People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 July 1894 — HOPEFUL VIEWS. [ARTICLE]

HOPEFUL VIEWS.

A Better Feeling Is Keported in Trade Circles. New York, July 2. —Bradstreet’s weekly review of trade says: “While there is no actual improvement in business throughout the country there are more favorable prospects and better feeling among merchants, with an increased number of instances where trade has been stimulated. The ending of the great bituminous coal strike is promptly followed by a sympathetic strike of railroad employes, which threatens disastrous effect on business by reason of Interference with distribution and travel. Losses on perishable freight in transit are already reported. Other unfavorable features include a conference of Rhode Island cotton mill owners as to the advisability of shutting down, owing to accumulation of stocks, heavy arrivals of wool at eastern markets, where stocks are already large: delay in settling the coke strike, which prevents many industrial establishments from starting up: an extremely restricted volume of business among wholesale dealers in clothing at Baltimore, 43 per cent, of what it was in the first half of last year; delayed orders from country merchants in Georgia and South Carolina, where crop damage has been threatened, and a sharp restriction In the volume of general trade at Chicago, where the railway strike centers. At New Orleans trade in all lines is smaller. At Nashville and at Birmingham, Ala., it is dull and without sign of early improvement, wnieh is true also at Portland. “The total number of actual business failures in the Unit'd Sta es in the last six months (failures in which assets are less than liabilities) is 6,528, which is more than in any preceding similar period, an increase of 4.6 per cent, compared with the first half of 1893, and 22 per cent, more than in six months in 1882. The present tendency in the number of failures to decrease is showm by the fact that while at the end of the first quarter of the current year the increase over the like period of last year was 900 failures, the Increase this year over last, at the end of a half year, is onl • 280 failures. Total liabilities of failing traders for the six mon ihs are $82,555,000, assets ieing .54 per cent, of that total. These aggregates are each less than one-halt of what they were for six months in 1892, and smaller than in six months of 1891 as well. Pennsylvania and California show striking increases in numbers of failures, and Illinois and Kansas noteworthy decreases.