The changes in industry and agriculture which have been discussed augmented Great Britain's national wealth to an extraordinary degree. In 1688, Gregory King estimated the total national income at about forty-three and one-half million pounds for England. In 1770, Arthur Young estimated it at one hundred and nineteen and a half million pounds a year. In 1812, Patrick Colquhoun with all the official documents of the government at his disposal gave the figures for Great Britain as four hundred and thirty million pounds a year. This increase in the national income expresses in a striking and concrete way the results and progress of the industrial and agricultural revolutions, and there is shown here the chief reason why Great Britain, not quite a first rate power even at the time of the treaty of Utrecht in 1713, was able to take her place at the head and forefront of European states by the end of the century. SUGGESTED BOOKS FOR CHAPTER XIX BIBLIOGRAPHICAL GUIDE. J. B. Williams, A Guide to the Printed Materials for English Social and Economic History 1750-1850. GENERAL ACCOUNTS. See previous lists, especially General Works. P. Mantoux, La Revolution industrielle au XVIIIe siecle. A. Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution. DEVELOPMENT OF INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS. H. R. Fox Bourne, English Newspapers. J. C. Hemmeon, The History of the British Postoffice. W. T. Jackman, The Development of Transportation in Modern England. E. A. Pratt, A History of Inland Transportation and Communication in England. GROWTH OF TRADE AND COMMERCE. D. Macpherson, Annals of Commerce. W. A. S. Hewins, English Trade and Finance. W. L. Mathieson, The Awakening of Scotland, 1747-1797. TECHNIQUE AND INVENTIONS. S. J. Chapman, The Lancashire Cotton Industry. G. W. Daniels, The Early English Cotton Industry. T. Ellison, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain. E. Meteyard, The Life of Josiah Wedgwood. S. Smiles, Industrial Biography. Josiah Wedgwood. Lives of the Engineers. R. H. Thurston, A History of the Growth of the Steam Engine. G. Unwin, A. Hulme and G. Taylor, Samuel Oldknow and the Ark. wrights. H. T. Wood, Industrial England in the Middle of the Eighteenth J. Wedgwood, The Personal Life of Josiah Wedgwood. THE METHODIST MOVEMENT. G. Eayrs, Letters of John Wesley. J. S. Simon, John Wesley. L. Tyerman, John Wesley. Life of George Whitefield. J. Wesley, Journal. THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION. W. H. R. Curtler, A Short History of English Agriculture. The Enclosure and Redistribution of our Land. E. C. K. Gonner, Common Land and Inclosure. J. L. and B. Hammond, The Village Labourer, 1760-1832. W. Hasbach, The History of the English Agricultural Laborer. A. H. Johnson, The Disappearance of the Small Landowner. G. Slater, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of the Common Fields. A. M. W. Stirling, Coke of Holkham. TRADE FLUCTUATIONS. M. Bouniatian, Geschichte der Handelskrisen in England 1640-1840. D. H. Robertson, A Study of Industrial Fluctuations. SOCIAL REACTIONS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. W. Bowden, Industrial Society in England toward the End of the F. J. Foakes-Jackson, Social Life in England 1750-1850. J. L. and B. Hammond, The Rise of Modern Industry. The Skilled Labourer, 1760-1832. The Town Labourer, 1760-1832. J. Lord, Capital and Steam Power. L. W. Moffitt, The Eve of the Industrial Revolution. R. B. Westerfield, Middlemen in English Business particularly between 1660 and 1760. A. Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures. ECONOMIC DOCTRINE. C. Gide and C. Rist, A History of Economic Doctrine. CHAPTER XX THE GREAT WAR WITH FRANCE, AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF BRITISH INDUSTRIAL SUPREMACY IN EUROPE The governments which held office in Great Britain from 1783 to 1815 were the ministries of William Pitt, 1783-1801 Henry Addington, Viscount Sidmouth, 1801-1804 Lord Grenville and Charles James Fox, 1806-1807 Lord Liverpool, 1812-(1827) William Pitt came into office supported by a coalition of his own followers, the King's Friends, British East India Company members, and others. This combination was strengthened and transformed into the new Tory party by the adhesion of Edmund Burke in 1791 and of the Duke of Portland with the major portion of the Whigs who resented the radicalism of Fox in 1792. From that time on, until 1827, the Tories controlled the government, except for a brief period in 1806-7, when a coalition ministry of "All the Talents" was in office. When Fox's India bill was rejected in the House of Lords in 1783 by nineteen votes, owing to the King's letter that he would regard as an enemy any one who voted for the bill, the Fox-North coalition ministry still had a majority in the House of Commons and actually carried through the House a resolution of censure of the King's action. A few days later George III dismissed the coalition and called upon William Pitt to become Prime Minister, to reestablish his prerogative in the face of the hostility of the most skillful politicians of the day. For some time Pitt ruled with only a minority support in the House of Commons, but when a general election was held in 1784, he won a majority. He himself had 52 personal followers, the King controlled 151 members, and the British East India Company worked hard enough by means of bribery and corruption to carry the rest. William Pitt was thus the creature of the King and of the British East India Company, and he did their bidding. In the interests of the British East India Company he brought in an India bill which satisfied the critics of the company by instituting a Board of Control selected by the government to supervise the company's political control in India, but left the appointment of servants and officials in the hands of the company. Pitt had the more national interest at heart also. Although the King had called him to office to preserve the prerogative, he followed a policy of his own. He looked upon himself as a national servant commissioned to do the best he could for the nation as a whole. He was safe in doing this, little as his independence pleased George III, because he alone stood between the crown and Charles James Fox, the detested leader of the Whigs. Pitt's first task was to mop up the waste and to eliminate the fraud, corruption, and inefficiency which had crept into every government department during the last twenty years, amid the political shufflings and deals which had as their object the destruction of the Whig Connection. At the same time he had to deal with a difficult financial problem growing out of the national debt of £240,000,000, of which £114,000,000 had accrued during the war with America. He found that loans were raised without public advertisement or competitive bidding among the bankers; that the auditors of the treasury neglected their duties, so that four treasurers of the navy and the three paymasters of the forces had not yet settled their accounts; and one official had handled government money for forty years without ever submitting to an audit. There was a floating debt of £14,000,000, in addition to £2,000,000 owing to the Bank of England and a deficit of £6,000,000 from the previous year. The customs duties, contained in about eleven hundred statutes, were so high that the greater part of some imports, such as tea, on which there was a duty of 119 per cent, was smuggled. To deal with the chaos which he found, Pitt introduced many constructive measures. He reduced the tea duty to 122 per cent so that smuggling would be discouraged; and, to make up the deficits, he imposed new taxes on windows, hats, raw silk, horses, linen, calico, candles, bricks, tiles, licenses, paper, shooting certificates, hackney coaches, gold and silver plate, race horses, and postage. Through the increased yield of the customs, brought about by the decrease of smuggling, and through the new taxes, the revenues rose from £14,000,000 a year to £22,000,000 and cost only £3,000,000 more to collect. Pitt further ordered all future government loans to be advertised and sold to the highest bidder, he consolidated the customs and excise duties into a single tax equal to the combined duties, and he placed the yield into the consolidated fund from which the interest on the consolidated debt (Consols) was to be paid. He also took in hand the reduction of the national debt. One million pounds was to be paid annually to a Board of Commissioners of the National Debt, who should use this money to establish a sinking fund by buying government bonds. In the second year the interest on these bonds would be added to another million pounds to buy more bonds, and eventually the debt would be extinguished. Unfortunately, people got the idea that, as long as the sinking fund was working, it mattered little how much more new money was borrowed, since ultimately the sinking fund would provide for everything; and they overlooked the fact that the sinking fund itself was supported by taxes. Pitt also attempted to bring forward the question of a reform in the House of Commons through an increase in the representation of London and of the larger counties by 72 seats, to be obtained through the surrender by 36 decayed boroughs of their seats, for which compensation should be paid. This project was voted down and remained unrealized for another forty-seven years. In this same year, 1785, Pitt took up the question of future relations between England and Ireland, inasmuch as the British government from the King down was not satisfied with the arrangement of 1782. He proposed to unite England and Ireland on the basis of commercial equality in the trade of the empire. The Irish Parliament was willing to accede and actually passed the commercial clauses of the agreement. But English interests opposed the scheme, and the bill was so emasculated in the English Parliament that the Irish refused to accept it in its amended form. The opposition to the Irish bill was the work of a highly organized lobby called the Chamber of Manufacturers, composed of the leading cotton manufacturers, pottery makers, ironmasters, hardware manufacturers, and machine builders of the new industrial areas of Birmingham, Manchester, and the north and west of England in general, led by Josiah Wedgewood, Matthew Boulton, Richard Arkwright and John Wilkinson. Twenty years earlier these men were only humble artisans or small masters working with their own hands in their small workshops. Now they employed thousands of men in their plants, were amassing fortunes of hundreds of thousands of pounds, |