Page 136 - clra62_0019-(GIPE)

RECENT RATE OF MATERIAL PROGRESS IN ENGLAND 129
juxtaposition; but the habit once set up, there seems
no reason why they should not concentrate themselves
on the old manufacturing centres. The ruder parts of
the coal and iron industry may be attracted to other
places, but the higher branches of manufacturing will
be at no disadvantage if carried on at the old centres.
On the other hand, the old centres will retain the
advantages, which are obviously very great, of climate,
accumulated wealth, acquired skill, and concentration
of population. That population under the new condi-
tions is to go from them merely because they do not
grow food which can be transported to them at the
cost of a mere fraction of the aggregate income, and.
because they have not coal and iron in abundance and
in juxtaposition, that abundance and juxtaposition,
owing again to the diminished cost of conveyance,
being no longer so indispensable as it was to the
higher branches of manufacturing, appears certainly
to be a large order. What I have to suggest most
strongly at any rate is that the advantages I have
spoken of as possessed by old manufacturing centres
are not unlikely to teU more and more under the new
conditions, and that the indispensability of coal and
iron is no longer to be spoken of as what it has been
in the last century, during which apparently England
owed so much of its precedence in manufacturing power
to these causes.
To the same effect we may urge the specially great
increase of the efficiency of coal in recent years. Cheap
coal in sill, cannot be relatively so important as it was
in days when five or ten tons of coal were required to
do the work which can now be done by one.
The truth is that the whole change that has been
occurring is only a continuation of much larger his-
torical changes. There has almost always in English
history been some one industry that was supposed to
be king. In the middle ages it was the growth and
export of raw wool; last century it was. the woollen
manufacture itself; early in this century and down to
II. K