England at this time in great quantities, all paying customs in ten several places before they come here.

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But there is something that may be of worse consequence than ordinary, if the iron manufacture be not encouraged. present, most of the works in Sussex and Surrey are laid down, and many in the north of England, and many in other parts, must follow, if not prevented by enclosing commons to supply them with wood. And when the greatest part of the iron-works are asleep, if there should be occasion for great quantities of guns and bullets,'—(always guns and bullets,

'As if the metals were intended

For nothing else but to kill men dead,')—

and other sorts of iron commodities, for a present unexpected war, and the Sound happen to be locked up, and so prevent iron coming to us, truly we should then be in a fine case!'

"The next branch of industry to which Andrew directed the attention of his countrymen was the woollen trade; and this he proposes to improve by the adoption of the processes which enabled the foreigner to make a handsomer cloth than was made in England. Here his advice was, 'import the machinery.' Two pieces of the same web of cloth may be so differently dressed, that the one shall be coarse, hard, unpleasant to the wear, unattractive to the eye, and comparatively unsuited to the market. The other piece, although made of the same wool, and woven in the same loom, may be so judiciously treated as to assume qualities of an entirely different character. Dressing, in fact, is the education of cloth—the woollen fabric, like the man who wears it, may grow up a boor or a gentleman. Andrew, then, tells his countrymen how they may dress their cloths, and make them of a superior quality; and this he does in a dialogue which would do no discredit to Izaak Walton. Before considering his method, however, we must notice one of his statements so contrary as it is to the common supposition that manufacturers were flocking into England. This they had done a century before; but Andrew assures us that, in his day, the manufacturers were actually emigrating to Germany, Ireland, and Holland. His statements ou this head, although concise, are quite explicit. We shall cite

only one, premising that he is speaking of those practices which were calculated to injure the trade of England :—

"Another trick there is of carrying fullers' earth from Woborne to Lynn in Norfolk, as they pretend; and then ship it to be carried to the clothiers in the west, and when at sea, a west wind blows the ship into Flushing, in Zealand. And we will have more fullers' earth carried from Arundel in Sussex to Portsmouth or to Chichester, and there shipped to secure the clothiers in the north of England; and when that ship is over against Hull, a west wind shall blow her over to the Brill, or into the Texel, into Holland. And these two ladings of earth, with a little that shall be brought over for ballast for ships, will do mischief enough, for trade will go where it is most encouraged, and where the merchant and clothier can get most by it.

Draper.-True, old friend, these tricks there are, and there are bad men enough that will be apt enough to leave the land where they were born; but let us see to help these matters, for if you should be one of them, all the poor of this country will be bound to curse you, and so will the rich too; for we have had men bad enough of our own trade, (but it will not become me to name persons,) who have provoked many clothiers to sell their estates, and transport themselves into the Lower Palatinate, and other parts of Germany, and there set up the clothing trade, which hath already spoiled our coarse cloth trade eastward, and the trade at Hamborough too; for if their trade be spoiled in England, they must try if they can make it out somewhere else, as in Ireland, Holland, and Germany, &c.'"

The folly of England in confining herself so almost exclusively to agriculture, had in those days become proverbial on the continent. "The stranger," as they said, "buys of the Englishman the skin of the fox for a groat, and sells him the tail for a shilling." Seeing that the system then existing tended towards the cheapening of all the raw materials of manufacture, labor included, Yarranton had little difficulty in arriving at the conclusion that a people wholly employed in tillage must remain poor, because of the waste of labor consequent upon the absence of that combination of effort which constitutes commerce. He, therefore, urged upon his countrymen the adoption of protective measures, by means of which they should, at once, incur the expense of bring

ing the machinery and the skill to the raw materials, and thus for ever relieve themselves from the necessity for sending the bulky corn and wool to the machinery and the skill. Were this done, it would, as he confidently assured them, lead to such improvements in the internal communications, and in commerce generally, that food could be cheaply supplied to all parts of the country that rents would rise — that capital would so much increase, that interest would greatly fall—and that land would sell more readily at thirty years' purchase of the greater rent than it then could do at sixteen years' purchase of the lesser one. These were remarkable predictions, but they were made by a man who seems fully to have appreciated the advantages resulting from that rapidity of circulation which constitutes commerce; and their entire accuracy was verified by the great increase in the value of both land and labor which subsequently followed their emancipation from that heaviest of all taxes the one resulting from a necessity for effecting changes of place, and constituting the great bar to progress.

In the advice thus given in regard to a great question in social science, this remarkable man only indicated measures similar to those we now see to be everywhere else pursued. When the chemist desires to diminish the centralizing force by means of which particles of matter are held together and thus to produce individuality, and the consequent power of association among those particles — he does it by means of the establishment of a stronger counter-attraction in another direction; as when he immerses zinc and copper in acids, and thus develops electricity. So, too, with the occupant of our Western prairies, who always fights fire with fire establishing local centres of attraction by means of which gravitation towards the great central fire is so much diminished, that the latter quickly ceases to exist. Flanders, Holland, and Germany had already attained to so great a perfection of manufacture, that the attraction of centralization was drawing in that direction not only all the raw materials of England, but many of the most valuable among her people; and Yarranton saw clearly, that the latter could never prosper until she should have established a system of counter-attraction sufficient not only to enable her to retain the skill she already had; but, also, to attract that which she required, and as yet had not. His advice was taken;

and from that time the statute-book of England became, from year to year, more and more filled with laws having for their object the bringing together of the farmer and the artisan, with a view to the production of association and combination-and thereby diminishing the necessity for exhausting the land by means of the exportation of its products in their rudest state.

§ 4. The insular position of England had given her security of person, and of property, so far as regarded the devastations of war, to an extent unknown in any part of Europe; and, in the days of Yarranton, she was waiting only the adoption of a system that should enable her people to combine together for the development of their various individualities. To effect a change in the movements of a nation requires, however, no inconsiderable time. The knowledge existed on the continent, but it was not to be found in England. In Holland, in the Netherlands, and in the manufacturing states of Germany, wealth abounded, and the loan. of capital could be obtained at the rate of four or five per cent. ; whereas, in the other it was with difficulty obtained for employment either in manufactures, or in agriculture. For centuries, the current of raw materials had been towards the continent, but now the course of that current was to be changed; and to accomplish this was a work requiring serious effort. Commerce, too, in England herself, was impeded by numerous restrictions, many of which had been created by law, while others had resulted from the anxiety of the existing manufacturers to discourage domestic competition for the purchase of raw products, as well as for the sale of finished commodities. Then, as now, they desired to buy cheaply and sell dearly; and the more they could prevent the extension of manufactures at home, the cheaper would be wool and the dearer would be cloth.

Time, however, brought the change, but not until the English farmer had experienced in its full effect the loss resulting from the necessity for depending on distant markets for the sale of the raw products of the earth. In the long and warlike period that closed with the treaty of Utrecht, the power of wheat to command money in exchange had been equal to 43s. 6d. per quarter, but with the return of peace, (1713,) the price fell to 35s., and thereafter continued gradually to decline until, in the ten years ending 1755,

the average was but 21s. 3d.; or less than half of what before had been obtained for it. The product exceeding the consumption, a small portion needed to go abroad; and that the price obtained for the surplus fixed that of the whole crop, will be obvious to all who remark the course of trade. A deficiency to the extent of even a hundred thousand bushels raises the price of all to the level of that at which that small supply may be brought from the distant market; while an excess to that extent reduces the whole to the level of the price at which this trivial quantity must be sold. How very slight was the excess to which was due the great reduction that had taken place, is shown by the following figures:

At the low price of 21s. 2d., the farmers of England obtained a market abroad for less than four millions of bushels - yielding scarcely two millions of dollars a year. The total product of wheat in Great Britain in this latter period must have been more than forty millions of bushels; and as that grain then entered little into consumption as compared with what it since has done, it would be, perhaps, fair to place the total production of food as being the equivalent of a hundred millions of bushels. Of this, about four per cent. constituted the surplus thrown upon the then regulating markets of the world, depressing the prices there, and in a corresponding degree depressing those obtained for the whole quantity produced; to the injury of the land and labor of the kingdom-to that of the artisan and to that of all but those who were dependent upon fixed incomes for their support.

The population of England was then but six millions, of whom the land-owners-then numbering nearly two hundred thousand -and their families, must have been nearly one-sixth, or a million in number. Adding to them the laborers in husbandry, we have a large proportion of the community directly dependent upon the results of agriculture. The mechanic, however, was equally inte