While the knowledge of the arts, and especially of the arts that relate to transportation, were in so backward a state, it was inevitable that the prices of commodities should be high, and their interchange limited. Having to pay so much for the articles that they did not grow or produce themselves, the people of England, in the middle of the eighteenth century, were extremely poor, as a rule, and had very little chance to increase their wealth. The wages of the working classes were very low. A shilling a day was deemed to be excellent earnings. In Scotland the wages of a day labourer were only 5_d._ per day in summer and 6_d._ in winter. The price of bread was ordinarily much higher than it is at the present time.[12] The prices of clothing and of the usual requisites for domestic comfort and convenience were very much more than at the present day. The rates of wages were hardly enough to enable the great mass of the people to keep body and soul together. Butchers’ meat was all but unknown, even among those who were tolerably well off.[13] Plain homespun was almost the only description of clothing that was worn. Shops were hardly known in the smaller towns or villages, and the country people were mainly supplied with such requirements as they were able to indulge in, outside of their own productions, by hawkers, who carried packs everywhere, as they sometimes do in remote country places in our own day. In localities where coal was not produced, it was not to be purchased for love or money, unless at seaport towns, and the fuel ordinarily used was either turf or wood. From this condition of things England was largely rescued in the latter part of the eighteenth century by the introduction and development of internal waterways. This movement gave a remarkable stimulus to commercial and industrial progress. It enabled raw materials to be transported at about one-tenth of what they had formerly cost, and facilitated the interchange of commodities between the different parts of the kingdom to an extent previously undreamt of.