Two hundred years ago, even more recently than that, the populous and prosperous parts of England were East Anglia, Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Somerset, Gloucestershire, and some neighbouring counties. Agriculture, sheep-farming, and the wool trade formed the main source of wealth: and the only notable exception was the iron industry of the Weald, where a sufficiency of wood fuel was available for smelting. Between 1750 and 1850 the great northward trek took place, and King Coal became supreme. He ruined an appreciable part of Yorkshire and Lancashire, smeared his ugly fingers over mountain valleys in South Wales and elsewhere, created the “Black Country” in his own image, and last of all produced the terrible blot that we call the “Potteries,” where the whole landscape looks like a bad dream. The most hideous nightmare-panorama that comes to my mind is a scene of utter desolation not far from Etruria (a singularly inappropriate name), in Staffordshire, where slagheaps, collieries, blast-furnaces, potbanks and smoke dispute the foreground. Yet an old print that I saw in Messrs. Wedgwood’s adjoining works proves that less than two hundred years ago this was unspoiled country. From that time onwards, the northern half of England became the national workshop, and a large part of southern England became a private garden. At the present moment half the total population of England is concentrated in five comparatively small districts: “Greater” London, South Lancashire, West Yorkshire, the “Black Country” and Tyneside. Examples of the early factories built towards the end of the eighteenth century are to be found in the beautiful valley above Stroud, and in many wild and lonely dales among the Pennine hills. They stand beside fast-running streams which at first provided the necessary power, but before long the steam-engine replaced the earlier method, and a tall chimney was one immediate result. Smoke, of course, was another. Yet so many of these old “mills” still survive that we can study their architecture. There are mills in the Stroud Valley admirably designed in the Georgian manner, with well-proportioned windows divided into small panes, stone-slated roofs, and stone walls, innocent of soot and now golden with time. Built of local materials, they harmonise well with their surroundings. The same may be said of a few Yorkshire mills, though for the most part they have been blackened with smoke and are more austere. Standing by some deserted building of this type, its great wheel disused and its windows broken, in a lonely valley with only the noise of the stream audible, one always thinks of the machine-breakers in Charlotte Bronte’s _Shirley_, a grim incident of the countryman’s fight against progress.