ance, Holland, Spain, a
great advantage. The tyrannical use these nations made of their
colonies for the purpose of building up home manufactures enabled
them to specialise more widely and safely in those industries to which
the new methods of production were first applied. Even after the North
American colonies broke loose, the policy of repression England had
applied to their budding manufactures enabled her to retain to a large
extent the markets thus created for her manufactured goods.

The large annexations England made during the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries gave her a monopoly of many of the finest markets
for the purchase of raw materials and for the sale of manufactured
goods. The large demand thus established for her textile and metal
wares served not only to stimulate fresh inventions, but enabled her
to utilise many improvements which could only be profitably applied in
the case of large industries with secure and expanding markets.

But the most important factor determining the priority of England was
the political condition of continental Europe at the very period when
the new machinery and motor-power were beginning to establish
confidence in the new industrial order. When Crompton's mule,
Cartwright's power-loom, Watt's engines were transforming the industry
of England, her continental rivals had all their energies absorbed in
wars and political revolutions. The United States and Sweden were the
only commercial nations of any significance who, being neutral,
obtained a large direct gain from the European strife. Yet England, in
spite of the immense drain of blood and money she sustained, under the
momentum of the new motor-power far outstripped the rivalry of such
states. Though she had to pay a heavy price for her immunity from
invasion, she thereby secured an immense start in the race of modern
machine-production. Until 1820 she had the game in her own hands. In
European trade she had a practical monopoly of the rapidly advancing
cotton industry. It was this monopoly which, ruthlessly applied to
maintain prices at a highly remunerative rate, and to keep down wages
to starvation point, built up, in an age of supreme and almost
universal misery for the masses, the rapid and colossal fortunes of
the cotton kings. Not until peace was established did the textile and
other factories begin to take shape upon the Continent, and many
years elapsed before they were able to compete effectively with