al and tyrannical.

In 1800 the union of the group of British Islands under one government
was completed, at least in form. Scotland had come under the same
crown as England in 1603, and the two Parliaments had been united in
1707, the title Great Britain having been adopted for the combined
nations. The king of England had held the title of Lord of Ireland
from the time of the first conquest, and of King of Ireland since the
adoption of the title by Henry VIII. The union which now took place
consisted in the abolition of the separate Irish Parliament and the
election of Irish members to the combined or "Imperial" Parliament of
the three kingdoms sitting at Westminster. The official title of the
united countries has since been "The United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Ireland."

*56. The Great Mechanical Inventions.*--As the eighteenth century
progressed one form of economic growth seems to have been pressing on
the general economic organization. This was the constant expansion of
commerce, the steadily increasing demand for English manufactured
goods for export.

[Illustration: Distribution of Population According to the Hearth-tax
of 1750. Engraved by Bormay & Co., N.Y.]

The great quantities of goods which were every year sent abroad in
English ships to the colonies, to Ireland, to the Continent, to Asia
and Africa, as well as those used at home, continued to be
manufactured in most cases by methods, with instruments, under an
organization of labor the same as that which had been in existence for
centuries. The cotton and woollen goods which were sold in the West
Indies and America were still carded, spun, and woven in the scattered
cottages of domestic weavers and weaver-farmers in the rural districts
of the west and north of England, by the hand cards, the
spinning-wheel, the cumbrous, old-fashioned loom. The pieces of goods
were slowly gathered from the hamlets to the towns, from the towns
to the seaports, over the poorest of roads, and by the most primitive
of conveyances. And these antiquated methods of manufacture and
transportation were all the more at variance with the needs and
possibilities of the time because there had been, as already pointed
out, a steady accumulation of capital, and much of it was not
remuneratively employed. The time had certainly come for some
improvement in the methods of manufacture.

A closer examination into the process of production in England's
principal industry, cloth-