1789-1848] Sugar-beet.—Potato spirit.— The guilds 751

staple German export was almost as swift as its rise; and that decline had begun already in 1840. The quality of the German wool was deteriorating, owing to careless breeding, while an effective substitute came in yearly increasing quantities from Australia.

The spread of the cultivation of the sugar-beet was as remarkable as the revolution in sheep-breeding. Beet-growing was first undertaken on a large scale during the wars. When war was over, great and small, Prussian squires and Flemish peasants, joined in the work. The cultivation of the new root led directly to the introduction of deep ploughing, drilling, and better implements generally,in central and eastern Germany. Between 1835 and 1837 there was an eruption of sugar factories in Saxony and Silesia. The movement was swift, for it was due to two of the great driving forces of the new age, industrial chemistry and large scale manufacture. Similar in character to the beet-sugar industry, though less extensive, was the new trade of distillation from the potato. Together with the extended growth of corn and oil seeds for export, these new branches of agriculture were beginning to exercise a powerful influence on the rural life of Germany. The Prussian squire, freed from some of the cumbrous routine of the old agrarian system, enabled to replace the inefficient customary service of his peasants by hired labour, came to regard his estate commercially and to watch home and foreign markets in a new fashion. He founded agricultural societies, exhibited at cattle-shows, and imitated the English landowners of an earlier generation.

The resistance offered to agricultural innovations on the Continent in the eighteenth century by antiquated land laws and a half-medieval village economy has something in common with the obstacles which guilds and ubiquitous Government control placed in the way of industrial change. But the importance of these obstacles may easily be exaggerated. In most, if not all, western countries the guild had long ceased to be a really independent, self-governing association of master-craftsmen. It was rather a police instrument in the hands of the State; and the State looked with favour on new industries, new processes, and large scale production, even when it subjected them to somewhat excessive inspection. With the Revolution and the French conquests guilds vanished from a large partof Europe. Industrial freedom was established in Prussia during the period of reconstruction after Jena. In many German States, however, the full guild-system with its regular hierarchy, its "Wanderjahre " and " masterpiece," and the accompanying State interference with the exercise of skilled crafts in rural districts, survived 1818. Here and there, as for instance in Bavaria, it certainly tended to delay change. But the industries most susceptible of change in the early days of the industrial revolution on the Continent were seldom organised after the complete guild pattern ; and, when the time came for revolution in the

752 Government influence. — Tariffs [1815-40

handicrafts, guilds were no longer alive. Again, the paternal supervision exercised throughout the German-speakinglands by aconservative bureaucratic Government delayed, among other things, the construction of railways and the reform of mining methods. On the other hand such supervision often accelerated economic movements. The royal Gewerbeinstitut founded at Berlin in 1821 stimulated industries — such, for instance, as engineering — whose " natural" rate of growth would undoubtedly have been slow, as also did the attention which Napoleon, his councillors, and his prefects, gave to industrial affairs. Delay in the adoption of new processes and of the new power in Europe is to be traced far oftener to the absence of economic stimulus, and the consequent survival of simple methods of manufacture, than to the deliberate acts of Governments.

It is probable, moreover, that the high customs-tariffs, which most countries retained or adopted as a means of commercial defence against England during the peace, did in some cases hasten the transition from the old order to the new. When the natural protection created by a state of war ceased, threatened groups of producers made successful appeals to Governments, which in but few cases had abandoned the traditions of the eighteenth century. Mercantile communities that lay across the world's trade-routes, such as the Dutch and the seaboard city States of Germany, were naturally in favour of greater freedom ; but such cases were exceptional. France quickly constructed a powerful protective system, with heavy duties both on manufactures and agricultural produce, and abundant prohibitions. Inadequate duties on manufactures formed one of the grievances of Belgium during the fifteen years of forced partnership with Holland. The separation of 1830 was followed by a tariff more satisfactory to the manufacturing interest and also by an outburst of industrial activity. The scientific and liberal Prussian tariff of 1818, although it was on the whole an important step towards freer trade, yet recognised the claims of the industrial classes; and, after the Zollverein came into being, the duties on manufactures were gradually raised, with results that seem to have been beneficial to the growth of the infant industries of Germany. In the most backward countries, in Russia, for instance, it is not possible to trace any such benefits; for, where new processes had not gained a footing, such exaggerations of prohibition and tariff as Russia practised were likely to perpetuate outworn methods of production. Nor was there any demonstrable gain to England, the leader of Europe, from the continuance of protection in its most extreme and irrational forms until after 1820, and in a form less irrational but still pronounced and ill-regulated until the forties. That continuance merely intensified the evils attendant on economic change, encouraged similar policies among England's neighbours, and hindered the expansion of her trade.

In almost every European country the industry that first felt the

1789-1846] Mechanical industry on the Continent 753

infection from England was that of cotton. On the Continent, as in Great Britain, it was relatively young and adaptable ; and, although in many districts it was both older and less adaptable than in Great Britain, yet its practice — unlike that of the linen and woollen industries — had never become associated with the tenacious routine of peasant life. Everywhere a professional trade, not a by-employment, those who followed it did so for gain. Very early indeed, in some cases several years before 1789, the hand-worked spinning-jenny and other English machines began to appear in France, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and Germany. By 1801 the jenny had driven out the wheel in the French Department of the North. During the Continental Blockade little spinning-mills began to spring up everywhere—near Lille, in Alsace, on the Rhine and on the Ruhr, in Bavaria and Saxony and Flanders. The machinery for preparing and spinning cotton could now be successfully made outside England. But steam was hardly known in the textile mills of Europe during the Napoleonic period. The first engine in Alsace—itwasof 10horse-power—Avassetupinl812. The next year Cockerill, of Seraing, built the first in Belgium. After Waterloo there was rapid motion, the districts of Lille and Miilhausen taking the lead. In weaving, the flying-shuttle was well established, thanks largely to the influence of Napoleon ; and so early as 1823 the power-loom was tried experimentally in Alsace. Twenty years later there were as many power-looms as hand-looms in the Alsatian trade. This is perhaps the most rapid conquest made by weaving-machinery in any section of the cotton industry. At Lille also the factory system was fully established in the forties, with all its ugly social accompaniments. True, progress was not uniform throughout France ; Normandy, for example, lagged far behind Alsace and the North. Yet the trade as a whole was fast becoming a real factory industry in the later years of Louis-Philippe.

Belgium kept pace with France. Belgian manufacturers had been among the first in Europe to import English machinery; the progress of Belgian mining and iron-working encouraged further effort. Steam came rapidly into use between 1820 and 1840, and the close commercial relations with England, together with the economic activity of the new national Government after 1830, assisted large-scale production and the factory system. In the German States the cotton industry, owing to its exotic character, had always adopted a more or less capitalistic organisation and so was ready for change. Yet mechanical progress was slow. Before 1810 steam was hardly used at all in this or any other industry on Prussian soil. The total horse-power recorded in Prussia was rather over 9000 in 1837, and less than 22,000 in 1846. At this latter date in Saxony, counted a most progressive land, less than 2500 horse-power in all was available. Of these small quantities only a small portion fell to the cotton trade, for steam was used chiefly in mining and metallurgy. The spinning-mills that were again springing

C. M. H. x. 48

754: Wool, linen, and silk on the Continent [1800-46

up rapidly during the thirties in Prussia, Bavaria, and Saxony were invariably water-driven and generally small. Weaving by power was unknown. Even in 1846 not four per cent, of the cotton-looms in Prussia were automatic ; and there was no such thing as a power-loom in Saxony.

The older and more rigid textile trades — wool, linen, and silk — were not easily bent by the new forces. In France none of them had adopted the power-loom in 1840; and, even in advanced cloth-manufacturing centres like Sedan and Reims, spinning-mills were rare. Decline in the spinning of wool by hand had, however, begun years before, whereas in the case of flax and hemp a decline was hardly yet perceptible. Clothshearing, which had long been taken over by machinery in England, was still carried on with the gigantic old hand-shears in the thirties. Handcombing was of course universal; and the only branches of the trade — other than spinning — upon which the new methods had fastened were dyeing and finishing. In remote districts, such as the cloth-working valleys of the Cevennes, no change of importance occurred for almost another generation. Nowhere was there a true factory system, though the trade contained many considerable capitalists and fair-sized single establishments. In the silk industry, one notable invention was made at Lyons in 1804 — the Jacquard-loom for weaving complex patterns without the intricate " harness " and endless labour of the old looms. As an invention it ranks with the greatest of those made in England, but it brought no change in the industrial organisation of the Lyons trade. The capitalist maitre fabricant, more a merchant than a manufacturer, directed the course of business as in the eighteenth century, giving out designs and material to the subordinate maitre ouvrier and his journeymen.

In Belgium the woollen trade at least had been considerably modified before 1840; but in Germany most primitive conditions prevailed. There were a few large spinning-mills about Aachen and in Silesia; but, as the Prussian "spinneries" contained on an average only 107 spindles each in 1840, the bulk of them could hardly be termed factories. Every peasant family still spun its wool and its flax; most owned and worked a linen-loom ; some wove their own wool. So late as 1843, not n third of the looms in Prussia were owned by professional weavers. Such weavers as there were almost all worked at home. There were three linen-weaving businesses in Berlin in 1846. They employed fourteen hands, all told. Its four cloth factories and its numerous silk factories each employed some five-and-twenty men ; its three establishments for spinning wool by machinery each between five-and-twenty and thirty. In England the hardest social problem of the textile trades was that of the hand-weavers ; in Germany it was that of the hand-spinners of flax. Flax-spinning was not a by-employment only; it was also a separate industry, an industry that had come into existence to meet

1815^0] Scientific industry on the Continent 155

the needs of the great domestic linen manufacture in Silesia and elsewhere and to supply the export trade in linen and linen-yarn during the eighteenth century. Princes had set their soldiers and the occupants of their prisons spinning; spinning colonies had been created; distressed peasants had often turned spinners; and the easy trade was overcrowded with low-grade labour. Flax-spinning machinery had hardly appeared in Germany; but the competition of English mill yarns and fabrics, together with the deterioration in the quality of most of the German yarn, crippled the export trade and produced long-drawn misery in the thirties and forties. While Germany was thus experiencing some of the first effects of widespread industrial change, and while the remodelling of the textile industries was in progress also in Switzerland, southern and eastern Europe remained almost untouched.

Not all the industrial changes of the peace were the result of English initiative, as the case of Jacquard's loom shows. Most of the early and decisive mechanical inventions came from England, though flax-spinning machinery is claimed for the Frenchman Girard and the tubular boiler for Seguin. From England also came the modern factory system and industrial organisation. But there remained arts and crafts in which she was still backward. In the textile industries her vast superiority of mere producing power was accompanied by a grade of beauty and design that was often woefully low. Here France was her mistress, and parts of Germany at least her equals. In scientific methods of metallurgy she was in some ways inferior to Germany; and in many branches of applied science she could not claim supremacy. The foundations of industrial chemistry were largely laid by Frenchmen, from Lavoisier and Leblanc onwards; and the French Governments, Napoleon's Government above all, encouraged the work with zeal. So also in smaller matters of a scientific sort. The first tolerable oil-lamps are connected with two French names, while later came Daguerre and his sun-pictures. It is not possible to trace the long series of the scientific inventions. Many of them had produced no great effects on industry in the forties; but the leading continental nations were taking their full share in the work of discovery and dissemination. Already their activity was a matter of concern to England ; and John Bowring wrote anxiously of the German Customs' Union in 1840, that " chemical knowledge, in all its various branches, is further advanced than with us."

That this advance in scientific knowledge did not as yet carry with it a corresponding advance in practice is shown by the position of the fundamental industries of mining and metallurgy on the Continent. The nearest approach to English conditions had been made in Belgium, thanks partly to the new railway system. The coal and iron industries were of old standing in the Low Countries. The pits of southern Hainault had been worked to a depth of over five hundred feet in the eighteenth century. Liege practised to perfection all known branches