I.The Manufactures
The history of England during the eighteenth century shows a curious contrast between the political stagnancy and the great industrial activity.The great constitutional questions seemed to be settled;and the statesmen,occupied mainly in sharing power and place,took a very shortsighted view (not for the first time in history)of the great problems that were beginning to present themselves.The British empire in the East was not won by a towering ambition so much as forced upon a reluctant commercial company by the necessities of its position.The English race became dominant in America;but the political connection was broken off mainly because English statesmen could only regard it from the shopkeeping point of view.When a new world began to arise at the Antipodes,our rulers saw an opportunity not for planting new offshoots of European civilisation,but for ridding themselves of the social rubbish no longer accepted in America.With purblind energy,and eyes doggedly fixed upon the ground at their feet,the race had somehow pressed forwards to illustrate the old doctrine that a man never goes so far as when he does not know whither he is going.While thinking of earning an honest penny by extending the trade,our 'monied-men'were laying the foundation of vast structures to be developed by their descendants.
Politicians,again,had little to do with the great 'industrial revolution'which marked the last half of the century.The main facts are now a familiar topic of economic historians;nor need I speak of them in detail.Though agriculture was still the main industry,and the landowners almost monopolised political power,an ever growing proportion of the people was being collected in towns;the artisans were congregating in large factories;and the great cloud of coal-smoke,which has never dwindled,was already beginning to darken our skies.The change corresponds to the difference between a fully developed organism possessed of a central brain,with an elaborate nervous system,and some lower form in which the vital processes are still carried on by a number of separate ganglia.The concentration of the population in the great industrial centres implied the improvement of the means of commerce;new organisation of industry provided with a corresponding apparatus of machinery;and the systematic exploitation of the stored-up forces of nature.Each set of changes was at once cause and effect,and each was carried on separately,although in relation to the other.Brindley,Arkwright,and Watt may be taken as typical representatives of the three operations.Canals,spinning-jennies,and steam-engines were changing the whole social order.
The development of means of communication had been slow till the last half of the century.The roads had been little changed since they had been first laid down as part of the great network which bound the Roman empire together.Turnpike acts,sanctioning the construction of new roads,became numerous.Palmer's application of the stage-coaches to the carriage of the mails marked an epoch in 1784;and De Quincey's prose poem,'The Mail-coach,'shows how the unprecedented speed of Palmer's coaches,then spreading the news of the first battles in the Peninsula,had caused them to tyrannise over the opium-eater's dreams.They were discharging at once a political and an industrial function.Meanwhile the Bridgewater canal,constructed between 1759and 1761,was the first link in a great network which,by the time of the French revolution,connected the seaports and the great centres of industry.The great inventions of machinery were simultaneously enabling manufacturers to take advantage of the new means of communication.The cotton manufacture sprang up soon after 1780with enormous rapidity.Aided by the application of steam (first applied to a cotton mill in 1785)it passed the woollen trade,the traditional favourite of legislators,and became the most important branch of British trade.The iron trade had made a corresponding start.While the steam-engine,on which Watt had made the first great improvement in 1765,was transforming the manufacturing system,and preparing the advent of the steamship and railroad,Great Britain had become the leading manufacturing and commercial country in the world.The agricultural interest was losing its pre-eminence;and huge towns with vast aggregations of artisan population were beginning to spring up with unprecedented rapidity.The change was an illustration upon a gigantic scale of the doctrines expounded in the Wealth of Nations.Division of labour was being applied to things more important than pin-making,involving a redistribution of functions not as between men covered by the same roof,but between whole classes of society;between the makers of new means of communication and the manufacturers of every kind of material.The whole industrial community might be regarded as one great organism.Yet the organisation was formed by a multitude of independent agencies without any concerted plan.It was thus a vast illustration of the doctrine that each man by pursuing his own interests promoted the interests of the whole,and that government interference was simply a hindrance.The progress of improvement,says Adam Smith,depends upon 'the uniform,constant,and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition,'which often succeeds in spite of the errors of government,as nature often overcomes the blunders of doctors.It is,as he infers,'the highest impertinence and presumption for kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people'by sumptuary laws and taxes upon imports.(1)To the English manufacturer or engineer government appeared as a necessary evil.It allowed the engineer to make roads and canals,after a troublesome and expensive process of application.