British counter weapon, the Orders in Council, and to the maintenance of an inconvertible paper currency in defiance, as the Bullionists argued (and refutation of their argument would be a hard task), of true economic theory and sound practice? One of Miss Cunningham's contemporaries might, perhaps, be tempted to write a third Girton study to show that (as Brougham in a famous speech suggested) Perceval, Castlereagh, and Vansittart were really more dangerous economic enemies to Great Britain than Napoleon and all his Decrees. Our political and economic history requires a monograph on the Continental system as a whole, a work certainly de longue haleine, but imperatively needed to-day. Miss Cunningham has proved her interest in the question and her competence to deal with it. The expansion of her essay into a comprehensive study of the economic and political problems furnished by the great phases in the struggle, from Trafalgar to the war of 1812 and the Russian expedition, would be an admirable supplement to the third volume of "The Growth of English Industry and Commerce."

C. GRANT ROBERTSON

The English Factories in India, 1630-33. Calendar of Documents. By W. FOSTER. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910. Pp. 354.) THE documents calendared in this volume cover the period from February 20th, 1630, to December 21st (o.s.), 1633, and number about 320, of which three-fourths come from the India Office, and belong mainly to "original correspondence" in these archives. But they also contain about seventy entries from the Surat Factory Outward Letter Book, "the oldest volume of English records now extant" in India. The Editor has done his. work with the same care and thoroughness that were evinced in previous volumes noticed in these columns; he contributes a short but very useful Introduction, summarising and commenting on the chief features of interest in the text, and there is a good index.

Most of the entries will appeal only to specialists concerned with tracing the detailed growth of English trade and settlements. in the East; and naturally, as with all such collections, the solid grains are embedded in a vast deal of chaff. The struggles with the Portuguese, the increasing competition of the Dutch, the relations of our traders with native Powers, the depredations on the Company's profits by the "private trade" of employees, and their fear of rivals from home poaching on the preserves of the

Company (exemplified particularly in the anxiety over the movements of one Captain Quail, commanding the Sea Horse, a small ship in the royal navy, sailing under a royal commission), and the inexhaustible energy of the Company's agents in pushing their trade, are illustrated in the documents. For example (p. 151), both the profits and risks of "private trade" can be seen in the case of one Boothby, who "for his own wrongs done to the Company," had been punished by six months' imprisonment at Surat, eight months at sea, "foure monthes a close prisoner, foure daies in irons, and two daies hunger bitt." Boothby, who was in the Company's employment, pleaded that the private trade of another servant, no less than President Wylde, "compared with his was as mountains to molehills," for Wylde allowed an Italian Sebastiani, "deepe drencht in Popery and sinn," to send goods freely to Persia. "Like will to like, quoth the Divill, when he danced with the collier."

The outstanding feature of the period is the terrible famine which raged in 1631 and 1632, and the extent and results of which, revealed piecemeal in these documents, are corroborated from other sources. No less important for the future is the attempt to extend the Company's operations by establishing, for the first time, permanent factories in Orissa or Bengal, made in the spring of 1633. But the venture was not particularly successful. Here, as elsewhere in the establishment of our Empire, the Englishmen who came to stay were the last to arrive, and in the Bay of Bengal Portuguese and Dutch and Danes had preceded us for many years. In 1633 Calcutta and Fort William are still a long way off.

The frontispiece to the volume is a reproduction of the portrait of the Earl of Denbigh, from the original by Vandyke in the Duke of Hamilton's collection. As the Editor points out, he was "the first English nobleman to go touring in the East." Curiosity, not private trade as the Company suspected, was his motive, and it was apparently easily satisfied; but on his return curiosity gave way to vanity, for he had himself painted "in a semi-Indian costume and attended by an Indian servant, with a background of tropical scenery." The documents tell us little about his trip, but a rapid reader will find from time to time some vivid paragraphs, one of which by Captain Weddell, describing the vengeance of the King of "Serash" on his brother, a Duke, is superbly vivid :

"The King, seemingly satisfied, sent for the Duke and his sonnes to Court. The good man in obedience came with his two

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sonnes, foreseeing and prepared for death. The King entertaynes him lovingly but after a little tyme, sitting drinking with the youngest sonne of the Duke, that lived and was brought up with him att Court, hee caused the Dukes head with his two sonnes to be struck off and brought in before him, and demaunds. of the young gentleman if hee knew these heads. Hee (deprived of his witts and memory by wyne) made answer 'No' and, wisht by the King to peruse them more advisedly, could make no other answer but No.' The King then called for a bowl of wyne and, casting it on their heads, uttered these words: They drank wyne while they liv'd; lett them drinke now they are dead'; and so sent forth the sonnes to know who they. were in the next world or never" (pp. 294-5).

Economic material does not often provide the dramatic. How many companies to-day receive letters in which their agents could tell a story as Captain Weddell does?

C. GRANT ROBERTSON

Norwich: A Social Study. By C. B. HAWKINS. (London: Philip Lee Warner, 1910. Pp. x+326.)

THIS is a businesslike study, based on direct observation and accessible figures, of a city with a great economic past and a present of marked characteristics. "The one great town of East Anglia" is affected in various ways by its isolation amid a wide rural area-labour moves out of it slowly, the half-rural casual moves into it too readily. The economic consequences of a huge cattle market, with its drovers provide problems of their own; the transition in the boot industry (one of those which came in the 'forties to relieve the tragedy of the decay of the ancient textile manufacture) from the stage of the garret-master to that of the factory is of general interest; and it is useful to have some first-hand knowledge of the conditions under which much of the world's mustard, starch, and blue are produced. Among the textiles small and diminishing remnants of silk and haircloth alone survive-features of antiquarian interest only in a town which lives mainly (besides boots and mustard) on chocolate, mineral waters, and marketing, with some ready-made clothing, engineering, printing, cabinet making, and breeding of canaries, in bedrooms as a rule it would seem. A town of "low wages, low rents, and good housing"; full of ancient charities, which one. is glad to find appear less demoralising than is commonly thought, and unduly given to doles; a town with problems and experience in unemployment relief and boy-labour not differing widely

from the normal; a town of very varied religious activities, whose social significance is here described somewhat from the standpoint of the superior person; a bigger town than you might suppose (from 110,000 to 120,000), which protests in the preface, through its Dean, that it is not "as some of the small cathedral cities"; the sort of town which those who think hurriedly of economic England are apt to forget, and of which it is therefore good to be reminded by a careful bit of work such as this, intended primarily for Norwich folk, who are not likely to forget. J. H. CLAPHAM

The History of Wages in the Cotton Trade during the Past Hundred Years. By GEORGE HENRY WOOD, Guy Silver Medallist of the Royal Statistical Society. (London and Manchester: Sherratt and Hughes, 1910. Pp. 162. 3s. net.)

THE statistical materials with which Mr. Wood has had to deal are far from perfect. The requisite continuity is apt to be wanting in the older price lists. But Mr. Wood has been successful in largely filling up gaps in the record so as to present a fairly consecutive account of the hundred years which he has chosen as the period of his review. The labour involved has evidently been immense, and the record may be expected to furnish a very useful basis for future investigators. As one commentator has described it, the task seemed like an effort to bring order out of chaos. Mr. Wood's experience of Lancashire, and his knowledge of the cotton industry there, have made him peculiarly suitable for the work undertaken.

It is impossible within our limits adequately to descibe Mr. Wood's methods and results; we confine ourselves to noticing some salient features of the work.

A point of some importance in regard to the general progress is the question of half-timers, as it is called. The system has always had much the character of a mere compromise which might prove convenient, and it is a matter for argument whether it may not prove a weak solution in an economic sense in the long run, and whether a more definite solution would not have been a far better one as regards the industry itself as a whole.

According to a graphic diagram, included in Mr. Wood's volume, the general wages of all operatives in the cotton industry appeared at the end of the nineteenth century to have about practically the same level as at the beginning, notwithstanding

that the proportion of children employed in the industry was substantially higher at the earlier date, a very remarkable fact. To some extent the larger proportion of adult labour at the beginning of the century may have been made up for by the speeding-up of machinery.

On the whole there is evidence that organisation has tended to raise wages, though it is far from clear that it has not been at the cost of a detrimental effect on the health of the operatives. One satisfactory point brought out by the investigation is its testimony to the function of organisation in the cotton trade as invaluable. It has induced the employer to put in newer and better machinery, and induced the operative to work that machinery efficiently. Mr. Wood is so convinced of the value of the services of the late Mr. James Mawdsley, as General Organising Secretary of the Operative Cotton Spinners' Association, that he thinks the people of Lancashire should put up a statue to his memory.

An interesting fact brought out in Mr. Wood's treatise is the relative decline of the cotton trade in Glasgow and other Scottish centres. In Lancashire the trade has grown from decade to decade, but in Scotland it has so dwindled that whereas a hundred years ago probably one-seventh of the cotton trade of the United Kingdom was Scottish, to-day the Scottish share is almost insignificant in proportion to that of the rest of Great Britain. Apparently the cause is a question of wages and of the almost entire disappearance of mule-spinning, and of the employment of women as spinners in Scotland.

A curious result of the changes which have taken place in the cotton industry is that in the early days of the industry frame tenters were the highest paid; the slubbers varied, but were generally the lowest, with the drawing-frame tenters just a little above. To-day the average is generally the other way about, except at Bolton, where the roving frame still yields the highest average wage. Mule-spinning is referred to as having been probably the most completely altered in character and structure during the nineteenth century; the difficulties in tabulation arising from the great range of earnings possible at any date, according to whether the counts spun were coarse, medium, or fine, the mules long or short, that is, containing a large number of spindles, and whether the work was done on hand mules or self-acting mules. As a general rule throughout Lancashire, and, indeed, throughout the whole trade, spinners of fine counts. have earned more than the spinning medium, and coarse counts