rs, she forbade the
colonists to set up iron furnaces and slitting mills. That her cloth
manufacturers might flourish, she forbade the colonists to send their
woolen goods to any country whatever, or even from one colony to
another. Under this law it was a crime to knit a pair of mittens or a
pair of socks and send them from Boston to Providence or from New York
to Newark, or from Philadelphia across the Delaware to New Jersey. In
the interest of English hatters the colonists were not allowed to send
hats to any foreign country, nor from one colony to another, and a
serious effort was made to prevent the manufacture of hats in America.
People in this country were obliged to wear English-made hats. Taking
the country through, every saw, every ax, every hammer, every needle,
pin, tack, piece of tape, and a hundred other articles of daily use came
from Great Britain.

Every farmhouse, however, was a little factory, and every farmer a
jack-of-all-trades. He and his sons made their own shoes, beat out nails
and spikes, hinges, and every sort of ironmongery, and constructed much
of the household furniture. The wife and her daughters manufactured the
clothing, from dressing the flax and carding the wool to cutting the
cloth; knit the mittens and socks; and during the winter made straw
bonnets to sell in the towns in the spring.

Even in such towns as were large enough to support a few artisans, each
made, with the help of an apprentice, and perhaps a journeyman, all the
articles he sold.

[Illustration: Hand loom[1]]

%96. The Cities.%--If we take a map of our country and run over the
great cities of to-day, we find that except along the seacoast hardly
one existed, in 1765, even in name. Detroit was a little French
settlement surrounded with a high stockade. New Orleans existed, and St.
Louis had just been founded, but they both belonged to Spain. Mobile and
Pensacola and Natchez and Vincennes consisted of a few huts gathered
about old French forts. There was no city, no town worthy of the name,
in the English colonies west of the Alleghany Mountains. Along the
Atlantic coast we find Portsmouth, Boston, Providence, New Haven, New
York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Alexandria, Williamsburg, Charleston,
Savannah, and others of less note. But the largest of these were mere
collections of a few hundred houses ranged along streets, none of which
were sewered and few of which were paved or lighted. The watchman went
his rounds at