The small number of "artisans and handicrafts," comprising only sixty thousand families, is of itself a sufficient indication that our manufactures, properly so called, were of very trifling amount. In various parts of this volume we have incidentally mentioned how slowly the great industries of this country grew into importance. At the period of which we are now speaking, nearly every article of clothing was, in many districts, of domestic production, and was essentially connected with the tillage of the land. The flax and the wool were spun at home; the stockings were knit; the shoes were often untanned hide nailed upon heavy clogs. Furniture there was little beyond the rough bench and the straw bed. The fuel came from the woods and hedges. About forty thousand of the cottages mentioned in the hearth-books had some land belonging to them; and, to prevent the growth of a "squatter" population, it was the business of the Grand Jury to present, as a nuisance, all newly-erected cottages that had not four acres of land attached to them. There was a contest perpetually going on between the more favoured portion who had regular means of subsistence, and the unhappy many who were pressing upon those means, in all the various forms of pauperism. One of the means of keeping down this class was to prevent them having dwellings. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, then, we see that there was some accumulation of capital, however small. There was then a vague feeling amongst the accumulators that something might be saved by setting the unemployed and the starving to other work than was provided for them in the fields. Population was pressing hard upon Capital. It pressed, chiefly, in the shape of increasing demands upon the poor-rate. The remedy universally proposed was "to set the poor to work." The notion was extremely crude as to the mode in which this was to be effected; but there was a sort of universal agreement expressed by sober economists as well as visionary projectors, that the more general introduction of manufactures would remedy the evil. Of course, the first thing to be done was to prohibit foreign manufactures by enormous duties; and then we were to go to work vigorously at home, knowing very little of the arts in which foreigners were greatly our superiors. But we were to go to work, not in the ordinary way of profitable industry, by the capitalist working for profit employing the labourer for wages, but by withholding from the poor the greater part of the want-fund, and converting it into a labour-fund, by setting up manufactures under the management of the poor-law administrators. Here, in these "workhouses" was the linen trade to be cultivated. Mr. Firmin set up a workhouse in Aldersgate Street, of the results of which, after four years, he thus speaks:--"This, I am sure, is the worst that can be said of it, that it hath not been yet brought to bear its own charges." Sir Matthew Hale was