§ 1. THE GROWTH OF OUR INDUSTRY--We have now traced the industrial growth of England from the diffused beginnings of manufactures and agriculture in the isolated manors, and have seen how gradually towns grew up, commerce extended and markets arose, while manufacturers became organized in various centres and regulated by gilds. We have seen that for several centuries the back-bone of our national wealth was wool, but that in time we ceased to export it, and worked it up into cloth ourselves, thereby gaining great national wealth. We have seen, too, how our foreign trade, after its petty beginnings in the Middle Ages, took a fresh start {212} in the buccaneering days of the Elizabethan sea-captains and then rapidly developed, by means of the various great Companies, till England became commercially supreme throughout the world. From commercial beginnings we traced the rise of our Indian Empire, and the growth of the American colonies. Meanwhile at home there came an Industrial Revolution which, happening as it did at the moment that was politically most favourable to its growth, gave England a very useful start over all other European nations in manufacturing industries of all kinds, and enabled her to endure successfully the enormous burdens of the great Continental war. Now comes a time of still greater progress, economic as well as commercial, for the old restrictive barriers to trade are to be swept away, and a new economic policy is to be inaugurated. § 2. STATE OF TRADE IN 1820--If we now endeavour to gain some idea of the trade of the country soon after the war, we may look for a moment at its condition in 1820, just before Free Trade measures were begun. The official value of foreign and colonial imports was declared to be £32,000,000, which with a population of about 21,000,000 was at the rate of about thirty shillings a head. The exports of home produce amounted to some £36,000,000. The tonnage of shipping entering and leaving our harbours was 4,000,000 tons, of which 2,648,000 tons belonged to the United Kingdom and its dependencies. Steamers were, of course, as yet unknown. Professor Leone Levi calculates the trade of the country at not more than one-eighth or one-ninth of what it is at the present time. The wealth and comfort accessible to the people in general was much more limited, the consumption of tea, for instance, being only 1 lb. 4 oz. per head, and of sugar 18 lbs. a head. In fact, if we compare {213} the £244,710,066 worth of our exports in 1889–90 with the £32,000,000 worth in 1820 we see at once how gigantic has been the growth of our trade. In 1889, again, the imports (for the first ten months) were £347,985,087, which is more than nine times their value in 1820. But even at the beginning of the century England was far ahead of her old rival France, for French imports were only worth £8,000,000 in 1815, and her exports only about double that amount, or less than