And when this improvement takes place, and India becomes more known and developed, her great manufacturing capabilities will become fully apparent.

India has two very great advantages.

She has an abundant, docile, and orderly population, and she obtains from the sun an ample supply of that heat which has to be paid largely for here.

When, then, the Indian operative attains to an advanced degree of proficiency--and to this he undoubtedly will attain--the greatest labour competition that the world has ever seen will begin--a competition between the white labourer who requires to be expensively fed, warmly clothed, and well shod, and housed, and the black or brown skinned man who can live cheaply, and work naked, and who is as physically comfortable in a mere shelter as his rival is in a well built dwelling.
The Indian peasant already, in the case of wheat, undersells the English farmer, and it seems merely a question of time as to when the Indian operative will undersell his Lancashire rival, and when perhaps calico will come to England, as it once did, from Calicut.

And no doubt, some such thoughts were passing through Cobden's mind when he once said, "What ugly ruins our mills will make." We are, however, a considerable way from such remains as the reader will see if he consults the interesting paper on "The Manufactures of India," read by Sir Juland Danvers at a meeting of the Society of Arts on the 24th of April last, and by this it appears that the imports of cloths of English manufacture have increased in recent years.