ABSTRACT
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 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.
