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THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN ENGLAND
IN the last chapter, wherein the condition of England was dealt with, we left it a prosperous country, in the ordinary sense of the word, under the rule of an orderly constitutionalism. There was no need here for the violent destruction of aristocratic privilege; it was of itself melting into money-privilege; and all was getting ready for the completest and securest system of the plunder of labour which the world has yet seen.
England was comparatively free in the bourgeois sense; there were far fewer checks than in France to interfere with the exaction of the tribute which labour has to pay to property to be allowed 160 to live. In a word, on the one hand, exploitation was veiled; and on the other, the owners of property had no longer any duties to perform in return for the above-said tribute. Nevertheless, all this had to go on on a small scale for a while.
Population had not increased largely since the beginning of the seventeenth century; agriculture was flourishing; one-thirtieth of the grain raised was exported from England; the working classes were not hard pressed, and could not yet be bought and sold in masses. There were no large manufacturing towns, and no need for them; the presence of the material to be worked up, rather than the means for working it mechanically—fuel, to wit—gave a manufacturing character to this or that country-side. It was, for example, the sheep-pastures of the Yorkshire hillsides, and not the existence of coal beneath them, which made the neighbourhood of the northern Bradford a weaving country. Its