A PECULIAR PEOPLE

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 59, 6 September 1913, Page 10

A PECULIAR PEOPLE

London is the great mart for the manufacturing North of England, and The Times, in its textile number, comment*, on *the interdependence of the Northern and Southern populations. "The most picturesque of the reasons for the existence of this marked dividing line between .North, and South in respect to the production of textile fabrics, as well as of other manufactures, ore, first, the industrial revolution* of the 'eighteenth century, due to the mechanical inventions of the spinning jenny, the power loom, and other labour-saving machinery, which were born of La-nca shire brains, and, uecondly, the fact that the Huguenot and Flemish weavers who from time to time settled in this country always showed a tendency to gravitate towards the North. "But the result of this centralising ol manufacturing energy in the northern parts of these inlands has without doubt been of the utmost value to the community in general. It lias produced a peculiar people. The inherited traditions of generation upon generation of skilled operatives, handed down from father to son and from mother to daughter, have evolved a race particularly well qualified to- deal with machinery, andi therefore, in this age of machines, of particular service to the sum total of the nation's industries. In the story, of the textile manufacturers, as so often in the history of the world's wars, the men of the North have proved themselves the masters of the men of tho South."