amalgamated
Society of Carpenters and Joiners.

Mr. J. R. dynes, J.P., M.P. — Organising Secretary of the
National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers of Great
Britain and Ireland.

Mr. H. Gosling. — President of the National Transport Workers'
Federation and General Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of
Watermen, Lightermen, and Watchmen of River Thames.

Right Hon. Arthur Henderson, M.P. — Friendly Society of
Ironfoundera.

Mr. John Hodge, M.P. — General Secretary of the British
Steel Smelters, Mill, Iron, and Tinplate Workers' Amalgamated
Association.

Mr. W. Mosses. — General Secretary of the Federation of
Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades and of the United Pattern-
makers' Association.

Mr. W. Mullin, J. P.— President of the United Textile Factory
Workers' Association and General Secretary of the Amalgamated
Association of Card and Blowing Room Operatives.

Mr. E. L. Poulton. — General Secretary of the National Union
of Boot and Shoe Operatives.

Mr. Alexander Wilkie, J.P., M.P. — Secretary of the Shipyard
Standing Committee under the National Agreement of 1909 and

270

THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL

General Secretary of the Shipconstructive and Shipwrights'
Society.

Mr. J. E. Williams. — General Secretary of the Amalgamated
Society of Railway Servants.

Additions may be made to the above list.

The members of the Council will in the first instance hold office
for one year.

Sir George Askwith, K.C.B., K.C., the present Comptroller-
General of the Labour Department of the Board of Trade, has
been appointed to be Chairman of the Industrial Council with
the title of Chief Industrial Commissioner, and Mr. H. J. Wilson,
of the Board of Trade, to be Registrar of the Council.

271

APPENDIX E i.

INDUSTRIAL UNREST.

INQUIRY BY THE INDUSTRIAL COUNCIL.

The following is an extract from the Times report
of the proceedings in the House of Commons, June
I4th, 1912 : —

Sir G. Toulmin (Bury, Lanes.) asked the Prime
Minister whether he had any statement to make in
fegard to any action which the Government pro-
posed to take with reference to industrial unrest.

Mr. Asquith : From the experience derived from
the industrial disputes which have lately occurred,
it has become evident that one of the chief difficul-
ties in the way of peaceful and friendly relations
between employers and men is the want of effective
methods for securing the due observance of indus-
trial agreements by both sides. Further, where
agreements are come to between employers and
workmen in regard to conditions of employment,
the agreement, though binding on those who are
parties to it, is not binding on the whole of the
trade or district.

These matters affect the employers and the work-
men alike, and it seems essential to ascertain — (i)
what is the best method of securing the due fulfil-
ment of industrial agreements; (2) how far indus-
trial agreements which are made between repre-

272

INDUSTRIAL UNREST

sentative bodies of employers and of workmen
should be enforced throughout the particular trade
or district.

The Government are anxious to have inquiry
made into the matter, and to receive advice from
those best qualified to give it. In these circum-
stances they propose to refer the above question to
the Industrial Council, which is representative of
the employers and of the men in the great indus-
tries of the country ; to request the Council carefully
to consider the matter ; to take such evidence as they
may think fit ; and to report to the Government any
conclusions to which they may come. The view
of the Government has been strengthened by the
following resolution of the Industrial Council, who
considered the matter yesterday :—

" The question of the maintenance of industrial
agreements having come before the Industrial
Council, that Council are of opinion that this sub-
ject is of the highest importance to employers and
trade unions and workpeople generally, and would
welcome an immediate inquiry into the matter."
The resolution was agreed to unanimously.
The Government are, therefore, requesting the
Industrial Council to undertake the inquiry, and
they will give the most earnest attention to any
recommendations which the Council may be able
to make.

Mr. Bonar Law (Lancashire, Bootle) : Do we
understand that the terms of the reference to the
Council will strictly limit them not merely to an
inquiry as to the best means of getting agreements

273

INDUSTRIAL UNREST

carried out, but to the consideration of the pro-
posals made by the Government ? Will the
reference be wider than is indicated in the right hon.
gentleman's answer?

Mr. Asquith repeated the terms of the reference.

Mr. Bonar Law : Does not the second head of the
reference limit the Industrial Council rather more
than is desirable ? Would it not be better to leave
it to the Council themselves to consider the best
method of inquiry ?

Mr. Asquith : It is intended that they should. If
the right hon. gentleman thinks that the words are
not adequate for the purpose, I will have them re-
moulded. I quite agree that should be within the
purview of the inquiry.

Mr. Ramsay Macdonald (Leicester, Lab.): Will
the Industrial Council have power to spend money
in the furtherance of this inquiry ; will the Indus-
trial Council itself sit as a committee of inquiry;
and is it the intention of the Government that the
evidence taken will be published as well as the
report of the Industrial Council ?

Mr. Asquith : In regard to the first point, what-
ever funds are necessary will be placed at the dis-
posal of the Industrial Council. I take it that they
will hear relevant evidence from whatever quarter
it is tendered. As to the publication of the evi-
dence, that is a question which had better be con-
sidered later. The Government will consult with
the Industrial Council, and I will give a reply on
Monday.

Mr. Clynes asked whether the settlement of the

274

INDUSTRIAL UNREST

Transport Workers' dispute was not delayed or
prevented by the refusal of the employers to meet
the men.

Mr. Asquith : I hardly think that arises out of my
answer. As I stated two days ago, so far as the
Government are concerned, our good offices are
available.
In the House of Commons on June i8th : —

Mr. Ramsay Macdonald (Leicester, Lab.) asked
the Prime Minister whether it was proposed that
the Industrial Council was to take evidence in the
inquiry into industrial agreements in public; and
whether that evidence was to be published.

Mr. Asquith : I am informed that the Industrial
Council are of opinion that the hearing of any evi-
dence which the Council may take upon the matter
referred to them should be open to the Press, and
the notes of the evidence ultimately be published.1

1. This enquiry occupied 38 long sittings, 92 witnesses were
examined, and a Parliamentary Blue Book (665 pages) was issued.
Minutes of Evidence taken before the Industrial Council in
connection with their Enquiry into Industrial Agreements. Cd.
6953. 1913.

275

APPENDIX E2.

CAPITAL AND LABOUR :
MEANS FOR PROMOTING INDUSTRIAL PEACE.1
(Paper read by Sir Charles W. Macara, Bart.,
before the British Association for the Advance-
ment of Science, on Wednesday, September
8th, 1915.)

The subject we have to-day met to discuss — viz.,
the relationship between Capital and Labour — is
one of supreme importance at any time, but more
especially so at a time of national crisis such as that
through which we are at present passing.

In the early days of the war, I was one of those
approached by representatives of the Government
regarding the effect the war would have upon indus-
try, and what could be done to minimise the disloca-
tion that was certain to ensue and to keep the work-
people employed as much as possible.

Recognising the colossal task with which the
Government was confronted, and that it was essen-
tial that the assistance of the most experienced
practical men should be taken advantage of, I
strongly advocated J;hat all existing organisations
of capital and labour, and indeed of every kind,
should be at once brought into requisition in pre-
ference to forming new ones to deal with the crisis.
There is ample correspondence to prove, and resolu-
tions have been passed and published shewing that
this supremely important matter has been urged on

1. Reprinted from " Credit, Industry and War," 1915, edited
A. W. Kirkaldy, M.A.

376

CAPITAL AND LABOUR

the Government without avail. Everyone who has
had experience of such work will realise that
creating new organisations cannot be efficiently
carried out without expenditure of much time and
labour, whereas it is comparatively easy to adapt
existing organisations to deal with great and sudden
emergencies — and time is an all-important factor.

Having visited many of the principal countries of
the world, and having studied their methods of
working, this country is as well organised as any,
but the Government has not understood how to
utilise existing organisations as they should have
done, and in this respect we have been placed at
a disadvantage with enemy countries whose Govern-
ments, on the outbreak of war, at once utilised all
their existing organisations, and deputed to their
most experienced industrial and commercial organ-
isers, definite and important duties in connection
with the carrying on of the war. Had this been
done in England, instead of Ministers keeping
matters in their own hands, it is my opinion that
we could have faced this great upheaval much more
effectively than has been the case.

Efficient co-operation of the industrial, com-
mercial, financial, scientific, transport, and labour
interests with the Government would have enabled
our enormous resources to have been brought into
requisition from the very commencement of the war.

As it is, after twelve months of war we are only
now realising what proper co-ordination of all our
vast resources might have accomplished — indeed,
the difference so far as practical results are con-

277

CAPITAL AND LABOUR

cerned between thorough organisation and the re-
verse can scarcely, be comprehended. It is un-
fortunate that the services of men who have led
the great organisations of capital and labour have
not been taken advantage of to anything like the
extent they should have been.

Had this co-operation between the various organ-
isations existed, it might have been possible to have
dealt more effectively with the problems connected
with the supply of the necessaries of life, which, I
pointed out to the Government, would not only con-
stitute the chief difficulty in carrying on the war,
but would be the main factor in terminating the
struggle. Certainly, so far as this country is con-
cerned, much might have been done to prevent the
undue rise in prices which has inflicted hardships
upon all, and especially on the working people, and
has been the main cause of the industrial unrest
that exists. On the other hand, nothing could
have been more splendid than the response of the
nation to the call to arms, and the magnificent and
unprecedented heroism and self-sacrifice which have
been displayed — but, again, the failing has been
the want of co-ordination of the resources in men
with the resources for the production of the muni-
tions of war, which I believe the National Register
will speedily remedy.

It is useless, however, dwelling upon the errors
of the past which cannot now be altered, and the
only object in referring to them is that in the future
full advantage may be taken of the experience

278

CAPITAL AND LABOUR

gained, so that the vast resources of the nation may
be utilised to the fullest extent.

My long connection with the cotton industry, one
of the greatest and most complex of our national
interests, has compelled my giving a large amount
of attention to the relationship between capital and
labour, not in this industry alone, but has brought
me into close personal touch with many of the
leaders of capital and labour in other staple indus-
tries, all of which are interdependent.

It has been my endeavour over a long term of
years to impart as much information as possible
regarding what might be considered the employers'
view of the carrying on of the industries to those
who were selected by the working people to safe-
guard their interests. By so doing I felt that the
realisation of the employers' and workpeople's
interests being identical, would go a long way to
smoothing over the differences which from time to
time arise, and would help to prevent disputes re-
garding the division of the profits of industry, and
also to promote mutual respect for the rights of
both.

I attribute the comparative freedom from general
stoppages in the cotton industry during the past
twenty years — an immense change from the condi-
tions that obtained in the previous twenty years —
to the operation of the famous Charter which termi-
nated the twenty weeks' struggle in 1892-93, and
which declares in its preamble that " the representa-
tives of the employers and the representatives of the
employed hereby admit that disputes and differences

279

CAPITAL AND LABOUR

- -iS3

«viiB

between them are inimical to the interests of both
parties, and that it is expedient and desirable that
some means should be adopted for the future where-
by such disputes and differences may be expediti-
ously and amicably settled and strikes and lock-outs
avoided." Other important factors are the educa-
tional work that has been extensively carried on,
and the co-operation of the representatives of the
operatives with the representatives of the employers
in the promotion of public-spirited movements for
the maintenance and extension of an industry which
plays such a prominent part in our national welfare.
I have endeavoured to carry this educational work
still further, and, after numerous conferences, a plan
was devised and has now been in operation for a
number of years, whereby outside experts, who are
independent of both workpeople and employers, and
each independent of the other, are brought in, and
by the aid of a tabulation of thoroughly reliable
statistics it is possible to shew accurately the profits
of the industry at any given time or over a period
of years. This scheme provides automatic arbitra-
tion without an arbitrator.

Another great factor in preventing wages dis-
putes in the cotton trade during the past twenty
years has been the limiting of the percentage of the
rise and fall of wages, and also that when any
change has taken place a certain time must elapse
before any further change can occur. It is much
to be desired that this condition could be agreed
upon in all industries. When fully explained, the
simplicity of the scheme for ascertaining profits and

280

CAPITAL AND LABOUR

its fairness is at once apparent, and I believe it is
capable of being adapted to almost any industry.
Disputes very often arise from an exaggerated view
of the return on capital invested in industry gener-
ally, and if some means can be devised by which
this can be fairly accurately gauged it would often
prevent unreasonable demands being made by work-
people or the refusals on the part of employers to
share in prosperity.

When industries are well organised on both sides,
and vicissitudes arise which may render it necessary
to temporarily curtail production, co-operation 'be-
tween the organisations of employers and work-
people might be requisitioned with most beneficial
effect.

Feeling strongly that many disputes might be
avoided by thorough investigation by practical men
when a deadlock arises, I conceived the idea of the
Government appointing a body consisting of an
equal number of thoroughly experienced representa-
tives of capital and labour connected with the staple
industries of the country, which, as I have already
said, are interdependent. After securing the ap-
proval of many of the most prominent leaders of
capital and labour, the Industrial Council was ap-
pointed by the Government in October, 1911, and
high hopes were entertained as to the services this
body would render in the cause of industrial peace.
But for some reason which it is difficult to under-
stand, and which has never been explained, this
body was only utilised to a very limited extent
before the war, and, notwithstanding the very con-

281

CAPITAL AND LABOUR

siderable industrial unrest that has occurred since
the war, it has not been utilised at all.

Another matter which js equally inexplicable is
that the result of an extensive inquiry into industrial
agreements and their observance which was deputed
by the Government to the Industrial Council, and
which occupied 38 long sittings in 1912-13, has
never been utilised.

A perusal of the report that was issued proves
conclusively not only the desirability of, but the
absolute necessity for, the thorough organisation of
both capital and labour, and that where this obtains
disputes are usually settled between the parties
themselves. The main obstacle to the perfecting
of these organisations is the selfishness of a small
minority of both employers and workpeople, who
remain outside the various organisations, but who
do not hesitate to take full advantage of the public-
spirited and self-sacrificing work of the majority.

A good deal has been said about trade-union
limitation of output. I venture to express the
opinion that this is against the true interests of
labour — indeed, it would be on a par with the perse-
cution of the great inventors who have done more
than any other men to improve the position of
labour, and to place England in the proud position
of being the greatest industrial and commercial
nation of the world.

I am personally acquainted with many of the
official representatives of labour in the staple indus-
tries, and upon the whole I have formed a high
opinion of their capacity and fairness, and it is only

282

CAPITAL AND LABOUR

by the rank and file following their leaders that they
can hope to be successful in securing their legiti-
mate rights — an army without leaders can accom-
plish nothing.

The inquiry by the Industrial Council, already
referred to, also demonstrated that compulsory arbi-
tration for large bodies of men by legal enactment
is impossible, and therefore it should never have
been included in the " Munitions Act."

I hold strongly that the interference of politicians
with industrial disputes is calculated to generate
bitterness between capital and labour, and often
leads to inconclusive settlements which are against
the best interests of the industries. It is not to be
expected that it is possible for those who devote
their whole energies to politics to have the necessary
knowledge of the intricacies of the numerous indus-
tries or the varying conditions under which they
are carried on.

The employers have the idea that this interference
places them at a disadvantage, and that such a
feeling should exist, although the workpeople may
gain an immediate apparent advantage, is ulti-
mately prejudicial to the real interests of industrial
peace and the national welfare. In this connection
I should like to emphasise that a large proportion
of the gross earnings of industry goes in the pay-
ment of labour and of the expenses necessary to the
running of the industries, and even under normal
conditions it is only a small margin that is left to
remunerate those who have invested their capital.
In the event of such a crisis as the present, this may

283

CAPITAL AND LABOUR

not only vanish but there may be a diminution of
capital, and it must be borne in mind that the em-
ployers' resources are not unlimited.

The effect of the war on industry has been most
varied. Certain industries have been exceptionally
profitable ; others have suffered severely, notably
the cotton industry, which is dependent for over
three-quarters of its employment upon export trade
in competition with many other countries. To deal
with the wages question without taking into con-
sideration the varying copditions is obviously un-
fair. A late President of the Board of Trade made
a statement a year or two ago that a sum of no less
than ^2,400,000,000 is invested in joint-stock com-
panies alone in the United Kingdom. This vast
capital belongs to millions of people and is the
accumulated savings of brain and muscle, many
small investors depending upon it for their living.
There may be therefore quite as much suffering
among them from the effects of the war as among
the workpeople for whom this capital finds employ-
ment. A thorough investigation into all the circum-
stances is absolutely necessary before giving any
award in a wages dispute, instead of, as is too fre-
quently done, ignoring these considerations or
splitting the difference. If it is proved that an in-
dustry is making exceptional profits it is only fair
that the workpeople, who may be involved in extra
strain, should share in this prosperity, but in the
event of an industry being adversely affected this
policy might, in the long run, result in the work-
people being thrown out of work altogether.

284

CAPITAL AXD LABOUR

It would be difficult to conceive any better method
for preventing or settling disputes than such a body
as the Industrial Council. To this Council the
Government should refer all disputes that the
parties themselves fail to settle, and the decision
should be published.

In any dispute in a staple industry which results
in a strike or lock-out, it is not only the combatants
that suffer, but enormous numbers of people who
have no direct interest in the dispute are deprived
of their means of livelihood ; indeed, it must never
be overlooked that the whole trade of the country
is one vast organism, and it' is essential that the
national welfare must have the primary considera-
tion in any dispute that may arise.

Any refusal of the parties to a dispute to submit
their case to a tribunal composed of an equal num-
ber of experienced representatives of capital and
labour with a non-political chairman appointed by
the Government, would be strong presumptive evi-
dence against the fairness of their demands, and
the impression made on those whose interests are
seriously prejudiced by the dispute, and on the
public generally, is the only compulsion possible,
and it would usually be effective.
SUMMARY.

In this paper I have endeavoured to shew : —

1. That harmonious relationship between capital
and labour is always of the utmost importance, and
that at a time of great national crisis it is supremely
so.

2. That in order to cope with such a colossal

285

CAPITAL AND LABOUR

task as that by which the Government was con-
fronted, the task would have been lightened and
much would have been gained, had they at once
enlisted the assistance of experienced industrial
organisers, and co-ordinated all existing organisa-
tions.

3. That the United Kingdom is as well organised
as any other nation, and had there been effective
co-operation of the industrial, commercial, financial,
scientific, transport, and labour interests with the
Government from the commencement of the war,
the position in every respect to-day would have been
vastly better than it is.

4. That by the co-ordination of these interests,
the problems connected with the supply of the
necessaries of Ifie, and with the undue raising of
prices of commodities, might have been coped with
much more successfully than they have been.

5. That the rise in the prices of commodities has
undoubtedly been the main factor in creating indus-
trial unrest.

6. That the only object in calling attention to the
errors of the past is that we might profit by the
experience gained, and so utilise to the utmost the
vast resources at disposal.

7. That the interference by politicians with indus-
trial disputes is to be strongly deprecated, often
leading to inconclusive settlements, it being im-
possible for them to have the necessary knowledge
of the intricacies of the different industries or their
varied conditions of working ; that such interference
only engenders bitterness and does ultimate harm.

286

CAPITAL AND LABOUR

8. That thorough organisation of both capital
and labour is essential to the smooth working of the
industries, and that where this is the case, disputes
are generally settled by negotiations between the
parties themselves.

9. That disputes frequently arise from an
exaggerated estimate of the return on capital, and
that schemes for ascertaining this return should
be promoted, as exaggerated views often lead to un-
reasonable demands.

10. That the Industrial Council, which was ap-
pointed by the Government in 1911, and which is
composed of an equal representation of capital and
labour, with a non-political chairman, has not been
utilised since the outbreak of war, that no adequate
explanation of this has been offered, and that the
valuable report of its inquiry into industrial agree-
ments has not been made use of.

11. That the enforcement of compulsory arbitra-
tion where large bodies of men are concerned is an
impossibility, and that an inquiry into the merits
of a dispute by experienced men representing
capital and labour, and the publicity given to its

• findings, would, together with public opinion
generally, supply the only effective compulsion.

12. That trade-union limitation of output is
against the best interests of labour.

13. That official representatives of labour are
generally men of capacity and fairness, deserving
of the confidence of the rank and file.

14. That the effect of the war upon industries has
been varied, and that any war bonus or wages ad-

287

vance should only be granted after full investigation
by leaders of capital and labour.

CONCLUSION.

In conclusion, I have endeavoured to deal with
a complex problem from the standpoint of one who
has during the past twenty years been frequently
placed in the difficult position of having to preside
over conferences of masters and men in connection
with disputes, while occupying the position of Presi-
dent of the Masters' Federation during that period.
Whatever success may have attended this work is
mainly attributable to being able to eliminate per-
sonal interests, and to view matters solely from the
standpoint of endeavouring to act fairly between
man and man. From a wide experience I have
come to the conclusion that nothing is gained from
strikes and lock-outs ; that the leaders of capital and
labour have exceptionally heavy responsibilities;
and that industrial peace, especially at present, is
absolutely essential. Mistakes and the difficulties
they cause frequently prove to be blessings in dis-
guise. So far as the British nation — I might say
Empire — is concerned the greater the difficulties to
be faced, the greater is the energy and determina-
tion to overcome them. It is fervently to be hoped
that such an arousing is now taking place and that
everyone is being made to feel the seriousness of
the situation, and that all classes must be prepared
to make any sacrifices that may be necessary to
ensure the speedy and victorious termination of the
unprecedented struggle in which we and our Allies
are engaged in defence of freedom and civilisation.

988

APPENDIX F

LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE
FREE TRADE UNION.

" Ardmore," St. Annes-on-the-Sea,

December i8th, 1909.
My Dear Sir,

Having occupied the responsible position of
President of the Master Cotton Spinners' Federa-
tion since 1894, and having also been Chairman
of the Committee of the International Cotton
Federation since its inauguration in 1904, it has
been necessary for me to give attention to all
problems connected with the cotton industry, the
development of which has been remarkable.
Although not a party politician, in view of the
threatened change in our fiscal policy I consider
it to be my duty to place before the electors in
every way I possibly can some facts regarding this
great industry : —

i . Lancashire, the centre of the cotton industry
of England, has during the last fifty years
doubled her population ; she has also doubled
her cotton machinery, considerably improved
its efficiency and increased the speed at
which it is run, with the result that not only
is there a proportionately greater output, but
the output is of immensely increased value.
289

LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT

2. The importance of the cotton industry of

England may be judged from the fact that its
products, in addition to providing for our
home requirements, represent about a third
of our total exports of manufactures. This
export trade is about three-quarters of the
production of our fifty-three-and-a-half million
spindles and the dependent machinery. These
exports go to the great neutral markets as
well as largely to the countries which have a
cotton industry of their own, 'forming part of
their exports. There are something like
seventy-eight million spindles in the other
twenty-one cotton manufacturing countries.
Next in importance to England comes the
United States of America with twenty-eight
million spindles, then on the continent of
Europe Germany leads with ten million
spindles ; in the Far East there are in India
five-and-a-half million spindles, and about
one-and-three-quarter millions spindles in
Japan.

3. In round figures the cotton crop of the world

now averages about twenty millions bales, and
a common fallacy of Tariff Reformers is to
gauge the value of the cotton industry of the
respective countries by the weight of raw
cotton consumed, thus displaying their utter
inexperience of the conditions under which
the industry is carried on. England, with
considerably over one-third of the spindles of
290

OF THE FREE TRADE UNION

the world, consumes annually four million
bales of cotton, whereas the United States of
America, with about half the number of
spindles there are in England, consumes five
million bales, and Germany, with considerably
less than a fifth of the spindles in England,
consumes one-and-three-quarter million bales.
This proves the absurdity of the Tariff
Reformers' contention. It is obvious that the
value of the cotton trade of the respective
countries can really only be gauged by the
extent of the machinery, the labour employed,
the fineness, variety, excellence, and value of
the fabrics produced.1

4. A.nother of the gross misrepresentations of the
advocates of Tariff Reform is that the present
depression in the cotton trade arises from
Free Trade. If so, how is it that every other
cotton manufacturing country in the world,
most of which are under Protection, is at
present in the same condition ? I say em-
phatically that the causes of the present
world-wide depression in the cotton trade
have nothing whatever to do with the fiscal
policy of this or any other country.

If a careful study had been made of the effect
Tariff Reform would have upon our greatest manu-

1. Between 1909 and 1913, the cotton trade throughout the world
increased in round figures from 131,500,000 to 143,500,000 spindles.
No tabulation has been possible since the war began.

291

LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT

facturing industry, I am of opinion it would never
have been launched, but, from the arguments of the
advocates of Tariff Reform, it is evident that no
proper investigation was ever made. From my
intercourse with the leading men in the cotton trade
of the world, and consequent knowledge of the
conditions under which the industry is carried on,
both at home and abroad, I am convinced that we
have advantages at present which we should be
deprived of were Tariff Reform adopted in England.
Its adoption would, in my opinion, not only enhance
the cost of building and equipping mills, but it
would also increase the cost of coal and other
requisites for running the mills; it would further
increase the cost of the numerous processes through
which cotton passes, each of which, like the building,
equipping, and running of mills, involves a large
amount of labour; therefore, the accumulated en-
hancement in the cost of the finished fabrics would
speedily undermine our position, and sooner or
later our gigantic export trade in cotton goods would
pass into other hands. The loss of a trade which
stands at the head of our exporting industries would
be a disaster not only to the millions of people
directly interested in it, but would seriously affect all
our national activities. In my opinion, none would
suffer more severely than the great landowners,
many of which seem to be the strongest advocates
of Tariff Reform. Their interests and those of the
agricultural classes are inseparably bound up with
the prosperity of our great manufacturing industries
and the power of these industries to maintain and

292

OF THE FREE TRADE UNION

extend our enormous export trade. It is well to
remember that within a radius of fifty miles of the
Manchester Exchange there is a population of eight
millions, and this area forms the largest outlet for
agricultural produce of any similar area within the
United Kingdom.

The United Kingdom is pre-eminently an indus-
trial and commercial nation dependent more than
any other country for the employment of her popula-
tion of forty-four millions upon the maintenance
and expansion of her foreign trade. In protected
countries the tendency is for the cost of living to
increase more and more ; this, coupled with the
demands of labour to obtain the conditions existing
in England, is undoubtedly reducing the power of
those nations to successfully compete in the markets
of the world.

Tariff Reform once begun in England would most
assuredly follow the course pursued by the nations
which have adopted Protection. One result would
be industrial strife in the endeavour to adjust the
changed conditions, and the enhancement of the
cost of production would also speedily follow. Both
of these would seriously prejudice our power of
continuing to secure the large share of the trade of
the world we at present possess.

My only object in addressing you, as the President
of the Free Trade Union, which I understand is a
non-party organisation, is that I am deeply concerned
about the maintenance of our pre-eminent position
as a commercial nation. I place this above all
other issues that are at present before the nation,

293

LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT

and I hope that the primary consideration of the
electors will be io return men to Parliament who
are pledged to continue our Free Trade policy,
which, circumstanced as we are, is, in my opinion,
vital to our national welfare.
I am,

Yours faithfully,

C. W. MACARA.

To the Rt. Hon. Arnold Morley,
President, Free Trade Union,
8, Victoria Street, Westminster,
London, S.W.

294

APPENDIX Fi.
MR. MACARA AND POLITICS.

DEFENCE OF MR. MACARA BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE
MANCHESTER ROYAL EXCHANGE.

(Manchester Evening News, January 6th, 1910.)

Speaking at the Chorlton Town Hall, last night,
Mr. A. A. Haworth,1 M.P. for South Manchester,
Chairman of the Manchester Royal Exchange, and
a principal of one of the most important cotton
concerns in the country, said : —

I saw in a Manchester paper this morning a very
angry article embodying a letter with a certain
number of signatories to it, some of whom some of
us have heard of, angry with Mr. Macara because
he has written certain letters to the Free Trade
League among other bodies, setting forward his
views on Tariff Reform as applied to the cotton
industry of Lancashire.

MR. MACARA'S POSITION IN THE COTTON TRADE.
Now I am not here in defence of Mr. Macara ; he is
well able to defend himself, and he might consider it
an impertinence on my part to put forward anything
in the nature of a defence on his behalf. But when I
see a man whom I respect, who has a position in
the cotton trade which is second to none in the
whole world of to-day, who has perhaps done more

1. Now Sir Arthur A. Haworth, Bart. Reprinted from the
Evening A7etr.«. January 6th, 1910.

295

MR. MACARA AND POLITICS

for the cotton trade than any man who ever lived
except the great inventors of the self-acting mule,
the spinning jenny, and the power loom — when I
see him abused as being guilty of writing these
letters as a political dodge, I, for one, as a private
individual, desire to enter my protest.

A BASELESS ACCUSATION.

First of all, Mr. Macara is accused of using his
position as President of the Federation of Master
Cotton Spinne'rs at home and Chairman of the
Federated Cotton Spinners of all the cotton
spinning countries of the world. But as far as 1
remember — I have not had time to look up the
letters again — they were not written in his capacity
as Chairman ; they were written from his private
address at St. Annes-on-the-Sea. He disclaimed
having any interest in any political party. To my
knowledge he has always, in the great work he has
done in organising the cotton trade for the general
benefit of operatives and cotton spinners alike,
avoided party conflicts.

POLITICAL VIEWS PERFECTLY CONCEALED.

To such an extent has he been able to conceal
his own views in politics that to my knowledge — I
don't know whether he would like me to say it or
not — he has been approached by both the great
political parties to become a candidate for Parlia-
mentary honours.

If those who attack Mr. Macara for the way he
has done this as an individual who cannot help
being the President of this great organisation,

296

MR. MACARA AND POLITICS

having been elected there by the men who know the
trade best, and know him as being the man best
fitted for that position — if they would for one
moment attempt to refute one single argument that
he has put forward as to why we should stick to
Free Trade, they would do more good to their cause.

297

APPENDIX Fa.

WHAT THE LEADERS OF THE OPERA-

TIVES IN THE COTTON TRADE AND

ALLIED INDUSTRIES THINK OF

PROTECTION!1

We believe that the supremacy of the United
Kingdom in the world's cotton trade is due to our
Free Trade policy, which enables us to buy the
materials we require for the production of manufac-
tured cotton at the lowest price without the addi-
tional burden of import duties. This minimum
capital outlay and the consequent saving in interest
and depreciation give the manufacturers of the
United Kingdom a great advantage in competition
with manufacturers in protected countries. Un-
taxed bread and meat and dairy produce have con-
tributed to the health and efficiency of the work-
people; and our Free Trade policy opens to us all
the markets of the world on the terms of the most
favoured nation.

We are convinced that any departure from our
Free Trade policy would cause great and irreparable
injury to the cotton trade, and its allied industries,
on which Lancashire and other parts of the country
so largely depend.
(Signed)

THOMAS ASHTON. WM. MULLIN.

JAMES CRINION. W. C. ROBINSON.

J. CROSS. D. J. SHACKLETON.

A. H. GILL. ALFRED SMALLEY.

WILLIAM MARSLAND. J . E. TATTERSALL.
January 3rd, 1910.

1. Vide Daily Press

398

APPENDIX F3.

LANCASHIRE COTTON TRADE.

GREAT MANIFESTO AGAINST TARIFF " REFORM."
A NON-PARTY STATEMENT.

.4

VITAL IMPORTANCE OF THE IssuE.1

The leaders of the Lancashire cotton industry,
irrespective of party politics, have been greatly con-
cerned at the definite adoption by the Conservative
party of the policy of Tariff " Reform." They hold
that this policy, if put into operation, would inflict
irretrievable disaster on the main industry of the
county. A manifesto has accordingly been prepared
in support of the views on this subject set forth by
Mr. C. W. Macara, and has been very largely
signed. The signatures printed below have been
collected within the space of two days, and they
could have been added to almost indefinitely if time
had allowed . It will be seen that almost every great
firm in the cotton and allied trades is represented by
the names of one or other of the directors, in the
list of signatories, and that the names, appended
within the short time during which the document
has been open for signature, are thoroughly repre-
sentative of Lancashire.

1, Reprinted from the Manchester Guardian, Jan. 14th, 1910,
299

GREAT MANIFESTO AGAINST

THE MANIFESTO.

The text of the Manifesto is as follows : —

We, the undersigned spinners, manufacturers,
and merchants connected with the cotton industry,
desire to state that, quite apart from party politics,
we unhesitatingly affirm our belief not only that
Free Trade is the best fiscal system for the country
generally, but that any resort to a system of
Tariff Reform would seriously jeopardise the
position of the cotton trade of Lancashire, and so
produce appalling disaster to the whole country.
We, therefore, thoroughly endorse the views
which have been set forth by Mr. C. W. Macara,
whose position makes him particularly conversant
with the facts obtaining in all the cotton-using
countries of the world.
Manchester, January i2th, 1910.
The following is the list of signatures : —

Ernest Agnew. G. B. Alexander.

A. Y. Agopian. H. Ashworth.

William Ashworth. Armitage & Rigby, Ltd.

Alfred K. Armitage. B. Noton Barclay.

James Arrowsmith. G. Beatson Blair.

R. Ashworth & Son. J. R. Barlow (Barlow A Jonee,

A. E. Ashton. Ltd.).

Thomas Ashton. Joseph Bell.

James H. Ainsworth, Alfred Brookes.

Francis Atkinson. G. F. Burditt.

James Ainsworth. Frederick Ball.

A. Abbott & Co. Wallace Brooks.

H. Arthur. Joseph Bles.

F. H. Ardern. John Blears.

J. W. Adam. P. Badger.

300

TARIFF " REFORM "

Richard Bond.

W. J. Bewley.

J. R. Broadhurst.

J. E. Bell.

J. Birtwistle.

Bailey & Roberts.

Bury Brother?.

John R, Byrom.

W. Burrows & Son, Ltd.

A. Bottomley.

S. Bottomley.

James Bentley.

Sir Jacob Behrens & Co.

John Boyd.

A. Beith.
Donald Beith.
W. Burrows.
T. Bannister,

J. B. Breacken.
Richard Barlow.
Charles Brown.
Birtwistle & Oddy.

B. Birtwistle

F. S. Bwrrows.
S. Bancroft.

H. Briggs & Co.

H. Barlow.

Beehive Spinning Co., Ltd.

Edwin Barlow.

John Barlow.

John W. Brooks.

H. Beswick.

Frank Barlow.

Boulaye Brothers.

H. A. Bunting.

G. A. Behrens.
George Bickham,

Henry Bannerman & Sons, Ltd

George Buckley.

Joshua Berry.

Adam Bradley.

James Bottomley.

Arnold W. Boyd.

John Broxap.

Thomas Butterworth.

James Barrow.

A. W. Bradbury.

John R. Brooks.

A. Birtwistle.

J. J. Briggs.

William Berry.

Thomas R. Bolton

H. R. Barnes.

J. Bottomley.

J. Bradbury.

J. A. Botham.

J. C. Broadbent,

J. W. Blackwell.

T. E. Bamford.

M. Burnitt.

A. Barlow & Son?.

C. Brumm.

Barlow Brothers & Greenwood.

H. Buckley.

J. Bamford.

E. H. Barnes.

S. L. Behrens & Co.

J. E. Bell.

R. H. Bowdler (Wesham Mill

Co., Ltd.)
James Butterworth.
•Joseph Barker.
Fred Bradshaw
S. Berry.

301

GREAT MANIFESTO AGAINST

J. M. Bradock.

W. Bracken.

J. S. Bass.

T. J. Bradburn.

J. E. Barrett.

S. D. Bles & Sons.

Allan H. Bright.

Alfred Crewdson.

Sir Frederick Cawley.

Arthur Carrington.

J. W. Crewdson.

Thomas E. Campbell.

Henry Cuncliffe & Son.

Robert H. Cooil.

J. W. Cochcroft.

Tom Carrington.

H. W. Carrington.

Edward T. Crook.

Joshua Crook & Sons, Ltd.

Tom Cox (Palmer Mill Co.,

Ltd.).

Collinge Brothers.
Thomas Catlow.
J. T. Cuncliffe.
Coates Manuf acting Co.. Ltd.
John Cocks.
Harry Cooper.
Hamlett Cocker.
G. H. Chadwick.
Thomas Clarke.
W. D. Chadfield.
Thomas Collier.
G. H. Crook.
Thomas Coates.
a. H. Clegg.
John Cheetham.
.Tames Caladine.

James Cheetham.

Miles Crompton.

J. W. Clarke.

M. Clegg.

Joseph Crook & Son. Ltd.

G. H. Clegg.

H. Clegg.

W. Carmichael.

J. Crompton.

J. Carr & Sons.

W. Cartlinge.

H. Crompton.

J. T. Chadwick.

J. E. Cockcroft.

J. Crabtree.

E. Catterall.

E. Cooper.

William Cheetham.

Joseph Chadwick.

J. S. Cheetham.

John Dodd (Platt Bros. & Co.,

Ltd.).
Tom Dean.
H. C. Dewhurst.
Harry Button.
Ernest M. Davies.
Josiah Doxey.
W. Dean.

Alexander Dowson.
W. Douny.
David Dyson.
Joseph Dugdale.
Daisyfield Eing Co.
A. Dawson.

Edward Dyson & Sons.
W. Dearden.
Abel Dearnaley.

302

TARIFF " REFORM "

Frank Dewhurst.
E. H. Dewhurst.
P. Dinwiddie
B. Dawson.
Walter Duckworth.
J. Derbyshire.
•]. Doodson.
George Dickins.
Alfred Emmott.
jrustav Eckhard.
John W. Exley.
T. W. Emmott & Co.
W. H. Eyre.

James Fletcher.

W. Scott Forbes.

Robinson Fouldg.

James Foulds.

Henry Fleet wood.

T. W. A. Forrest & Co., Ltd.

John Faulkner.

A. E. Fitton.

John Faulkner, Ltd.

Henry H. L. Fletcher.

Wra. Fergusson (J. Fergusson

& Co.).
W. Fischbach.

William Emery (William Emery, W. W. Fletcher (Ashton Bros.

Ltd.).

James Emery.

A. T. Eccles & Sons.

Robert Emmott.

T. Emmott & Sons.

James Edmnndson.

Edgar & Cothingy.

James Ellison.

William Emmet t.

Edward A. Eason.

Edward A. Eason, junior.

W. H. Eason.

J. Emmet t.

B. Ellinger.

W. Eller.

Edward Evans & Son.
George Entwistle.
Elson & Neill.
H. Ellison.
John W. Exley.
W. Arthur Elder.
James E. Evans.
A. 0. Evana.

& Co., Ltd.).
J. R. Forester.
John Flockton.
Jos. Frost.

C. Fielding.
J. Fielding.
A. Fielden.
John Fell.

H. Fieldman.
W. H. Frost.
A. S. Fulber.

D. E. Frith.
Jos. Foulds.
G. W. Fennell.
Thomas Fletcher.
Paul Fraser & Co.
N. H. Foulds.

S. Galk.
John Grey, Ltd.
Greenfield Mill Co.
H. Garstang.
James Garside.
Tom Garnett.

303

GREAT MANIFESTO AGAINST

G. P. Gunnis & Co.

James Gibbon & Son.

William Gibson.

William Gibbon.

H. Goble.

W. R. Grundy.

W. H. Greenhow & Co., Ltd.

John Grime.

J. 0. Griffiths.

John Gledhill.

John Greenwood.

John G. Graves.

C. Gatkie.

J. G. Grime.

J. Greenwood.

0. Gillett & Co.

C. W. Godbert.

J. M. Gray.

Sidney Gask.

Charles F. Gresty.

J. Francis Gibb.

George S. Greaves.

A. H. Greensmith.

Richard Haworth & Co., Ltd.

Sir Frank Hollins, Bart.

L. Heyworth.

E. & G. Hindle, Ltd.

Arthur M. Hughes.

W. A Hargreaves.

Hall, Higham & Co.

J. T. Hargreaves.

C. Harris.

Holme Manufacturing Co., Ltd.

R. Holdsworth & Nephew.

Edmund Halstead.

R. Harwood & Son, Ltd.

John Harwood & Son.

Haslam Spinning Co.
Joseph B. Harrison (Vernon
Cotton Spinning Co., Ltd.).
Harwood Brothers.
John Holden & Son.
James Halliwell.
Hampden Mill Co., Ltd.
William Hodgson.
Hartley Spencer, Ltd.
Frank Hodson.
George G. Hardman.
William Holden.
James F. Button & Co., Ltd.
Haythornthwaite Brothers, Ltd.
William Hoyle.
John Haughton.
C. J. Hadfield.
Alfred Haworth.
George Hadfield
J. R. Hepburn.
Edward Hallsworth.
Samuel Hague & Co., Ltd.
William Harrop.
T. Hellawell.
P. Haworth & Son.
Hollas, Farnworth, Ltd.
Ralph Holden.
W. Hamer.
Jesse Haworth.
Charles Hardman.
R. Hasty.
T. Horrocks.
J. G. Haworth.
David Healey.
James Hunt.
A. W. Hennings.
Thomas S. Howortb,

304

TARIFF "REFORM "

William Hay.
K. Ha skim.

B. Haskim.
Fred Hartley.
Hey & Elliott, Ltd.
S. Hodgkinson.
John Hamer.

Harrison, Son, & Hague, Ltd.

(Jeorge Hahlo.

Joseph Hargreaves.

A. P. Hillis.

VV. R. Hesketh.

Joseph Hague.

Edwin Hamer

A. G. C. Harvey.

E. C. Harvey.

W. H. Hall.

W. Healey.

John R. Hardern.

Edward T. Hoyle.

W. C. Hargreaves.

R. P. Hewit.

Forest Hewit.

S. Hinrichsen & Co.

A. B. Herbert.

C. Hahnel.
Phillips Hindley.
W. E. Hall.

D. Hendle.

E. 0. Heywood.
James H. Hyde.
Thomas Hey.

R. Hahnel.
VV. Heap.

B. W. Holden.
W. B. Hanson.

F. J. Hargreaves.

J. Hindie.

F. R. Haythornthwaite
Albert Hindie.
James A. Holden.
C. W. Higgin.

E. A. Haslani.
J. W. Holt

R. Hargreaves.

C. Hoyle.

W. H. Horsfall.

D. Hill.

H. Hollinrake.

J. Halliwell.

H. Holden.

T. Hartley.

\V. F. Hamer.

Hartley & Wilson, Ltd

F. Higson.
John A. Hood.
Jehu Healey.
John W. Healey.
J. W. Habbashaw.
C. Holt.

William Taylor Hague.

B. & W. Hartley, Ltd.
W. B. Hodgkinson.
Samuel Haughton.
Fred C. Isherwood.

R. Isherwood.
J. Isherwood.
P. Isherwood.
W. O. Ingham.

C. H. Ingham.
Alfred Ingham.
George Ingham.
W. G. Johnson.

F. Johnston & Co., Ltd.

305

GREAT MANIFESTO AGAINST

James 8. Johnstone.

J. B. Johnstone & Co.

H. Jackson.

Richard H. Jackson.

John Jackson & Son.

Daniel Jopson.

E. Jones.

G. B. Kay.

John Kay & Son.

Alfred J. King.

Ernest A. Kolp.

T. W. Killick.

L. Kippax.

R, W. Kessler.

Samuel Kealey.

W. T. Kemp.

James Kay.

W. Randell Kay.

Leonard Kershaw.

Arthur Kershaw.

John Kenyon.

J. Kerfoot.

C. Koch & Co., Ltd.

William Kenyon & Son. Ltd.

Lancaster Brothers.

A. Lindley & Son.

Edward Lord.

John F. Leach.

John Law.

J. W. Landless.

Henry Leach.

George E. Leach.

Frank Lee.

Lennox Lee.

Henry Lawton (Asa Lee* &

Co., Ltd.).
John E. Longworth

Julius Lesser & Co.'s Successors.

John Longworth, Ltd.

J. P. Lord.

G. H. Leeming.

J. Lloyd.

James Lees.

Fred Longbottom.

W. E. Lightbowne.

W. Lowe.

J. F. Lomax.

Sam Luke.

K. Lee.

Samuel Leigh.

James Lawrence.

E. S. Lang.

J. G. Leach.

E. Lawton.

J. A. Leeming.

E. H. Langden.

H. Lee.

Charles Lees.

G. H. Lings.

Lewis & Buckley.

Frank Leech.

Wilfred Lord.

W. Langshaw.

John Dewhurst Milne.

T. B. Marsden (Platt Brothers

& Co., Ltd.).
W. R. M'Clure (R. M'Clure A

Son, Ltd.).
E. R, M. M'Clure (R. M'Clure *

Son, Ltd.).

J. H. Moorhouse (Vernon
Cotton Spinning Co., Ltd. ) .
J. S. Match in (Waste Spinning
Co.).

306

TARIFF " REFORM "

R, Martin & Son, Ltd.

J. Mallalien.

John Mitchell.

\V. Marsland.

•James Moorhouse.

Robert E. Milne.

G. W. Munn.

P. Millward.

Joseph Magaon.

1". R. M'Connell (Greg Brothers

& Co.).
O. Mallalieu.
A. H. Marsland.
C. Marx.
Alex. Manley.
C. E. Moore.
S. Milne.
Fred H. May all.
Abel Mellor.
W. H. Morris.
J. G. Marcroft.
J. B. Mayall.
John Margerison.
James Mallalieu.
J_. W. Mallalieu.
C. Mellor.
S. J. Michles.
J. Malloc.
R. Moores.
A. Matthews.
Joseph Mills.
H. A. Maryland.
R. H. Massey.
R. D. M'Laren.
J. Marshall.
J. H. Marsden.
R. Moorhouse.

John Mill*.

Thomas Milnes.

C. William Mill*.

James Milne.

Robert Mellor.

William Marcroft.

Mitchell & Son.

William Morgan.

William M'Kerracher.

J. H. Morris & Co.

R. W. Matthews.

James Milne (Preston).

0. W. Needham (Platt Brothers

& Co., Ltd.).

H. T. Norinanton & Co., Ltd.
C. Newth.
John Noden.
R. Nutter & Co., Ltd.
Ephraim Nutter.
Thomas Nutter.
A. O. Noel.
S. C. Nordlingei-.
W. Noble.
A. Nordlinger.
Howarth Nuttall.
Wilfred F. Nuttall.
James Nutter.
John E. Newton (Asa Lfet> 4

Co., Ltd.).
Thomas Noton, jun.
George Nelson.
John Needham & Sons.
George Newton.
S. Newton.
F. Norcliffe, jun.
A, Nichol.
M. S. Newton.

307

GREAT MANIFESTO AGAINST

Thomas Nuttall & Sons, Ltd.

Nuttall & Crook.

B. Nutter & Co., Ltd.

W. W. Neill.

Oxford Mill Co., Ltd.

H. Oliver.

Joseph Oliver.

Cuthbertson Orr.

William J. Orr.

Orschavir Brothers.

D. E. Ormerod.

Samuel Ormerod.

William O'Hanlon & Co.

David Ottersill.

J. A. Ormerod.

B. Ogden.
W. O'Neill.

S. H. Ormerod & Co.

Ogdens & Madeleys, Ltd.

The Old Mill Co., Ltd.

T. Pilling.

Pickup & Co.

A. C. Pott & Co.

S. Potter.

William Pearson.

William Pownall.

Pembertoris, Ltd.

C. H. Pickford.
James Prestwich.
Alfred Partington.
T. Parkins.
Thomas Potter.
W. J. Petrie.

S. H. Bobinson.
George Bobinson & Co.
Boach Vale Mills, Ltd.
Samuel Balphs (Vernon Cotton
Spinning Co., Ltd.).

John E. Bhodes.

J. F. & H. Boberts, Ltd.

W. Bowbotham.

J. B, Bhodes & Co.

James Bhodes.

F. Bushworth.

John Bamsbotham.

James Bamsbotham.

W. Biley.

S. Bobinson.

Bitchie & Eason.

Frederick Beyner.

W. Bigg.

F. Bedman.

Rawson Brothers.

F. W. Bayner.

H. T. Bayner.

James Bussel.

A. Bogerson.
John Bountree.

B. Byden.

H. D. Battray.

T. Bedman.

W. J. Bobertson.

J. Bobertson & Sons.

F. Bobey.

G. E. Bowland.
Frank S. Boberts.

River & Tower Mills Co., Ltd.

C. W. Bothwell.
William Smith & Co.
J. H. Snowdon.
Samuel Slater.
Steinthal & Co.
James Speak.

F. A. Scott.
Tom Shackleton.
S. H. Sagar.
308

TARIFF " REFORM "

John Smith.

T. & J. Smith.

Thomas Stephens.

John Sutcliffe.

Sandygate Mill Co., Ltd.

Ernest M. Susman.

Paul Susman.

W. F. Smethurst.

J. W. Sclanders & Co.

•I. W. Shovelton.

Edgar Smalley.

Henry Speakman.

S. H. Smith.

Joseph Sutcliffe.

Herbert Slater.

Fred A. Slater.

A. Sugden.

Harold Shawcross -

Thomas Scott.

S. Seidlin.

H. R. Sassen.

,T. Spence.

>. H. Smith.

Edwin Stansfield.

W. H. Shirley.

K. W. Summerfield

Joseph Smith.

G. H. Stafford.

H. Shepley.

Alfred Smithson.

Stott & Smith.

C. Smith.

J. G. Sansome.

E. Swan.

J. H. Scholes.

J. A. Scrimgeour.

J H. Shuock.

T. Stott.

F. J. Sparks
T. H. Bigby.
A. E. Sutton.
R. W. Seed.
A. Saxon.

W. Stephens.

G. Stott.

J. J. Smithies.

W. Slater & Son, Ltd.

E. G. Smalley.
W. E. Sagar.
Joseph T. Sladen.
G. Shuttle worth.
J. Stott.

Emil Scholefield.
S. Sugden.

Schofield & Froggatt.
Sugden Sutcliffe.
James Speak.
Wilfred Street.

F. Seal.

James A. Spencer.

Frank Smith.

C. C. Stout.

James Sharpies.

Southern & Nephew, Ltd.

James W. Southern & Son, Ltd.

G. E. Shaw.

J. H. Sladin & Co.

Benjamin Thornber & Sons, Ltd.

James Thornber.

Sharp Thornber.

J. G. A. Taylor.

Charles Taylor & Brothers, Ltd.

Edgar M. Taylor.

Thomas Taylor (S. Taylor, Ltd.).

309

GREAT MANIFESTO AGAINST

Luke Thornber.

William Tetlow.

VV. H. Taylor.

Frank Taylor.

C. H. Turner.

John Taylor.

James Taylor.

James M. Thomas.

Alfred Topp.

J. T. Tetlow.

Jesse Thorpe.

James Tattersall.

John E. Taylor.

John Trafford.

Richard Trafford.

Robert Taylor, jun. (Asa Lees

& Co., Ltd.).
R. Thompson & Co.. Ltd.
Richard Thornley.
Elias Taylor.
William Topham.
James Tattersall & Son.
Thomas Taylor.
H. Thompson.
W. E. Thompson.
H. Taylor.
M. Taylor.
-A. Taylor.

E. Travis.
S. Taylor.
J. Taylor.

S. J. Tattersall.
J. F. Turner.

F. A. Tomlinson.
F. Taylor.
William Taylor.
W. S. Tvson.

James T. Tunstall.

W. B. Taylor.

Abraham Wood.

W. G. Wallia.

James Watts, jun.

Albert E. Wright.

Rowland J. Worthington.

Walmsley & Co.

Whittlefield Mill Co., Ltd.

John Ward.

William H. Wood.

Whitehead & Leaver, Ltd.

James Walton, Ltd.

Robert Walton.

H. Woollin.

J. T. Whipp.

A. S. Wallace.

Witham Halstead & Co.

John S. Wyatt.

Joseph Wild.

Handel Whittaker.

Seth Wrigley.

John Warburton.

George Woolley.

A. Watson.

Walker, Allen & Son, Ltd.

H. Watson.

J. Wild & Son.

S. Watson.

George F. War die,

Alfred Watkin.

T. B. Wood & Son, Ltd.

Henry E. Williams.

John Wardley.

Ernest Ward.

J. Wrigley.

R. Wood.

310

TARIFF " REFORM "

R. S. Wild.

John Worrall.

Edgar G. Walker.

H. Wolfenden.

Wilson & Rawlinshaw.

H. Waterhouse.

G. Warburton.

W. H. Walsh.

M. Wilson.

J. E. Wood.

T. Woodward.

J. Wainwright.

E. Whitehead.

T. Walton 4 Son.

S. Whittaker.

W. Whittaker.

W. Walton.

John B. Weston.

J. Watson.

A. C. White.

S. D. Willis.

J. W. Wood.

A. Whitehead.

S. Watson (J. S. Watson & Son).

James Watts.

Arnold Whitworth.

G. Arthur Watson.

H. J. Whitham.

James Walmsley.

George Yates.

Ralph Yates.

T. Yarker.

C. N. Yowell.

A. Rowell- Young,

Frank Yardlev.

U

APPENDIX F4.

LANCASHIRE'S VERDICT.

ITS EXPLANATION.

FREE TRADE ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL.*
By C. W. MACARA.

Lancashire has given for Free Trade a verdict
and a lead to the other industrial centres, in my
opinion, more emphatic than that proclaimed in
1906.

In the face of electioneering methods new in this
country, though familiar in the United States,
whence they have been copied by the Tariff
Reformers, the Free Trade vote in Lancashire is
more pronounced in 1910 than it was four years
ago. This result is impressive. To, what must it
be attributed ?

I believe it to be due, firstly and mainly, to this
fact, that the cotton trade is the one great staple
industry in England in which employers and
operatives work together in dealing with the great
problems affecting their mutual industrial weal or
woe.

I have myself led various movements for the
advancement of cotton trade interests. In all, I
have had the active co-operation of the leaders of
the operatives.

1. Sunday Times, London, Jan. 23rd, 1910.

LANCASHIRE'S VERDICT

One of the most notable examples of this co-
operation between capital and labour is the British
Cotton Growing Association. Equally with the
employers, the operatives contribute their quota to
its funds, and they are represented on the council
of the Association.

When that is the situation and the practice, is it
surprising that masters and men should join hands
in resisting a fiscal policy which their knowledge
and experience tell them must involve the absolute
ruin of their industry ?

In this matter Lancashire has never wavered.
Six weeks after Mr. Chamberlain made his pro-
nouncement in favour of Tariff Reform in 1903, a
conference representing the leaders of both capita!
and labour in the cotton industry denounced his
proposals in no measured terms. Again in 1906
Lancashire denounced these proposals, and she
denounces them to-day with undiminished deter-
mination. The arguments against Tariff Reform
brought forward at the Conference in 1903 have
never been refuted.

Notwithstanding the great development in the
cotton industry which has been going on throughout
the world, England has well maintained her pre-
ponderating position, owning to-day nearly one-half
of the world's cotton spindles, and exporting about
three-quarters of the production of these spindles
and the dependent machinery to all parts of the
globe. These exports represent a third of our total
exports of manufactures.

Much has been heard of the growth of the exports

313

LANCASHIRE'S VERDICT

from other cotton manufacturing countries. It is
not generally known that a considerable part of
those exports are goods that have been made in
Lancashire and exported from these countries after
having undergone some further process.

Much, also, has been made of our own imports of
cotton manufactures. Again, it is not generally
known that a large proportion of these imports are
goods made in Lancashire, sent abroad for some
special process, such as finishing, dyeing, etc., and
sent back to England; in many cases for re-export.
Not only is the prosperity of Lancashire dependent
upon this great export trade, but its maintenance
largely concerns our existence as a commercial
nation.

Thanks to our Free Trade policy the nations of
the world give us "most favoured nation" treat-
ment in admitting our goods to their markets. Then
we can build and equip our mills, weaving sheds,
and other dependent undertakings, such as calico
printing, bleaching, dyeing, and finishing, at a
much lower capital outlay than our competitors in
protected countries.

The watchword of Lancashire in business is enter-
prise. We do not ask for monopoly. As business
men we realise that its benefits are illusory.

Enterprise has given the cotton industry a highly
specialised and inter-dependent, but at the same
time, as I have shown, a delicate and complicated
organisation. It has made us keen to adopt every
improvement in the making and finishing of our
verv varied productions. It has made us keen to

3*4

LANCASHIRE'S VERDICT

keep our management more and more efficient; to
keep our machinery abreast of the times, and to give
the best possible value. On the wonderful expan-
sion which has followed from this bold and
courageous policy we have prospered. Tariff
Reform is an appeal to timidity. It does not fit
the temper of Lancashire.

During the last thirty-five years the world's
demand for cotton goods has trebled. If, in the
face of that demand, many countries have entered
upon cotton manufacture for themselves, such a
development was to be expected ; the result has not
been to cut off our trade, but to encourage greater
variety and excellence of fabrics. No manufactur-
ing industry, in proportion to the capital invested,
employs so much labour as does the cotton industry.
Much of that labour is highly skilled — the inherited
skill of generations — and is superior to that obtain-
able in any other cotton manufacturing country.
Excepting in America, where the cost of living is
excessive, the wages paid in the English cotton
industry are considerably in excess of those paid
in any other country, and the hours of labour are
fewer.

We are able to compete successfully in all the
neutral markets of the world, as well as in the
markets of the other twenty-one countries which
have a cotton industry of their own.

We are able to do this because of the elasticity
of our industry based on the solid foundation of
free enterprise.

The most notable example of our hold upon the

LANCASHIRE'S VERDICT

world's trade is found in the case of India. Our
foreign competititors have the same right of entry
into the Indian market as we have, yet 95 per cent,
of the cotton goods imported into India are supplied
by England.

All these things the Lancashire operative knows
as well as his employer. Misleading statistics have
little effect on him.

In 1906 Lancashire's pronouncement on Free
Trade exercised a tremendous influence.

Lancashire's pronouncement in 1910 shows an
even greater determination to reject nostrums based
largely upon ignorance of the conditions which have
enabled us to build up our gigantic export business,
representing an annual average of ^100,000,000 in
cotton goods. To maintain that trade under Tariff
Reform would be impossible.

Any doubt as to Lancashire's determination to
uphold Free Trade has been repelled by the cotton
industry and Free Trade manifestos. The first
was signed by all the principal leaders of the
operatives; the second by eight hundred representa-
tives of the great cotton firms, and of the subsidiary
and dependent industries, as well as by the mercan-
tile interests. Those signatures were obtained on
the eve of the poll in two days. The amount of
capital represented in this manifesto is colossal.

Unfortunately the great industrial districts in
which the wealth of the country is created did not
appreciate the want of knowledge in those districts
where so much of that wealth is expended, still less
could they have believed that an important section

I*

LANCASHIRE'S VERDICT

of the Tariff Reform press, by excluding from its
columns plain, businesslike statements by practical
men, would have kept its readers in ignorance of
the warnings against the ruin which must befall the
nation as a whole if Tariff Reform were adopted.
But surely by such tactics that section of the press
is accepting a very grave responsibility.

I have said before, I repeat it now. A great
commercial nation must choose between its own
market and the markets of the world. The United
States, so far as manufactures are concerned, have
chosen their own market. Hence their export of
cotton goods is a trifle. Our market is the market
of the world. The market of the world it must
continue to be. Our population cannot live on any
other terms. In my opinion the unique position we
now hold in the world's markets, and consequently
the livelihood of our whole population, must be
seriously endangered by the adoption of a policy
which, however applicable to the United States with
its large areas of contiguous territory, cannot be
applicable to the crowded and limited area of the
United Kingdom.

It is incredible that a great commercial nation
should jeopardise the industries by which it lives.
If we enter on Protection and ruin our commerce,
all other problems will sink into insignificance.

This is the opinion Lancashire has pronounced.
It is endorsed by a great majority of the other
centres of industry. No Government dare disregard
the verdict.

APPENDIX FS.

THE INDIAN COTTON DUTIES, 1917.
VIEWS OF SIR CHARLES MACARA, BART.1

Ever since the war commenced I have studiously
avoided expressing opinions on subjects of political
controversy. I have been, for example, repeatedly
asked to state my opinions regarding Free Trade
and Tarifl Reform, but I have invariably declined
My view is that our task is to win the war, and to
that end we ought to sink all personal predilections.
But on the question now before us I cannot refrain
from speaking. As a convinced Free Trader I have
never objected to any impost considered necessary
for revenue purposes, but it is not fair that
Lancashire should be singled out for taxation to the
distinct advantage of another part of the Empire.
Let us be just to all parts, and not penalise one
to the gain of another. It is not right for the
Government to give a preference to the Indian
manufacturers. Let us have fair competition, no
bolstering up on the one hand and no penalising on
the other. If the Indian manufacturer can beat us
in the open market let him do so, but do not help
him by preferential treatment.

I have already explained my attitude towards this
controvery, and I cannot add much to what I said in
the Manchester Guardian on March 3. It will be

1. Vide Manchester Guardian, March 14th, 1917.
318

INDIAN LOTION LM TIES

remembered, possibly, that in 1903, 1006, and 1910 I
took a determined stand from the point of view of a
business man — as it is well known that 1 take no
part, and never have done, in party politics — against
the Tariff " Reform " movement introduced by Mr.
Joseph Chamberlain. I cannot tell you how much
I regert that this controversy, or any thing approach-
ing the semblance of a controversy, should have
been raised at a time when we are passing through
the most terrible experience the world has ever
known. 1 have strenuously advocated abstention
from controversial matters, which bristle with diffi-
culties, until victory is secured, and I am fully alive
to the fact that new conditions will then have to be
faced. That will be work, however, for practical
men, not for party politicians. I am one of those
who hold that professional politicians have no right
to introduce measures concerning the welfare, and
indeed almost the existence, of the great industries
by means of which this country has attained her
position of pre-eminence throughout the world, and
I have worked hard to federate the industries of the
country, which, after all, are only one complex
organism, so that what affects one of the great
industries of the country practically affects the
whole.

It is painful for me to see the views that are
expressed by leading London organs regarding
matters with which they cannot possibly have any
first hand knowledge. It is unfortunate that these
journals are read by so many people who are so
utterly misinformed regarding the points at issue.

319

INDIAN COTTON DUTIES

I would remind Mr. Austen Chamberlain — I do not
care for personalities — that if he will follow what was
done in 1903, 1906, and 1910, he might possibly, if
he is not irrevocably committed, have given some
consideration on Monday to the representations of
the thoroughly practical men upon whom, after all,
the welfare of this country is dependent.1 It is
incredible, as I said in the 1910 controversy, that
" a great commercial nation should jeopardise the
industries by which it lives. If we enter on Protec-
tion and ruin our commerce, all other problems will
sink into insignificance."

1. A deputation consisting of Lancashire members of
Parliament of all parties, Lancashire Chambers of Commerce,
the Liverpool and Manchester Cotton Associations, the
organisations of both employers and operatives in the Cotton
industry and others, had waited upon Mr. Austin Chamberlain,
Secretary of State for India on March 12, 1917.

APPENDIX G.

WOMEN ON THE LAND.

SIR CHARLES MACARA AND THE NEEDS OF
AGRICULTURE.1

Sir Charles Macara, addressing the students
and their relatives and friends, at a centre for
training women in market gardening, said that
increasing the food production within the British
Isles was an essential factor in securing victory in
this great struggle for the detence ot liberty and
civilisation, and no more important work could
possibly be undertaken by any Government. He
was one of those who believed in efficiency in every-
thing, in taking full advantage of scientific research,
and utilising whatever was at their disposal; such
as, for instance, the linking up of the electrical
power stations, and the supply of electrical energy
tor the driving of agricultural machinery, and pos-
sibly, also, for increasing the productivity of the
soil. Personally, he had always had the utmost
confidence in the work of women, and in serving
on a committee in London, where evidence had to
be taken regarding various occupations, he was
most impressed by the evidence that was given by
the principal lady at the Board of Trade as to the
manner in which women had adapted themselves to
occupations that had in the past been carried on by
men. Agriculture still remained our greatest in-
dustry but hitherto the women of England had
1. Vid* The pr«M, 1917.

321

WOMEN ON THE LAND

done less in the cultivation of the soil than those of
most of the other countries of the world. Both
agriculture and horticulture required as much skill
as any other industry. An elementary training,
which, although for a time of emergency like the
present was invaluable, was not sufficient for perma-
nent success, but must be carried further, and what
was wanted was that many centres for training
women should be started under the direction 01
those who were fully qualified to teach. Circuin-
.stances had arisen from time to time which had
compelled him, in the position he had occupied
for so many years in connection with the staple
industry of Lancashire, to study agricultural
problems, as alter ail, everything was dependent
upon the tillers of the soil for the two prime neces-
saries of life — tood and clothing. In 1904 the staple
industry of Lancashire was, as it is to-day, in a
serious position as regarded shortage of the raw
material, which led to the various international
movements being started, all cotton-using countries
being more or less similarly affected. At that
time he had to take a lead in several of these move-
ments in which agriculture played a prominent part ;
they resulted in the establishment of the British
Cotton Growing Association, the International
Federation of Master Cotton Spinners' and Manu-
facturers' Associations, with headquarters in Man-
chester, and the International Institute of Agricul-
ture, with headquarters in Rome. In connection
with these world-wide movements, a Private Cotton
Investigation Commission visited the United States
in 1906. followed by an international delegation the

3*2

WOMEN ON THE LAND

next year, and a few years later a similar delegation
visited Egypt. A great deal of information regard-
ing agriculture was thus acquired. He went to
America in 1907 expecting to find up-to-date
methods in agriculture. In this, however, he was
disappointed. Although as a result of the visits of
the Private Cotton Investigation Commission many
reforms had been promptly started. A characteris-
tic trait of the American people, however, was
shown bv the promptitude with which they acted
when their deficiencies were brought home to them,
nnd Government experimental farms were quickly
instituted, and bv this means great reforms brought
about. In Egvpt, on the other hand, he was equally
surprised in iqi2 to find the most up-to-date
methods in operation. What was done in America
was what was so urgently needed in the British
Tsles. and as he had alreadv said, there ought to be
a "Teat extension of centres for training1 women
under efficient teachers. He felt sure there must
be anv number of voungf women of ^ood social
status who, after receiving thorough training mieht
qualify as teachers in that work. By so doing thev
would render invaluable service to their countrv.
not onlv in this unprecedented crisis, but in the un-
known future. He was glad to sav that the students
who hnd gone from that centre had all acquitted
themselves well, and he hoped the disposition on
the part of those who employed students from these
centres would be to thoroughly appreciate their
patriotism, and to reward them adequatelv for the
valuable services they were rendering to the nation
in the present grave crisis.

323

APPENDIX H.
TRAFALGAR DAY, IQI6.1

1. At Manchester great Trafalgar Day Demonstration, 1916.

OUR SAILORS.

SPEECH BY SIR CHARLES W. MACARA, BART.

" I am a landsman, but I have been associated
for many years with sailors, and the more I see of
them the more I like them. It is a matter of deep
regret that Lady Beatty, whose husband's magnifi-
cent services to the country in this the greatest of
all wars have evoked universal admiration, is unable
through indisposition to be present to-day. But I
feel highly honoured in being associated with so
distinguished a representative of the Navy as
Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Hedworth Meux, whose
eminent services in connection with the Navy are
well known ; perhaps the most notable being when,
as Captain the Hon. Hedworth Lambton, he com-
manded the Naval Brigade at Ladysmith, giving
a splendid demonstration of what can be accom-
plished by co-operation between the Navy and the
Army, and one that I think will go down to
posterity. It is fitting that so distinguished a
personage should come to this great centre of
industry on Trafalgar Day to advocate the claims
of the British and Foreign Sailors' Society, which
has done such splendid work for so many years.
In looking back upon a somewhat strenuous career,
nothing gives me greater satisfaction than the work
I have been able to do in promoting the welfare of
the seafaring- class. This work has always had a
great attraction for me. My first public work in
connection with the sea was taking part in the

324

TRAFALGAR DAY

raising of a fund to provide for the widows and
other dependants of twenty-seven lifeboatmen who
lost their lives in December, 1886, in a gallant
attempt to rescue the crew of the German barque
' Mexico,' wrecked on the treacherous Horse Bank
in the estuary of the Ribble, who were ultimately
rescued by the Lytham lifeboat. Some years later,
in 1891, when the funds of the Royal National
Lifeboat Institution had sunk to a somewhat low ebb
in proportion to the work carried on by this great
voluntary life-saving service, it was Manchester and
Salford l that came to the rescue and led the way in
a popular movement which was taken up throughout
the United Kingdom, and which supplied the
additional funds necessary to carry on the work
efficiently. It was in prosecuting this work that I
shall always remember with gratitude the assistance
that was rendered by the representatives of this
Society who had served in the Navy, and who
organised a display of the Rocket Brigade which
added materially to the impression made at the first
Lifeboat Saturday Demonstration in Manchester,
October, 1891. Since that time I have taken a deep
interest in the work of the Society, whose claims
have been advocated to-day, and have taken part
in various events in connection with it, notably the
opening of the Fielden Sailors' Rest at Fleetwood,
which was presented to the British and Foreign
Sailors' Society by Mrs. Samuel Fielden, of
Todmorden, and which has done much good work
since it was opened, among the sailors and fishermen

1. Vide The Book of the Lifeboat, 1894, Report of Committee
on the Royal Naval Lifeboat Inquiry, Evidence, Appendix and
Index, 1897, Cd. 4394 ; and the History of The Lifeboat Saturday
Fund, 1898 (published by private subscription, and containing
documents omitted from the Parliamentary Blue Book).

325

TRAFALGAR DAY

residing there or who visit the port. The good
example shown by this lady might well be followed
by others in establishing similar Homes in various
places on the coast wherever they are needed. In
this connection I would like to say that it is the
lifeboatmen and deep sea fishermen who largely
carry on the heroic and dangerous work of mine
sweeping, in which service many fishermen have
lost their lives. I also had the pleasure of taking
part at the banquet given at the Fishmongers' Hall,
in London, on the hundredth anniversary of
Trafalgar, and was deputed as a Vice-President of
the British and Foreign Sailors' Society to present
a bust of Nelson to the London Stock Exchange
the following day. On that occasion I had the
privilege of meeting many distinguished sailors and
soldiers. The more that one knows of the work of
sailors, the more one feels how deeply we are
indebted to them, and how eager we should be to do
whatever we can to minister to their welfare. In
this great centre of population — 9,000,000 within a
radius of forty miles — we depend absolutely on our
sailors. Not one pound of raw cotton do we grow,
all has to be imported, and our great cotton industry
is dependent for three-quarters of its employment
upon export trade. Through the enterprise and
energy of the promoters of the Manchester Ship
Canal, the port of Manchester has now, in the value
of its exports and imports, attained the position of
fourth port in the United Kingdom. Concurrently
with this, the tonnag-e of Liverpool has largelv
increased. In my experience in advocating the
claims of philanthropic institutions, I have always
found that with a good cause, forcibly put before
the British public, provided that the proper organi-
sation is also available for securing the contributions
of all classes of the rommunitv according to their

326

TRAFALGAR DAY

means, and that it is one of centralisation and
decentralisation, and both national and local in its
working, success is practically assured, and I have
every confidence that the appeal which has been
made on behalf of the British and Foreign Sailors'
Society will meet with a hearty response."

TRIBUTE TO THE LATE FIELD MARSHAL EARL
KITCHENER.1

By Sir CHARLES W. MACARA, Bart.

Speaking at Preston on Easter Sunday afternoon,
1917, Sir Charles W. Macara said : —

" In the stirring events that are taking place, and
the fact that the English-speaking nations are now
united, I think we have every reason to feel
optimistic as to the ultimate victory of the forces
fighting for liberty and civilisation.

It has been my privilege to meet many distin-
guished personages throughout the world, and
among these no one impressed me more than Lord
Kitchener. He was not only a great soldier but a
splendid business man, as well as a man imbued
with an intense desire to promote the welfare of
humanity and alleviate the lot of the oppressed. I
well remember asking his approval regarding an
international delegation going to Egypt in connec-
tion with Lancashire's staple industry ; his reply
was : ' I welcome such a delegation. I am in Egypt
to do my best for the welfare of the Egyptians, and
I wish the world to benefit bv whatever I may
succeed in accomplishing.' When he received me
at the Residency in Cairo, in expressing his satisfac-
tion that the delegation had come to Egypt, he

1. Vide The Lancashire Daily Post, April 9th, 1917.

327

TRAFALGAR DAY

solicited my help in assisting him to raise the
position of the Egyptian peasantry, whose lot he
considered exceptionally hard. I have met great
soldiers whose business qualities will compare
favourably with those of men holding high positions
in commerce and industry, and it is equally note-
worthy that men engaged in corrimerce and industry
have been transformed into magnificent soldiers.
The name of Lord Kitchener will go down to posterity
as the greatest military organiser the world has ever
seen. I have no hesitation in saying that the
heroism and self-sacrifice of the fighting forces of
the Empire and of our Allies have never been
excelled. In this connection I cannot but allude to
the splendid manner in which the women of the
country have voluntarily come forwrard and taken
up work in all directions. Had they only been
organised as they might have been, the great strain
caused by the withdrawal of such large numbers of
the manhood of the nation would have been much
less severely felt."

328

INDEX

Adamson, Daniel, 135
Agriculture, International Institute,
149, 206, 211, 224

needs of, 321

Aircraft cloth, supply of, 171
Alexandria, International Delega-
tion at, 222

Amalgamated Association of Card
and Blowing Boom Operatives, 83

Association of Operative Cotton

Spinners, 79, 81

Weavers' Association, 84

America, advice to, on the use of

existing institutions in war work,
173

cotton crop, 201

cotton industry, 147

International Delegation to, 209

American cotton bale, 147
Ancoats, characteristics of, 61

strike, 67

Anti-Corn Law League, 133
Arbitration, 105

Ashton, Thomas, 161
Ascroft, Robert, M.P., 93, 95
Askwith, Sir George, 100, 119
Asquith, H. H., Prime Minister, 116,

262, 272

Atlanta, Convention at, 209
Australia, Strikes in, 264
Bannerman, Alexander, 44

Andrew, 44

Bannerman, David, comes to Man-
chester, 43, 44

- death of, 46

borough reeve of Man-
chester, 46

Henry, founder of the firm,

41-44

- death of, 46

Henry, of Hunton, 44

buys the Hunton estate,

46

High Sheriff of Kent, 47

James Alexander, 46
Janet, 47

John, 44

buys Wyastone Leys, 47

House of, 37

both producer and distri-

butor of cotton goods, 69

Barnes, George N., M.P., 116, 162

Behrens, Sir Charles, 115 262

Beith, John Alexander, 33

Blackpool, 21

operatives on holiday at, 56

Blowing and carding, 78

Board of Trade, statement on Indus-
trial Council, 267

Bright, John, 67, 133

British and Foreign Sailors' Society,
324

Cotton Growing Association, 233

Brooklands Agreement, history of
the, 93, 255

329

INDEX

Brunswick Mill, strike at, 67 et seq. Cowpar, Charlotte Grace, mother of

Bryce, Lord, letter of, 221
Bythell, John Kenworthy, 33, 139
Campbell, Sir James, 47
Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry, 47,

157
Capital and labour : Industrial

Council, 253

and labour : means for promot-
ing industrial peace, 276

and labour under war condi-
tions, 276

Chalmers, Thomas, 6
Chamberlain, Austin, M.P., 320
Clynes, J. R., M.P., questions in

Parliament, 274

Cobden, Richard, 24n, 132, 133
Cotton as contraband, 163

creation of a reserve of, 166,

215

corner, 143

crops, 199

duties, Indian, 318

Employers' Parliamentary As-
sociation, 156-159

industry, growth, 289

industry, organisation and

federation, 204

industry, survey of its history,

191

plant, description of, 194

seed, products of, 197

trade disputes, 278

trade an exotic, 125

trade, method for ascertaining

normal return on capital, 105

trade of Lancashire, 50n

world's supply, 203

Charles W.*Macara, 8
Cox Brothers of Dundee, 33
Crewe, Marquess of, deputation to,

249

Crooks, Will, M.P., 263
Disraeli, Benjamin, on Manchester,

131

Disruption of 1843, 2, 13
Dukinfield, characteristics of, 63
East India Company, 9
Education, fears concerning, 74
Egypt, cotton crop, 200

development of the Sudan, 233

reception of delegates by Lord

Kitchener, 239

visit of International Cotton

Delegation, 222
Factory Acts, 66
Federation of Master Cotton

Spinners' Associations, 209
Fielden, Mrs. Samuel, 325
Free Church of Scotland, 6, 13
Free Trade Hall, 30
- — — Trade, Lancashire's verdict, 312

Trade Union, letter to the

President of the, 289

Galloway, Admiral, 9

Major-Gen. Sir Archibald, 8-9

German merchants in Manchester, 51
Grey, Sir Edward, on the cotton

industry, 208, 225
Grosvenor Square Presbyterian

Church and its debating society,

32
Haworth, Arthur A., speech in

defence of C. W. Macara, 295
John, 158n

330

INDEX

Hindu civilisation, 193

Hours of labour, reduction in 1904

owing to shortage of cotton, 216
Howe, George, dismissed from Fern

Mill, 99-100
Hunton Court, 46-47
India, cotton crop, 147, 202

cultivation of cotton, deputa-
tion to Lord Crewe, 249

Sir A. Galloway's services in,

9-10

Indian cotton duties, 318

- Famine Funds, 171, 186
Industrial Council, 281

projected, 110

- established, 118

article in " Financial Review of

Reviews," 253

Industrial unrest, 108

inquiry by the Industrial

Council, 272

Influences, 1

International Congress, Paris, 1908,
address to C. W. Macara, 245
— Convention of Cotton Growers,
Spinners, etc., 209

Cotton Conferences, 145 et seq.

Cotton Federation, 209

its prestige, 151

deputation to the Marquess of

Crewe, 249

delegation to America, 209

Federation of Textile Workers,

225

industry and commerce, 223
Institute of Agriculture, 149,

206, 211, 224
Internationalism, 125

Kitchener, Lord, 229, 236

reception of delegates at Cairo,

239

tribute to, 327

Lancashire, C. W. Macara's influence

on, 3, 133

operatives, 55

Private Cotton Investigation

Commission, 213

Lancashire's verdict on Free Trade,

312

Law, A. Bonar, M.P., 273, 274
Lifeboat rescues and disasters, 180

et seq.

- Saturday, 184, 325
Liverpool Cotton Market, 138-140
London, journey to, in the sixties, 21
Long, Walter, M.P., and the

National Registration Act, 169
Lowe, Robert, 26n
Lubin, David, 149, 150, 206, 211
Macara, Charles Wright, born at

Strathmiglo, son of Rev. W.

Macara, 3

opening into life, 14

schools, 15-16

arrival in Manchester, 19, 30

enters service of Cox Brothers,

33

marriage, 37

joins Bannerman's, 47

— first conflict with the operatives,
67

— — formation of Federation of
Master Cotton Spinners' Associa-
tions, 85

strike of 1892-3, 85

Brooklands Agreement, 95

331

INDEX

Macara, Charles W., as chairman of
conferences of employers and
employed, 102

on interdependence of indus-
tries, 109

plan of an industrial council, 110

article in " Financial Review

of Reviews," 117, 253

his historic place in Lancashire,

133

on transport duties, 141

promoter of international cotton

conferences, 146

organises visit of a cotton

commission and delegation to
America, 148

joint organiser of the Inter-
national Institute of Agriculture,
150

his organising activity, 155-6

presides at Conference of 1903,

157

of

— retires from presidency
Employers' Association, 159

— created a baronet, 159

— other honours, 159-160

— address, etc., from operative
spinners, 160

— economist, suggestions after the
outbreak of war, 161

— cotton as contraband, cotton
reserve, National Register, 163-169

— on the adaptation of existing
organisations to war purposes, 173

— residence at St. Annes-on-the-
Sea, 179

— lifeboat disasters, 180

Macara, Charles W., Lifeboat Satur
day originated, 184

his children, 187

Survey of the cotton industry,

191

speech at Atlanta, 209

correspondence with President

Roosevelt, 218

address at Alexandria, 222

on the development of the

Sudan 233

at reception by Lord Kitchener,

239

address presented to him at

the Fifth International Confer-
ence, 245

deputation to the Marquess of

Crewe, 247

paper on the Industrial Coun-
cil, 253

paper on Capital and Labour,

276

letter to the President of the

Free Trade Union, 289

defence of, by Arthur A.

Haworth, 295

position in the cotton trade,

295

manifesto against Tariff

Reform, 299

Lancashire's verdict on B'ree

Trade, 312

on Indian cotton duties, 318

— — on the needs of agriculture :

women on the land, 321

speech on Trafalgar Day, 1916,

324

332

INDEX

Macara, Lady, 37, 38, 182, 184, 186

Rev. William, career of, 5-16

marriage, 8

- Mrs. William, 8-9

- William C., 187
Macara clan, 3

Macdonald, Ramsay, M.P., question

in Parliament, 274
Manchester Chamber of Commerce,

50
— firms and their names, 38-39

goods, destination of, 126

- School, 132

- Ship Canal, 135, 138

Victorian, 19

Mason, Hugh, 67

Masters and men, 73

Mawdesley, James, 60n, 70, 76, 82,

88, 90, 95, 162
Mellor, " Tommy," 67
Meux, Admiral Sir Hedworth, 324
Minders, 79

Morley, Arnold, letter to, 289
Mullin, William, 11 In
Munro, Dr., 34
Muthu, Dr. C., 192
National Koalth Insurance Act, 158
National Register, scheme adopted

by Government, 168-170
Northern Counties Textile Trades

Federation, 84
Oldham Association, 83
Operative spinners, address to C. W.

Macara, 160
Operatives, 55
Parlane, Mrs., 31
Perthshire, home of the Bannermans,

41

Piecers, 79

Protection, what the leaders of the

operatives think, 298
Ramsay, Sir William, 165
Rest in change of work, 179
Reyner, Arthur, 88, 89
Ring-spinners, 78
Rochdale, Mayor of, 76
Roosevelt, Theodore, correspondence

with, 218
Round table conferences, value of,

231
Royal National Lifeboat Institution,

183
Sailors, our : speech on Trafalgar

Day, 324

St. Annes-on-the-Sea, 179
Scotsmen, migration into England, 14
Smethurst, Samuel, 90
Smith, Hoke, Governor of Georgia,

216

Stalybridge, 64
Strathmiglo, 3, 7-8, 10-11
Strike in 1884, 68

of 1892-3, 85 et seq., 93

Sudan, development of the 233
Sully — cotton speculator, 144
Tariff Reform, 157, 291

manifesto against, 299

Tattersall, John Brown, 90
Thomson, John, President of Man-
chester Chamber of Commerce, 141

Toulmin, Sir George, M.P., 272

Trade Unions, 75

Trade unionism in the cotton trade,

78 et seq.

Trafalgar Day, 1916, 324
Transport duties, 140

333

INDEX

United Textile Factory Workers'

Association, 80n, 84n, 157
Victorian Manchester, 19
War, effect upon industry, 276
European, suggestions and

services of Charles W. Macara,

160 et seq.

- terrible effects, 231
Weavers, handloom, at Strathmiglo,

11

West Indies, cotton crop, 199

Whitney, Eli, 201

Whit-week in Lancashire, 58-59

Wingate, Sir Keginald, 237

Women on the land, 321

Wyastone Leys, 47

Young, James, 47

Marion, 38

William, 46

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