1800-42] Steady agricultural progress 741

farm-buildings which the extension of arable land necessitated; estates were crippled by mortgages and charges piled on them during the days of the war rentals; the vicissitudes in prices had ruined many farmers. These things, together with social unrest, riotings, heavy poor-rates, heavy taxes, were not favourable to progress. But movement did not cease, though it was slow, intermittent, and unequal. The work of the eighteenth century had not been wasted. Scientific rotations were no longer confined to specially progressive estates and districts, but became matters of general knowledge; and the medieval rotation with its bare fallows gradually died out. Marling and claying of light soils to fit them for wheat became commoner. A more intelligent use was made of natural manures; and the value of artificial manures, such as bone dust, nitrate of soda, and guano, began to be appreciated. The new and improved breeds of cattle and sheep were established; and their feeding and fattening were better understood. English farmers could, it is true, no longer supply manufacturers with the finer wools that they required; but that was in part because breeding had improved the size of the fine-woolled South Downs and kindred stocks at the expense of the fleece. The use of the new-modelled ploughs and other implements known in the previous century became general; and their construction benefited greatly from the progress of metal-working and machinebuilding. The threshing-machine, in its early form, that had been reinvented by Andrew Meikle shortly before the year 1800, came rapidly into use, the flail disappearing before it and therewith much valuable winter work for the labourer. Even during the disastrous years from 1815 to 1833, when parliamentary committees on agricultural depression sat again and again, the agriculture of whole counties—such as Lincoln and Northumberland—was being remodelled. During the thirties also a new aid was given to farming on those heavy clay lands that had felt the worst of the depression, through the improvements made by Smith of Deanston in the methods of field drainage.

There was little of novelty in the work done on the land before the forties. It consisted for the most part in the application of principles already established. But greater things were in preparation. Agricultural chemistry came into existence with the nineteenth century, and made public its first claims and promises in England when Davy delivered a famous series of lectures before the Board of Agriculture in 1812. Seven years later the Board came to an end; and during the difficult years that followed the wars the chemist's voice was a vox clamantis in deserto. Nor was his work ripe. The earlier discoveries needed to be supplemented by those of Liebig and his successors ; and Liebig's results were not accessible until 1840. Two years earlier the Royal Agricultural Society had been founded; two years later the Agricultural Chemistry Association followed. A scientific knowledge of agriculture and organisations for spreading it were being built up.

742 London and international finance [1770-1821

But agriculture had not become scientific — that is a development which takes time.

It has been said that before 1789 London was already the commercial and financial capital of the West. The industrial changes and the wars raised her higher still. London alone of the great European cities had never seen a hostile army. Instead of the invader came the foreign capitalists and merchants—of whom Nathan Rothschild was chief—who found London the most secure and convenient headquarters. London was now not only the centre of European finance and banking, but also, and naturally, the centre of marine insurance. Lloyd's had taken an organised form between 1770 and 1780, and had subsequently become essential for the commerce of England and the world; for its work was not confined to British shipping. Foreign vessels were freely and profitably insured against capture by English cruisers ; and intelligence was collected for all. Everything favoured the accumulation in London of that wealth over which, it is said, Bliicher smacked eager lips when the signs of it lay spread before him around the dome of St Paul's. It was the greatest city of Europe in 1801, and its population doubled in the next forty years, crowding both into the new western quarters and the undrained, crowded, and pestilential districts to the east and south. There were other things than wealth visible from the dome of St Paul's.

To Cobbett's mind, in 1821, the "swelling out of London" seemed due to the growth of the funded national debt, and the inhabitants of its comfortable quarters were for the most part "tax-eaters." He was pointing towards two economic facts that he only vaguely understood — the greatly increased opportunities for investing free capital (not in the English funds only) which political, industrial, and commercial changes had brought with them, and the position that London had secured as a market for investment. The field for investment had long been widening and the organisation for dealing in securities becoming more perfect. By 1773 the more reputable stockbrokers were grouping themselves into a society distinct from the crowd of lottery jobbers, gamblers in insurance, and miscellaneous sharpers who had given Change Alley its evil name. Dealings in Government stock, the shares of the East India and other trading companies, those of the older insurance and water companies, and the like, were the staple business of the eighteenth century stock exchange. When it established itself in Capel Court, in 1802, the great increase in the public debt and the creation of the canals had added considerably to its work. After the wars investment on a large scale in foreign loans began. Such investment had been known since first Marlborough raised a loan for the Emperor; but constant wars and an Act of 1730 had checked its development. The nations now borrowed mainly in England, as they had once borrowed mainly in Holland. Amsterdam still took a share in the lending, as did

1775-1848] Foreign wars. — Joint-stock enterprise 743

Frankfort; but the trade and finance of Amsterdam never recovered from the shock of the French occupation and the temporary loss of the Dutch colonial empire.

The subsidies paid by England to the Allies during the wars had prepared the way for the later loans; and the great financial houses, notably the Rothschilds, controlled an international organisation fitted for handling them. Every nation came to borrow in London during the years of Europe's convalescence — France, Prussia, Austria, Russia, and the rest. The Americans borrowed too — the mushroom republics of the South very freely after 1820. Over ten millions were lent, and lost, in South America alone between 1822 and 1826. The loans were negotiated with the financiers, who passed them on to the English public, which was attracted by the guarantee of a fixed rate of interest in pounds sterling, a device invented by Nathan Rothschild and forced iipon the needy borrowing nations. The process was profitable to the great firms, at times remarkably so. In 1817, for instance, the Barings and the Hopes of Amsterdam took up a French 5 per cent, loan at 57. Next year it stood at 85, and before the revolution of 1830 it had risen to upwards of 109. When that loan was issued, there was no single Parisian banking firm strong enough to share in it. Four years later, two or three French houses began to take a subordinate part in the work; but, down to and after 1848, the London financiers and the great international Jewish houses that were half domiciled in London ruled the loan market.

Meanwhile in England the growth of joint-stock companies further widened the field of investment. With each period of trade expansion attempts were made to bring some new type of economic activity within the scope of the principle of associated capital. Early in the century there was a great increase in canal and water companies. Gas manufacture became a company business from the start. Mining companies first appeared in considerable numbers in connexion with the wild schemes for the development of South America in 1825. Industry was as yet rarely carried on under the joint-stock principle; for the shameless fraud connected with many of the ventures of this period made the business world reluctant to employ the company form except in the greatest undertakings. Banking, the branch of commerce that most needed to employ that form and was best suited for it, was long kept from adopting it in this country owing to the jealously guarded monopoly of the Bank of England. During the fifty years from 1775 to 1825 the history of English banking is full of the rise and fall of innumerable private banks, that were born as trade expanded and died wholesale as it contracted. Free joint-stock banking was not sanctioned by Parliament until, in 1825, for the fourth or fifth time, some scores of these flimsy note-issuing private banks stopped payment in a single year. Even then a circle with a sixty-five mile radius was drawn about London, within

744 English enterprise abroad [1800-40

which joint-stock banking remained unknown until 1833. The Scottish banks have, however, an entirely differenthistory. An uncommonly strong and flexible system of joint-stock banking had been created in Scotland in the eighteenth century, to which not a little of the swift progress of the country in commerce, industry, and agriculture during the first generation after 1800 maybe attributed.

Thus merit and circumstance had united to make Great Britain the leader in economic change. She was praised, envied, and imitated ; her ideas, her implements, and her men were borrowed as well as her accumulated wealth; though the British Government for years did its utmost to keep the skilled men and the machines at home. The early history of change on the Continent is full of English names — Richards, who began to build simple pumping-engines in Saxony before the great wars; Douglas, a maker of textile machines, whom Count Chaptal established in Paris on the Isle of Swans during the Consulate ; Cockerill, of Seraing, who helped to found the machine industry of Belgium ; CockerilFs sons, who in 1815 were invited by the Prussian Government to Berlin; a nameless Irish prisoner of war, who, having worked at muslin-weaving in Glasgow, greatly improved the looms of Tarare; the men from Nottingham, who shortly after Waterloo introduced the bobbin lace machine at Douai and St Pierre les Calais; Manby, Wilson, and Company, who started English methods at Creusot between 1826 and 1834 ; and so forth. The modern period in German agriculture is dated from the publication of Thaer's account of English farming in 1798. Telford was the adviser of the Austrian and Russian Governments ; and his pupil, Tierney Clark, began the great suspension bridge at Budapest in 1839. English capital was responsible for the first serious railway building by private enterprise in Belgium in the forties; and a few years later English contractors and English navvies went all over Europe.

The wars had both helped and hindered on the Continent that development of the means of communication without which there can be no swift economic progress. From this point of view the Napoleonic age was a time of restoration and advance for all countries that at any time formed part of the Empire, of arrested development for those that did not. In road and bridge and canal building, France, Belgium, and northern Italy had nothing, or almost nothing, to learn from England, except the use of iron bridges; even that, in the first instance, seems to have been a French invention. A sound economic instinct as well as the desire to transport cannon across the Simplon, impelled Napoleon to the work of improving communications. It suited his genius to a marvel; and the ancien regime had set up a good tradition in civil engineering. New canals were planned andstarted; rivers were improved and canalised; and thousands of miles of main road were cut or reconstructed. The Bourbons carried on the task with creditable determination. Nearlv a

1815-48] Transport improvements on the Continent 745

thousand kilometres of canal were opened for traffic between 1815 and 1830; and the King's highways— many of which had fallen out of repair during the disastrous years after Moscow—were again taken in hand, repaired, and extended. The July monarchy was equally zealous. The total length of royal roads in good repair was nearly doubled between 1830 and 1848; and, though the local roads, both departmental and communal, were not all that they might have been, though the canal system at the beginning of the railway age was far less complete than that of England, France had no cause to be ashamed of her achievement. It was entirely the work of the public authorities, for there was no tradition of private enterprise in such matters, and private capital was lacking.

Belgium and Holland resumed work on their already well-developed road and canal systems as soon as the peace permitted. The great seacanal from Amsterdam to the Helder, undertaken to revive if possible the trade of the Dutch capital, was opened in 1825; while in Belgium fresh road-making was undertaken by Government, canal-building by private capitalists. But over all the German-speaking lands progress was slow. The Prussian Government had begun to build solid main roads in 1788. By 1816 it was maintaining about nineteen hundred English miles of highway ; but the greater part of these roads were in Westphalia and the Rhine Province. There was no appreciable quickening in the rate of construction down to 1844. The eastern provinces remained ill-furnished with satisfactory means of communication, Prussia proper containing only six hundred and fifty miles of chaussce in 1841. The rest of the highways were of the old eighteenth century type, full of ruts and pits and morasses. Yet Prussia was counted a well-administered State. Austria was by this time stirring again ; and even Russia had joined in the work. The Polish road from Warsaw to the frontier, built from Telford's plans in the twenties, was the first satisfactory long highway in the Russian Empire. Austria had inherited a number of good routes from her eighteenth century monarchs, and her Italian provinces had formed part of the French Empire, so that she suffered less than some of her neighbours from the slow movement of the years that followed the fall of Napoleon. In southern Italy and in Spain much change was not to be expected.

Belgium is the single continental country where the railway age can be said to have begun before the later forties. A new economic life was rising on the foundation of her old industrial and commercial aptitudes ; and, after the separation from Holland in 1830, her Government had the wit to appreciate the advantage which a policy of railway-building, combined with the development of the trade of the now opened Scheldt, would bring to a country so favourably situated between England and the ocean on the one hand and the mass of Europe on the other. Work on the State system of railways began in 1834. With Malines as centre, the lines struck north to Antwerp, south through Brussels towards