e amount of
domestic industry for domestic consumption, renders the manufacturing
figures, however carefully they might have been collected, very
deceptive. The same criticism, though to a less degree, applies to the
estimate of Arthur Young for 1769.

[Illustration]

If to Young's estimate of the population dependent upon agriculture we
add the class of landlords and their direct dependents and a proper
proportion of the non-industrious poor, who, though not to be so
classed in a direct measurement of occupations, are supported out of
the produce of agriculture, we shall see that in 1769 we are justified
in believing that agriculture was in its productiveness almost
equivalent to the whole of manufactures and commerce.

In turning to the several branches of manufacture, the abnormal
development of one of them, viz. the woollen, for purposes of foreign
trade, marks the first and only considerable specialisation of English
industry before the advent of steam machinery. With the single
exception of woollen goods almost the whole of English manufactures
were for home consumption. At the opening of the eighteenth century,
and even as late as 1770, no other single manufacture played any
comparable part in the composition of our export trade.

According to Chalmers,[16] in the period 1699-1701, the annual value
of woollen exports was over two and a half million pounds, or about
two-fifths of the total export trade, while in 1769-71 it still
amounted to nearly one-third of the whole, giving entire or partial
employment to no fewer than "a million and a half of people," or half
of the total number assigned by Young to manufacture.

Next to the woollen, but far behind in size and importance, came the
iron trade. In 1720 England seems to have developed her mining
resources so imperfectly as to be in the condition of importing from
foreign countries 20,000 out of the 30,000 tons required for her
hardware manufactures.[17] Almost all this iron was destined to home
consumption with the exception of hardware forced upon the American
colonies, who were forbidden to manufacture for themselves. In 1720 it
is calculated that mining and manufacture of iron and hardware
employed 200,000 persons.[18]

Copper and brass manufactures employed some 30,000 persons in
1720.[19]

Silk was the only other highly developed and considerable
manufacture. It had, however, to contend with Indian competition,
introduced by the East India Com