the last
half of the century. The roads had been little changed since they had
been first laid down as part of the great network which bound the Roman
empire together. Turnpike acts, sanctioning the construction of new
roads, became numerous. Palmer's application of the stage-coaches to the
carriage of the mails marked an epoch in 1784; and De Quincey's prose
poem, 'The Mail-coach,' shows how the unprecedented speed of Palmer's
coaches, then spreading the news of the first battles in the Peninsula,
had caused them to tyrannise over the opium-eater's dreams. They were
discharging at once a political and an industrial function. Meanwhile
the Bridgewater canal, constructed between 1759 and 1761, was the first
link in a great network which, by the time of the French revolution,
connected the seaports and the great centres of industry. The great
inventions of machinery were simultaneously enabling manufacturers to
take advantage of the new means of communication. The cotton manufacture
sprang up soon after 1780 with enormous rapidity. Aided by the
application of steam (first applied to a cotton mill in 1785) it passed
the woollen trade, the traditional favourite of legislators, and became
the most important branch of British trade. The iron trade had made a
corresponding start. While the steam-engine, on which Watt had made the
first great improvement in 1765, was transforming the manufacturing
system, and preparing the advent of the steamship and railroad, Great
Britain had become the leading manufacturing and commercial country in
the world. The agricultural interest was losing its pre-eminence; and
huge towns with vast aggregations of artisan population were beginning
to spring up with unprecedented rapidity. The change was an
illustration upon a gigantic scale of the doctrines expounded in the
_Wealth of Nations_. Division of labour was being applied to things more
important than pin-making, involving a redistribution of functions not
as between men covered by the same roof, but between whole classes of
society; between the makers of new means of communication and the
manufacturers of every kind of material. The whole industrial community
might be regarded as one great organism. Yet the organisation was formed
by a multitude of independent agencies without any concerted plan. It
was thus a vast illustration of the doctrine that each man by pursuing
his own interests promoted the interests of the whole, and that
governmen