he price of bread was growing higher
and higher, while in many districts skilled operatives working at home
could not earn by their utmost efforts eight shillings a week. They
saw their hand labor supplanted by great cotton mills filled with
machinery driven by "monsters of iron and fire," which never grew
weary, which subsisted on water and coal, and never asked for wages.

Led by a man named Ludd (1811), the starving workmen attacked a number
of these mills, broke the machinery to pieces, and sometimes burned
the buildings. The riots were at length suppressed, and a number of
the leaders executed; but a great change for the better was at hand,
and improved machinery driven by steam was soon to remedy the evils it
had seemingly created. It led to an enormous demand for cotton. This
helped to stimulate cotton growing in the United States of America as
well as to encourage the manufacture of cotton in Great Britain.

Up to this period the north of England had remained the poorest part
of the country. The population was sparse, ignorant, and
unprosperous. It was in the south that improvements originated. In
the reign of Henry VIII, the North fought against the dissolution of
the monasteries (SS352, 357); in Elizabeth's reign it resisted
Protestantism; in that of George I it sided with the so-called
"Pretender" (S535).

But steam transformed an immense area. Factories were built,
population increased, cities sprang up, and wealth grew apace.
Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham, Leicester, Sheffield, and
Liverpool made the North a new country. (See Industrial Map of
England, p.10.) Lancashire is the busiest cotton-manufacturing
district in Great Britain, and the saying runs that "what Lancashire
thinks to-day, England will think to-morrow." So much for James Watt's
POWER and its results.

564. Discover of Oxygen (1774); Introduction of Gas (1815).

Notwithstanding the progress that had been made in many departments of
knowledge, the science of chemistry remained almost stationary until
(1774) Dr. Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen, the most abundant, as
well as the most important, element in nature.

That discover "laid the foundation of modern chemical science." It
enlarged our knowledge of the composition of the atmosphere, of the
solid crust of the earth, and of water. Furthermore, it revealed the
interesting fact that oxygen not only enters into the structure of all
forms of animal and vegetable