20 DERBY-SILK. [1689-1714. flax, or hemp; company meanwhile mutually cheering and provoking to labour. In certain other parts you may see, on a summer's evening, the common labourers sitting along the streets of a town or village, each at his own door, with a cushion before him, making bone-lace, and earning more in an evening's pastime than an Irish family would in a whole day.”* Alas, for the bone-lace makers. Their industry was almost extinguished by the inexorable machine of 1809. But a change of fashion is bringing their labour again into repute. The endowment in 1626 of a free-school at Great Marlow, to teach twenty-four girls to knit, spin, and make bone-lace, had become a provision for the continuance of obsolete arts and unprofitable labour. The revival of the prettiest of these arts is one of the many proofs that whilst machinery does its proper work for the great bulk of comforts and luxuries, there are elegancies and niceties of hand-labour which machines cannot wholly supersede. Lombe's famous silk-mill at Derby, completed in 1717, was not the first attempt to supersede the foreign thrown, or spun, silk, by the conversion of the raw silk into what was called organzine. The silk-mill at Derby, "afterwards much improved by sir Thomas Lombe, was first erected by one Soracole, a man expert in making mill-work, especially for raising water to supply towns for family use."† The almost exclusive use of woollen cloth had been trenched upon before the end of the reign of Charles II., by the silks of France. In 1699, it was bitterly complained of, that "the unreasonable and indiscreet preference of India manufactures, especially that of India silks and stuffs, hath almost wholly overthrown, and unhinged, this profitable and necessary trade of silk throwing and weaving." § The clamour was so great against Indian silks and printed cottons, that after the 29th of September, 1701, the wearing all wrought silks, of the manufacture of Persia, China, or East India, and all calicoes, painted, dyed, or stained therein, was absolutely prohibited. || If we may believe the advocates of prohibition, this Statute had the effect of repeopling Spitalfields, "that looked before like a deserted place." ¶ The weavers went blithely to work; and an ingenious experiment was tried to furnish them with silk spun by machinery. Yet the wearers of silk would not be satisfied with the home manufacture. The mercer tried to palm off the wares of Spitalfields as French goods illicitly imported.** Bishop Berkeley, with the large view of a philosopher, saw the reason of this preference; and, when the clandestine importation went on, to a great extent, in spite of all custom-house vigilance, asks "whether France and Flanders could have drawn so much money from England, for figured silks, lace, and tapestry, if they had not had Academies for Design?" We should have remained till this day inferior in design, and in every other quality of the silk manufacture, had not a great statesman, who was denounced as "a hard-hearted political economist," made a partial beginning of that system of free trade which has raised this particular manufacture, as it has raised so many others, to an eminence which utterly disregards every danger of foreign competition. The country 1689-1714.] LEAD MINES-LINCOLNSHIRE. 21 which, in 1825, was to be ruined by the importation of foreign silks, now exports silk of native manufacture, to an extent little short of two millions value in one year. The Lead mines of the High Peak, in Derbyshire, were worked in the period of which we write, without much mechanical aid. The miner descended into the pit by a narrow square opening called a groove, in the angles of which groove pieces of wood were inserted. He ascended with his load of ore in the same rude fashion. "We saw,” "We saw," says Defoe, "the poor wretch working and heaving himself up gradually, as we thought with difficulty. * * He was clothed all in leather; had a cap of the same without brims; and some tools in a little basket which he drew up with him. Besides his basket of tools, he brought up with him about three-quarters of a hundred weight of ore." This poor man, who could not express himself intelligibly, signified through an interpreter that he was at work sixty fathoms deep; but that there were five other men of his party, two of whom were eleven fathoms deeper, and the other three fifteen fathoms deeper. These had an easier labour, for they had a way out at the side of a hill. Such was mining, in days before the steam engine. The lead mines have always been worked with the expectation of obtaining silver, for the extraction of which modern chemistry has afforded facilities. In 1699 one impediment to such experiments was removed. By a Statute of Henry IV., the "multiplying" gold and silver was made felony. This law, directed against the alchemists, made the attempt to extract gold and silver, by refining metals, a high penal offence; and men of "study, industry, and learning," who in metallurgy had "arrived to great skill and perfection, dare not exercise their said skill." The Act of Henry IV. was therefore repealed.* Such are the mistakes of legislation, when it fancies that matters wholly belonging to its own time will have a perpetual endurance. Our Statute book is full of such examples of blind lawgiving; and the remedy seldom comes till the evil has become insupportable. Lincolnshire is now universally acknowledged to be the most fertile county in England. At the beginning of the eighteenth century it numbered 40,590 houses, and a consequent population of about two hundred and three thousand. In 1801 it contained a population only of about two hundred and eight thousand. In 1851 its numbers reached four hundred and seven thousand. This is the most remarkable example of the increase of a purely agricultural population, by the application, upon the largest scale, of the resources of mechanical and chemical science. Defoe looked upon the fencountry—the "often-drowned country," whose very ditches were navigable, and whose inhabitants went from town to town in boats. Here he heard the hoarse voice of the bittern. Here he saw the Decoys for wild-fowl, which were taken in incredible quantities for the London market. The bittern no longer shakes "the sounding marsh;" the Decoys are swept away to yield a better supply of beef and mutton. The drainage of the Fens was in progress when Defoe wrote; and there were large outlays of capital upon this great undertaking. But, "notwithstanding all that hands could do, or art contrive, yet sometimes the waters do still prevail, the banks break, and whole levels are overflowed together." The work which the Romans began; which the 1 Gul. & Mar. c. 30. "Tour," vol. ii. pp. 341-344. 22 SALT SODA-SOAP. [1689-1714. skilful monks of the middle age continued; which spirited adventurers undertook in the time of Charles I., but were interrupted by the rapacity of his unwise government, and the subsequent troubled times; which was set on foot again in 1668; and which was an especial subject of legislation in 1697,—has steadily gone forward. The time may arrive when the Great Level of the Fens may become as wholly firm land, as the remains of ancient roads and trees below the surface show it once to have been. The contrast between the great corn-bearing and grazing country of our own times, and of the period of the Revolution, is sufficiently impressive, although some land has yet to be reclaimed from the dominion of the waters. The brine springs of Cheshire and of Worcestershire had been producing Salt from time immemorial. On all parts of the coast sea-water had been evaporated for salt, from days probably coeval with the earliest labour of the fisherman. In 1670, the first bed of rock salt was discovered at Nantwich, in Cheshire. Defoe mentions that after this discovery of rock-salt, the salt of the brine springs was not so much in request. At the beginning of the eighteenth century England was known to possess an unlimited supply of the material of salt; yet the manufacture was so imperfect, that the only salt fit for the tables of the opulent was imported. There was no gabelle, as in France, to prevent the free consumption of salt; but the nauseous taste, and the deleterious effects, of our common salt, necessarily limited its use. Then came the long era of injudicious taxation. A duty was imposed upon salt in the reign of William III.; and in a century it was increased to twelve times the value of the article taxed. But this was not enough for the grasp of self-defeating fiscal rapacity. The duty was raised at last to fifteen shillings a bushel, or forty times the value of the article taxed. In 1823 the salt duties were wholly abolished. Then this necessary of life was to be used without stint; and salt was also to become one of the most important materials of chemical manufacture. It is curious to trace the changes in industry produced by the magic of relief from taxation. The abolition of the duty on salt produced the manufacture of soda. The cheapness of soda, and its certain and unlimited supply, wholly altered the manufacture of soap. The alkali which was obtained on every shore of England and Scotland, by burning the sea-weed to produce kelp, now comes from the chemical works of Newcastle and Glasgow, at a price which renders the labour of the meanest peasant who earned the scantiest pittance by collecting, the weed, far too costly for the purposes of commerce. Every farmer, in the middle of the last century, endeavoured to prevent any clause being inserted in his lease to regulate his cutting of underwood. He wanted not the underwood for his own hearth. He wanted to burn the wood to make ashes for the soap-boiler. In Suffolk, the soap-boiler's men were always travelling the round of the hamlets. They visited every house with light quartering carts, to collect the wood-ashes. There were scarcely any roads impracticable to these vehicles.* The misery of a country with bad salt and dear soapboth evils chiefly produced by misdirected taxation-can scarcely be overestimated. The contrast of these matters of the present and the past is astounding. The annual consumption of salt by every individual of the * Cullum's Hawsted, p. 250. 1689-1714.] LANCASHIRE BEFORE THE COTTON ÆRA. 23 population of Great Britain was estimated at twenty-two pounds in 1839.* Upon a population of twenty-one millions, this would give a consumption of four hundred and sixty-two million pounds, or eight million two hundred and fifty thousand bushels. In addition, we now export thirty million bushels of salt. Soap duties are now also abolished. The first excise of a penny per pound was imposed in the reign of Anne. The duties on soap went on increasing, till they were utterly repealed in the reign of Victoria. The consumption of soap in 1851 was four times as great as that of 1801. If the fire-nymphs, and water-nymphs, and earth-nymphs of Darwin had been endued with the spirit of prophecy-if his "nymph Gossypia," + especially, had looked back upon the past, and predicted of the future-the population of Lancashire, when Darwin wrote in 1790, would have incredulously listened to facts such as these, whether told in sonorous verse or simple prose: You numbered two hundred thousand souls at the beginning of the eighteenth century; you will number two million souls in the middle of the nineteenth century. The vegetable fibre of which you scarcely knew the use when the first ship entered the first dock of Liverpool, in the year 1700, and when Liverpool and Manchester had no water communication, shall be brought from North America, from Brazil, from Egypt, and from India, in quantities that will annually reach a thousand millions of pounds. This cotton-wool shall be worked by machines which in their elaborate contrivances shall make the "spinning jenny" of Arkwright appear a feeble substitute for fingers. Enormous factories for converting the wool into yarn, and for weaving the yarn into cloth by mechanical power, shall rise up in barren districts, where the human foot now scarcely treads; and villages, each with a few hundred souls scattered around its parish church, shall become enormous towns, with their thousands of inhabitants. The products of this industry shall furnish twenty millions of our own nation with fabrics of wondrous cheapness, and of beauty far surpassing the painted calicoes of the East, which were so jealously prohibited about a century ago. Foreign nations shall purchase these cotton manufactures to the annual amount in money value of nearly forty million pounds. This manufacture shall give direct employ to half-a-million of people in the factories, and to a hundred thousand engineers and machinists in connexion with these mills. All these wonderful results shall be accomplished by almost incredible skill and perseverance, during a period not longer than the ordinary term of human life. But the most marvellous expansion of this industry, and of all other industries, shall take place in the generation succeeding you; and at the termination of the first half of the nineteenth century, three persons shall subsist on this soil of Lancashire where one subsisted at its commencement; and ten shall subsist where one subsisted a hundred years earlier. To look at the condition of Lancashire before the cotton era is to look at the Hercules in his cradle. But we must endeavour to continue the sketch which we have attempted of other districts about the beginning of the eighteenth century. 24 MANCHESTER. [1689-1714. Manchester, in the early part of the reign of Charles II., was reckoned to contain six thousand people.* Fifty years later its population was estimated at fifty thousand; but this estimate included "the suburb, or village, on the other side of the bridge." + There were no very precise data for this estimate, beyond the manifest increase of buildings and of trade; the increase of inhabitants having demanded a new church, that of St. Anne. "If this calculation be just, as I believe it really is," writes Defoe, "you have here an open village, which is greater and more populous than most cities in England: neither York, Lincoln, Chester, Salisbury, Winchester, Worcester, Gloucester, no, nor Norwich itself, can come up to it." The social condition of Manchester, at the end of the seventeenth century, was very primitive. Its manufactures of fustian, girth web, ticking, tapes, were carried on by small masters, who had apprentices residing in their houses. These lads were employed in the servile offices of turning the warping- mills, and carrying packages from place to place. The master and his young men breakfasted together upon "water-pottage, boiled thick," and a bowl of milk stood upon the table, into which all dipped their spoons. § In 1702 there was the portentous entry in a tradesman's household-book, of a sum expended for tea and sugar. In the reign of George I. it was held that "the luxury of the age will be the ruin of the nation;" and one of the proofs of this degeneracy was that "the wholesome breakfast of water-gruel and milk-pottage is changed for coffee and tea." || The present mill-owners of Manchester, each with his enormous transactions, represented by hundreds of thousands of pounds in a year, furnish a remarkable contrast to "those travelling tradesmen whom we call Manchester-men." To every town the fustians and "small things called Manchester-ware' were borne by horse-packs; "the Manchester men being, saving their wealth, a kind of pedlars who carry their goods themselves to the country-shopkeepers everywhere." ¶ The perils of their land journeys were not trifling: "The horse is driven away by some sudden flood, or falls down in the water and spoils the goods." ** Manchester had few rival neighbours in its trade of fustians and dimities, in which a little hand-spun cotton was used. Towns such as Bolton, to which "the cotton manufacture had reached," did not presume to compete with Manchester's warping-mills, and Manchester's looms, "which work twenty-four laces at a time," as is recorded with wondering commendation. At Bury, the cotton manufacture was ended, and the woollen manufacture of coarse sorts begun. At Preston, the tourist had "come beyond the trading part of the country." This gay town, known as Proud Preston, was full of attornies, proctors, and notaries. †† Between the trading towns there was very imperfect communication; and until the Mersey, the Irwell, and the Weaver were made navigable, land-carriage to and from Liverpool was an important addition to the cost of exported and imported goods. The traveller entering Lancashire from the Western point of the county, would be ferried over the Mersey to Liverpool. Instead of steamers and magnificent landing-places adjusting themselves to the rise or fall of the tide, |