This town is supposed to contain 40,000 souls, and to employ of its own 500 sail of ships, 400 of which are colliers. The people employed in the coal mines are prodigiously numerous amounting to many thousand; the earnings of the men are from 1/-to 4/-a day and their firing. About five miles from Newcastle are the ironworks, late Crawley’s, supposed to be the greatest manufactory of the kind in Europe. Several hundred hands are employed in it, insomuch that £20,000 a year is paid in wages. They earn from 1/-to 2/6 a day, and some of the foremen as much as £200 a year. The quantity of iron they work up is very great, employing three ships to the Baltic that each make ten voyages yearly and bring 70 tons at a time.... They use a good deal of American iron which is as good as any Swedish and for some purposes much better. They would use more of it if larger quantities were to be had, but they cannot get it--which is worthy of remark. In general their greatest work is for exportation and are employed very considerably by the East India Company: they have of late had a prodigious artillery demand from that Company[32]. As to the machines for accelerating several operations in the manufacture, copper rollers ... and the scissors for cutting bars of iron ... the turning cranes ... the beating hammer. There are machines of manifest utility, simple in their construction and all moved by water ... there are no impossibilities in mechanics, an anchor of 20 tons may undoubtedly be managed with as much ease as a pin. AMERICAN TRADE (Macpherson, _Annals of Commerce_, IV, p. 10) The Consequences resulting to Great Britain from the independence of the American States, may, with great truth, be called _advantages_.... A great and obvious advantage was the relief from governing and protecting them ... relief from the payment of bounties ... the recovery of the valuable trade of shipbuilding ... sacrificed to the zeal for promoting the prosperity of the Colonies. It was said ... that Great Britain possessed the whole of the American trade before the revolt.... It is well known that before the war the Americans carried a considerable proportion of their trade to other nations, contrary to law. Now they are at liberty to deal with other nations or with Britain; and for that reason alone some of them will choose to deal with Britain.... Experience has fully shown that there was no real cause to apprehend any decay of the British commerce in consequence of the new order of things in America: and moreover, what must effectually silence all controversy on the subject, the official accounts of the Custom House demonstrate that there has been a greater and more rapid increase in the general commerce of Great Britain, and especially of the commerce with America, since the era of American independence than ever there was. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ENCLOSURES (A. Young, _Northern Tour_, Letter IV, pp. 252-65)