eat numbers from departing from the beaten
track. Cotton dealers up to this time had regularly financed the
spinners, who were frequently men of little capital, by allowing long
credit, and had even employed them to spin on commission. As men of
substance increased among the ranks of the spinners, the Manchester
cotton dealers found it impossible to retard a movement set on foot by
the prospects of such appreciable advantages. Ultimately many of the old
Manchester cotton dealers became brokers for their old customers. In
1875 there were said to be upwards of 100 cotton dealers in Manchester,
but from that time onward their members steadily declined. It is
interesting to observe that a later development of transport between
Manchester and Liverpool, namely, the Manchester Ship Canal, has drawn
back into Manchester a part of the cotton market which was attracted
from Manchester into Liverpool by the famous improvement in transport
opened to the public three-quarters of a century ago.

The centralization of the cotton market in Liverpool fixed firmly the
system of buying through brokers, for the Liverpool importer, or his
broker, was in no sense a professional adviser to the spinners,
informally pledged to advance the latter's interests, as the old
Manchester dealers had been. The system was rendered comparatively
inexpensive by the drop in commissions from 1 to 1/2% which had followed
the adoption of selling by sample. This custom of buying and selling
through brokers continued unshaken until the laying of the Atlantic
cable tempted selling brokers occasionally, and even some buying
brokers, to buy direct from American factors by telegraph and thus
transform themselves into quasi-importers. The temptation was made the
more difficult to resist by the development of "future" dealings. When
the agents of the spinners, that is, the buying brokers, by becoming
principals in some transactions, had acquired interests diametrically
opposed to those of their customers, the consequent feeling of distrust
among spinners gave birth to the Cotton Buying Company, which,
constituted originally of twenty to thirty limited cotton-spinning
companies, represents to-day nearly 6,000,000 spindles distributed among
nearly one hundred firms. Its object was to squeeze out some middlemen
and economize for its members on brokerage. This company, it is said,
helped to attract the brokers back to the spinners, and an informal
understanding was arriv