busy 2,500 ingrain carpet looms. That means work, directly, for 7,500 weavers, dyers and spinners. That means labor and wages for one-half the ingrain carpet workers of Philadelphia. That means that about 30,000 people are indirectly caused to suffer by the stoppage of those 2,500 looms. Not one-half of the ingrain looms in the country are running to-day. That means that thousands of trained employés are out of work. And this does not apply to the weaving of ingrain carpets alone. What affects ingrains must affect other branches of the trade. The making of tapestries and Brussels suffers as well."

Mr. Dobson was so absorbed in this branch of his subject that he closed his eyes, and talking as if to himself, plunged into a little mental arithmetic.

"Let me see, 404,000 pieces of silk would be 16,000,000 yards a year. One loom weaves sixteen yards a day. That would mean about 3,300 looms a year to make the silk we imported in 1895 from Japan alone, not to speak of China. That, I believe, is just about the number of silk looms now idle at Paterson. That throws directly out of work 10,000 people-dyers, throsters and spinners. Indirectly, that brings hardship to 50,000 people. Those disasters have not yet struck our cotton mills. But they are coming, and coming soon, and they will strike New England and check the growth of the New South."

"Mr. Dobson, will you say to what extent these

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oriental importations have stopped the payment of wages within your personal knowledge?"

I

"I do not like that part of my story," he replied, "but I'll tell you approximately. In 1893 Our our pay-roll reached $136,000 a month. mills were then running full and gave steady work to 5,000 people. To-day our pay-roll is $60,000 a month. By reductions of time and like devices we managed to distribute these wages among about 4,000 people. We take care of as many as we can, but there is so much less for them to do and so much less for them to earn, and so much less for them to spend, and so much less for I don't know how many thousand other people to receive and to respend in their turn. think those figures are sadly eloquent, and they apply only to our own local community, right here at the falls of the Schuylkill. But think of the other communities. Go to Kensington— Kensington, you know, is a northern suburb of Philadelphia, on the Delaware River. There are Dolan & Co.'s woolen mills. I am sure that not one-half of their people who were working on full time at good wages in 1893 can get any work at all now. That statement will apply to every branch of the woolen business, excepting only the mills that make women's fancy dress goods. Most of those mills, I believe, are still running full. And then think of the Paterson silk mills!"

Mr. Dobson explained that he preferred to

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confine his statement to the shrinkage of pay-rolls in dollars to his own experience, but suggested that the figures he had already given carried their own inference. Then he went on:

"All this means distress to both employés and manufacturers. The employés are earning either little or nothing at all, and yet they must live, and their necessity is dire. The manufacturer suffers because his expenses are constant for insurance, maintenance of plant and other items. These expenses in the aggregate are an enormous tax upon the capital invested in these crippled industries. For example, in the neighborhood of Providence, R. I., there are seventy-five woolen mills. Of them fifty-four are standing still and the rest are running only four days a week. It is hard to put into words what distress that means to both capital and labor.

"Why, in all my experience of many years I have never seen business in such a condition as it is to-day. People won't buy goods, because they think that at another time they can buy them cheaper. There is no stability in prices. For example, only last week 10,000 cases of ginghams were sold in New York at from three and onehalf to three and three-quarter cents a yard. Only a few weeks ago the price of these goods would have been to jobbers six to seven cents a yard. To-day cotton cloth for converting purposes and for export sells in the South at thirteen cents per

pound. That is simply unprecedented in the annals of manufacturing."

It was suggested that it would be difficult to trace the effect of these disasters upon other classes of capital and labor in our social and industrial system.

"Yes, to their furthest extent," said Mr. Dobson, "but it is comparatively easy to see how they affect the great business of transportation. I believe that the railroads employ one per cent. of all the employés of the country. Now, when the factories of the country are not busy, they furnish less freight to the railroads, whose earnings fall off until they go into the hands of receivers. That is the condition of sixty-two per cent. of the railroads of the country to-day. Unless we manufacturers can give business to the railroads I don't see how they can pay their interest charges and prosper. This, of course, finally reaches the pockets of the stockholders, big and little, at home and abroad, and carries distress to those who had hoped to live on their invested earnings. We owe an enormous foreign indebtedness to our railroads. Many of our railroads have borrowed all they can, until almost all their rolling stock is pledged to car trusts, and they have nothing left to borrow on. Not a railroad security falls due but that is paid off by issuing a new security. In other words, they are not paying their debts, but are keeping their borrowing capacity up to its extreme limit.'

"

CHAPTER XIV.

A VOICE FROM BOSTON.

The following is an editorial taken from the Boot and Shoe Record, a representative business publication at Boston :

"It is not easy to decide whether the financial authorities (?) who control the daily press in this part of the country are stupidly ignorant or lamentably disingenuous in their statements about our alleged dependence on foreign capital or about the threatened withdrawals of foreign capital by reason of the silver scare. Now foreign capital either refuses to go to silver-using countries or it does not. It is a question of fact and not of opinion. If doing business on anything but the gold standard scares off investors, then we will certainly find the proof in a silver-using country like Mexico, where gold is counted at nearly 100 per cent. premium. In the financial columns of the Boston Herald, which editorially tells of the terrible things that will happen if we favor silver in the slightest degree, we find the following

"A city of Mexico special says: "The Bank of London and Mexico will increase its capital to $10,000,000, in order to provide funds for its