VAST PROGRESS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 737

due to a full command of the same great agent-steam. This mighty energy, which quite transformed the modern world in fifty years, began to give promise of the future by 1815, and to be fully appreciated by 1825 on each side of the Atlantic. Yet great agencies mature slowly. The first railway was built in 1825, and, in 1850, there were but 6,621 miles in the British Islands. The Atlantic was not crossed by steamers till 1838, and British expansion did not acquire its full colossal proportions till Free Trade had been adopted and the gold of California and Australia had supplied to the world a tolerably adequate measure and representative of its increased values. In 1870 the coal raised for use in England was about six million tons. Fifty years later it was a moderate quantity. There was a great but rather slow increase for thirty years longer. About the close of the American Civil War it reached one hundred million tons yearly, and the quantity increased in 1880 to considerably more than one hundred and thirty million tons annually-nearly as much as all the rest of the world, including the United States, produces.

When the French war began, about 1793, England im. ported much of her iron. In the early years of this century she produced about 150,000 tons annually, and imported. about 40,000. After 1824, when the hot blast began to be used in smelting, there was great progress. Soon the annual production reached millions of tons-averaging between 1870 and 1880 about six and a half millions, which is equal to that of all the rest of the world, although most nations enter into competition, or may do so-iron ore being the most common of the metals. This illustrates well the superiority of English energy when once fully launched in pursuit of an end. It improves all advantages and enters into business on the largest scale in order to produce at the least comparative cost, and so triumphs over all competition.

Up to a late period in the last century the means of transport were very imperfect and costly. The improvement of

highways and construction of canals proceeded actively after 1760, and by the beginning of the present century the needs of business were fairly met, for that time. The English people had been like an overgrown and careless giant, generally good natured, not readily aroused, living a somewhat rude, rather careless country life in "Merry England ”— fierce and warlike at times, but soon subsiding into a quiet life for lack of a sufficient object. While they did not see their way clear to great things, and were not very seriously interfered with in their customary pleasures and rights, they permitted their rulers to think and act for them at their will.

But the long European war of nearly twenty-five years, in which they finally came out victors, aroused them. Powerful instruments of peaceful victories were offered for their use. They turned their awakened energies to new fields of achievement and never again allowed their ambition to be foremost and carry all their undertakings to success, to slumber. A restless and varied activity henceforth contrasted strongly with their previous love of quiet, and dislike to change.

The growth of towns and cities, mining enterprises and a manufacturing population, greatly increased the value of land, so largely held by the nobility and gentry, the middle classes gained enormous wealth in commerce, trade and manufactures and the laboring classes new fields of employment. The desire for setting things right took hold of them. The era of Reforms was opened and one has succeeded another from 1820 to the present. A general serious desire that others besides themselves should have their rights led them to abolish slavery in the British Empire, the larger colonies were permitted the fullest liberty to govern themselves, and they placed themselves, generally, on the side of human liberty and at the head of modern enlightened progress.

They soon became intimately and usefully concerned in

THE ORIGIN OF ENGLAND'S INDUSTRIES.

739

the affairs of all nations by an ever-growing trade, and ever new manufactures. They had invented none of the great industries, originally, and rather repulsed than invited them to become naturalized in their island until this period of awakening. Calicoes and cotton fabrics originated in India; silk-weaving was learned from the French and Italians; the Hollanders introduced the fine woolen manufactures; ship-building and the gains of commerce were imitated from the Genoese and Venetians, the German Hanse Towns and the Dutch. Yet when this people, so rich in mental energy and resource, gave their full attention to the pursuit of these industries they acquired an enlargement and scope quite amazing to their inventors.

They had advanced far into the present century before the laws of commerce and trade and economic science, generally, became clear to them. Then they carried reform as near as possible to the bottom of past evils and errors and swept away the hindrances to vast and profitable enterprise. About 1850 the way was fairly open and a great future fully assured. This has been so entirely realized that there has been hardly any comparison between them and particular nations in most great lines of business. In several points the United States has, in recent years, been rising so fast, and with such an incalculable mass of resources for future development, as to indicate that British progress must, in many things, soon pass into some new phase.

Yet there is much for that vigorous and rich young Republic to do before it can take the lead in any of the great modern specialties of British activity. The entire foreign trade of England is about two and a half times larger than that of the United States and about equal to that of France and Germany combined. The United States, with its great variety of productions, differing climates, manufactures, its mines of all kinds and its large population, is a world in itself. Being largely busied in developing new lands and

resources and in paying its war debt it shares much less in the general business of the outside world than an old country, or than it will in the future.

In 1801 England imported twenty-one million pounds of cotton; in 1875 sixteen hundred million. In 1785 the export of cotton goods amounted to $4,300,000; in 1810 to $90,000,000; in 1874 to $375,000,000; and woolen manufactures exported in the latter year were valued at $140,000,000. This was the surplus after its own people had been supplied. The textile industries employed over one million persons and the metal manufactures six hundred and fifty thousand. Its coal was worth $230,000,000 per annum, and its pig-iron amounted to $90,000,000 in 1876. With this world-wide trade it had accumulated vast deposits of capital. Much of this was invested in all kinds of enterprises in foreign lands, or loaned on good security and at good interest in a thousand forms, so that it was interested in, and shared the progress and prosperity of all lands.

The commercial marine of England was large for those times at the beginning of the century-or about two million tons capacity. Half the century had passed before this was doubled. Other countries entered into a lively competition with English ships but its superiority has been maintained to this day. In 1876 it reached about six million tons, and, in 1878, over six million two hundred and thirty thousand tons. More than half this was exclusively engaged in foreign trade and a large part of the remainder partly in home and partly in foreign trade. The United States had, at this time, about four million, five hundred and thirty thousand tons, mostly engaged in home trade. More than 70 per cent of its foreign trade was conveyed back and forth by foreign shipping.

The capacity of American shipping was larger than that of any country but England. More than one million tons of sailing and steam capacity were employed on the Northern

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Lakes and Western Rivers. The Civil War was disastrous to its shipping then engaged in the foreign trade and this has continued to diminish. It seems likely to revive, in time, and press hard on the heels of British commerce. The last has continued to expand during years of financial depression. It is not easy to foresee its future but there are no present indications of a tendency to decay in this direction. Canada, India and Australia are rapidly coming forward as commercial powers, south Africa seems likely to do so presently, and the British West Indies and South American possessions are likely to show a rapid growth in that near future when, the Isthmus Canal being in use, and the southern United States, Mexico, Central and northern South America being stirred up to great commercial activity, a New Era of earnest progress shall dawn for these tropical regions. England is likely to share in all these rapidly increasing activities, since the more enterprising dwellers in all these regions are of her own race and, in large part, in political dependence on, or intimate relations with, her.

She has, in her islands and resident abroad-but considering Great Britain as "Home"-a people trained to activities and enterprise in the line of this progress; she has vast collections of capital and, after her internal development of the last eighty years, no very important or very extensive calls on the attention of her statesmen to home reforms or on the capital of her business men to develop extensive home interests. Not that reform is complete, or that many branches of home business are not of prime importance, but that all these are well under way. The momentum of the past and the

present tendencies in these directions are so well settled as to bring, inevitably, the readjustments that the welfare of the people demands.