756 Coalmining. — The iron industry [1782-1850

of iron and steel working. War gave employment to her foundries and her forges; but the new processes only came with the peace — cokesmelting, the puddling-furnace, and the rolling-mill, crossing from England between 1820 and 1830. Even during the wars iron tramways and steam winding-engines were being introduced in the Hainault collieries. With the thirties came a great extension of mining and a rapid transformation of the iron industry. Between 1830 and 1835 some thirty thousand men were employed in the Belgian coal-mines, which at that time had a greater output than those of either France or Prussia. Steam was rapidly adopted and new industries sprang up fast on the coal-fields of the south.

French coal-mining developed slowly; and the small, old, charcoalsmelting furnaces, each giving work for a mere handful of men, that were scattered over the wooded highlands of the east and south were only gradually displaced by large coke-furnaces employing the steamblast. One of Watt's engines came to Creusot in 1782. Experiments with coke were made there a few years later and again in the early years of the Empire ; but at the time of the July Revolution there were still less than thirty coke-furnaces at work in France, as compared with nearly four hundred of the old type. The number of charcoal-furnaces grew for another nine years; and in 1846 more than half the French pig-iron was still charcoal-made. When the railway age began, the French industry was not in a position to supply the needs of the companies, which at times were forced to import from England, in spite of heavy tariffs, at times to make advances to equip furnaces out of their own funds. Until after 1840 the consumption of coal in France grew slowly, though persistently. The full extent of the northern coalfield was as yet unknown ; and the greater part of the output came from the comparatively inaccessible fields of the upper Loire.

Outside Belgium and France there was little rapid movement before 1850. The ancient Swedish iron industry went forward steadily. It fed Sheffield and felt the effects of English industrial activity. The Styrian mines on the contrary, which in the third quarter of the eighteenth century had yielded almost as much iron as all England, were now utterly distanced. The new processes were not really established in Germany. In 1846 barely fourteen per cent, of the furnaces in Prussia had adopted coke as fuel; and six years later it was estimated that the output of iron from an average English furnace compared with that from an average German furnace was as ten to one. There were a few great smelting and iron-working establishments in Westphalia and Silesia in the forties; but they were all young. As a whole the German iron industry was still a half-rural, a woodland, trade. The old waterdriven tilt-hammers, nail-mills, and wire-mills were thickly strewn over the iron district of Siegerland. Smelting in that country was commonly in the hands of small groups of peasants who " managed to divide their

1837-49] Engineering. — Social movements 757

time between the mine, the forest, the furnace, and their land," and wore the furnace-man's leather apron when haymaking, as an English traveller reported in 1846. Nine years earlier the average Prussian iron-mine gave employment to less than ten men; and the working force even in the copper, lead, and silver mines was usually but thirty or forty. Belgium alone produced more iron than the whole Zollverein in the early forties, just as she produced more coal than Prussia. Coal-mining on a large scale had begun in Westphalia, on the Roer, and in Silesia ; but its growth waited on that of the iron industry and the railway.

Where the manufacture of pig-iron was still undeveloped, the engineering trades — and with them the fibres of the new industrial economy — were of necessity weak. This was the situation in Germany in 1840. The stimulus given to most branches of manufacture by the creation of the Zollverein was only just beginning to make itself felt. The use of steam-engines had hardly begun. Though various classes of machines were being successfully built in Saxony, at Berlin, and in Westphalia, and though joint-stock engineering businesses had recently been founded, all was experimental and somewhat raw. In France and Belgium this was not the case. There the new metal-working appliances — rollers, lathes, planing-machines, slotting-machines — were known and used in the thirties. But England's superiority remained indisputable. Cockerill, of Seraing, was probably the best of continental machine-builders. Yet his textile machinery was conspicuously inferior to that of English makers in 1837; almost all his models, in every branch of the industry, were English ; and from England came all his best machine tools. The next decade no doubt saw great advances in Germany, as' well as in Belgium and France ; but England also was in motion, and the relative positions of the industrial nations were little affected.

The social and political effects of industrial change had touched almost every part of Great Britain in the early forties. Town growth was in headlong and unwholesome progress. That capitalism would triumph in all fields seemed certain. Economists could assume with no very glaring inaccuracy that both capital and labour were mobile between trade and trade. The manufacturers were a power in Parliament. Reform of the evils characteristic of life in mill and mine had begun. The multitudes of wage-workers in the new and new-modelled trades were struggling for freedom to organise, and feeling after those forms of organisation for self-defence and self-advancement which already existed in some of the older crafts. Collectivist thought was taking forms consonant with the principles of the new industrial systems. Friedrich Engels was following earlier English thinkers in examination and criticism of the tendencies of the new age, as manifested in Great Britain. Before 1850 Karl Marx settled in England. There was a fresh bitterness of class strife, threatening industrial as well as political

758 Primitive conditions in Germany [1754-1849

revolution. In France and Belgium the outward signs and the soci.il effects of the new age were less marked and less general. They were concentrated, it might be in Alsace, or about Lille, at St Etienne, or at Roubaix. It could be plausibly maintained in 1849 that la grande Industrie was an unnatural, as well as an unwholesome, growth in France — a growth due to slavish imitation of England joined to a protective tariff, and that small-scale, and not capitalistic, industry was and must remain the true French system. The bourgeois following of the bourgeois King was not a class of great manufacturers, though it contained such. Collectivist thought was not completely dominated by the new movements ; it retained something of the classical flavour of eighteenth century social speculation. This was but natural; for the economic conditions under which the majority of Frenchmen lived, above all in the villages and country towns, had changed surprisingly little since Louis XVI met the States General at Versailles.

Germany furnishes a most complete picture of primitive social and economic conditions as yet untouched. Mills and furnaces might be rising, agricultural methods changing, the flax-spinners suffering; still, in innumerable trades and towns apprentice and journeyman lived with the master after the old fashion. The peasant was often enough his own miller; and, where the miller existed, he usually took his pay in kind. The village smith, in many districts, was an official paid by the commune and bound to work for small customary fees. Even in such industries as tanning and dyeing the small craftsman, working at home, generallyheld his own. During three generations—from 1754 tol847— the number of master-craftsmen as compared with the population of Berlin hardly varied. The capitalist manufacturing class—theemployers of modern economic theory — existed only as isolated individuals, not as a distinguishable grade of society. Industry had been freed over a great part of Germany; but it retained most of its old habits and moved slowly along the new ways ; while in more than one State access to those ways was still hindered by the law.

In trading as in industry, inland Germany, and with it all eastern Europe, retained methods which in England and other parts of the west had long been disappearing. Trade was medieval in its simplicity. Peasant and townsmen everywhere dealt directly with each other in the weekly markets. No intermediary came, as a rule, between the working craftsman and the consumer. The man who wanted.a new town-house himself bought the materials and directed the workmen. In the country the peasant often built for himself with the aid of his neighbours. Local supplies of food for the most part satisfied all local needs. Even in Berlin the bulk of the flour consumed was ground at the neighbouring mills. Outside the greatest towns the pure shopkeeping class hardly existed. Pedlars and travelling dealers took its place, from whom both small townsman and peasant bought any implements, utensils,

1800-50] Oceanic trade. The English markets 759

articles of clothing, or luxuries, that could not be made on the spot. Fairs, such as those of Leipzig and Frankfort on the Oder, were the centres of a more wholesale commerce and attracted to themselves the greater merchants and the staples of international trade. The Frankfort fair was still growing in importance in 1850 ; for economic conditions in eastern Germany somewhat resembled those of Russia, where the decline of the fairs only began with the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Not even in the west had that revolution been accomplished which has brought into some branches of retail trade organisation on the largest scale and, latterly, the joint-stock company form. In Paris itself, in the forties, almost all the retail business firms remained small and peddling, short of capital and of organisatiou. The position of the London tradesman was little better. It was noticed as a new thing, in 1825, that the prosperous shopkeeper was leaving the house over his shop for the suburbs; and such evidence of growing wealth evoked comment. As an institution the shop would seem to have been generally established some time before 1800, even in remote English villages; but in 1840 it was still an institution economically akin rather to the domestic system of manufacture than to the complex factory organism.

Meanwhile there had developed in the ports of the west wholesale dealings of uncommon magnitude. Forms and methods had not greatly changed since the eighteenth century; there had been no appreciable quickening in the rate of ocean transport or in the dissemination of market news; but the scope of commerce had been extended to meet new needs and make use of new opportunities. The long distance trades in food-stuffs and raw materials took a fresh aspect, as population thickened in the industrial lands, as manufactures using tropical or subtropical materials developed, and as the produce of the southern temperate zone for the first time crossed to the northern. England was the centre of the new activity. The slave-grown cotton of America, that had been sparely used before 1800, came to Liverpool in greater quantity year by year during the generation that followed the wars. Cotton was also shipped to Havre, to Hamburg, to Antwerp, and elsewhere ; but Liverpool remained the central European market where Frenchmen, Belgians, and others, did much of their buying. Gradually there was constructed at Liverpool a commercial mechanism adapted to the work in hand and modelled, to some extent, on that of the London Stock Exchange. The foundation of the Cotton Brokers' Association in 1841 may be taken to mark the beginning of this new type of highly organised and regulated wholesale dealings, a type which was to develop in other markets and affect other commodities. In the wool trade it had not developed, though there also great changes were in progress. Between 1820 and 1840 considerable supplies of wool began to reach Europe from Australia, Cape Colony, and the river Plate. With the arrival of the colonial wools a n&w international market was created in

760 The wheat-trade. — Eastern trade [1790-1851

London, a market through which for almost half a century well-nigh every bale of Australian or South African wool passed.

On all hands tariffs checked the free development of the international trade in grain; but it also was growing and changing notably. England was as yet the only country that depended on import for any appreciable quantity of her corn in ordinary years. Even in years of scarcity, however, her imports had probably never exceeded one-fifteenth or onesixteenth of her total consumption of wheat before 1840. There was a rapid growth in the next decade; yet it was possible in 1851 to treat the notion that she might ever draw the greater part of her bread from abroad as a grotesque absurdity. Nevertheless this limitation of independence was a new and significant thing. Supplies of grain from fresh and remote sources were waiting admission at the doors of the industrial nations. Until the close of the wars the occasional needs of western Europe were met by the surplus produce shipped from the southern Baltic ports, from Sicily, and from the North African coast. The United States and Canada had contributed, but on no great scale, though American corn had often found its way to French ports and had been welcomed by the agents of the Revolutionary Government during the Terror. Before the eighteenth century ended, the colonisation of the Black Sea steppes by Russia and the opening of the Dardanelles to commerce prepared a new field of supply and a way to it. Odessa, a mere cluster of houses in 1790, was a town of fifty thousand inhabitants in 1825, whence grain was being shipped to the Mediterranean and the west. The cheap Russian wheat had reached France and England immediately after the Peace of Vienna. Its advent had encouraged both countries in their new policy of rigid exclusion. However, it speedily drove the Baltic wheat from such markets — they were mainly in the south of Europe — as it was permitted to enter. The wheat-growing capacity of America was still comparatively small; but there was a steady increase in the surplus available for export both in British North America and in the United States.

Other long distance trades of old standing had recovered from the disturbance of war; and their swift growth provoked incessant change in British and continental ports. England of set purpose discouraged the easy timber trade with the Baltic, and, by a substantial tariff preference, stimulated that with New Brunswick and the other North American provinces. British dealings with India and the Far East grew with the abolition of the Company's monopoly in 1813 and the transference of all trading powers from the Company to the private merchants in 1833. But the seas east of Singapore were still little frequented by English shipping; and direct trade with China was of no great importance until after 1840. Between 1830 and 1840 only twenty-three British ships cleared for China yearly; and only forty-four ships of all nationalities entered British ports directly from that country.