of domestic trades connected with dress is carried on on a large scale. I need only mention the cottage industries of Ireland, as also some of them which have survived in the shires of Buckingham, Oxford, and Bedford; hosiery is a common occupation in the villages of the counties Of Nottingham and Derby; and several great London firms send out cloth to be made into dress in the villages of Sussex and Hampshire. Woollen hosiery is at home in the villages of Leicester, and especially in Scotland; straw-plaiting and hat-making in many parts of the country; while at Northampton, Leicester, Ipswich, and Stafford shoemaking was, till quite lately, a widely spread domestic occupation, or was carried on in small workshops; even at Norwich it remains a petty trade to some extent, notwithstanding the competition of the factories. It must also be said that the recent appearance of large boot and shoe factories has considerably increased the number of girls and women who sew the “uppers” and embroider the slippers, either in their own houses or in sweaters’ workshops, while new small factories have developed of late for the making of heels, card-boxes, and so on.
The petty trades are thus an important factor of industrial life even in Great Britain, although many of them have gathered into the towns. But if we find in this country so many fewer rural, industries than on the Continent, we must not imagine that their disappearance is due only to a keener competition of the factories. The chief cause was the compulsory exodus from the villages.
As everyone knows from Thorold Rogers’ work, the growth of the factory system in England was intimately connected with that enforced exodus. Whole industries, which prospered till then, were killed downright by the forced clearing of estates.136 The workshops, much more even than the factories, multiply wherever they find cheap labour; and the specific feature of this country is, that the cheapest labour — that is, the greatest number of destitute people — is to be found in the great. cities. The agitation raised (with