of children and women, for whose labor there had been before little demand outside of the home. The problems which have arisen as a consequence of these changes still press for a solution, not only in England, but in all progressive countries, and give perhaps its chief interest to the study of economics in our day. § 12. To sum up this brief sketch of the rise of modern Concluindustry in England: the course of development was from sions. local self-sufficiency in industrial matters and local regulation to an industrial organization of national scope, in which questions of money and trade were prominent, and national regulation was the rule. Only within the last one hundred years has the system of industrial freedom been adopted. The institutions and practices belonging to this last stage of development, now so familiar as to seem almost necessary, are none of them very old-compared with the age of industrial society and are all of them on trial, and likely, in the course of time, to be found unfitted to new industrial conditions, and to be discarded as were the institutions of the manorial system and the regulations of the Elizabethan period. Free competition, which seems to the modern mind so essential to the continuance of prosperous industrial activity, was almost unknown in medieval England. Private property, at least in agricultural land, hardly existed in its modern form. The granting of monopolies, which is so repugnant to the modern sense of justice, was almost as common in the days of Elizabeth as is the granting of charters of incorporation to-day. Present practices and institutions have been adopted because they suit the needs of the time; but as surely as conditions are changing and new needs are becoming dominant, practices and institutions must also change. That industrial relations and institutions are subject to change and development is the first and most important lesson of economic history. The second, and almost equally important, lesson is that the range of the changes that may occur and the degree of development that may be looked forward to are indefinitely great. We have seen how different were the conditions in England a thousand years ago from those which we know to-day. But a period of a thousand years is only a brief chapter in human history. There is no means of determining at what period man first emerged as a toolusing animal; but fist-hatchets, the most primitive knownform of human tool, are believed by geologists to have been in use two hundred thousand years ago. In comparison with the age of man, our English ancestors of the eleventh century are thus almost our contemporaries. There is no means of determining how long man will continue to live upon the earth; but we have every reason to believe that it will be for two hundred thousand years longer, or even more. Changes as great as that from the manorial system to the system of freedom of industry and enterprise may occur over and over again in this time. In fact, so great are the possibilities of development, that we are justified in believing that any form of industrial organization, or any institution, that would prove truly desirable for the mass of men, will also be found to be attainable. It is with this conviction that the student of economics should approach the consideration of the practical problems of his own day. REFERENCES FOR COLLATERAL READING *Ashley, English Economic History, 2 vols.; *Cheyney, Industrial and Social History of England, Chaps. I.-VIII.; Gibbins, Industry in England; *Price, Short History of English Commerce and Industry; Warner, Landmarks in English Industrial History; Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages, and The Industrial and Commercial History of England; Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, 2 vols.; Milnes, From Gild to Factory; Beard, The Industrial Revolution. CHAPTER II INDUSTRIAL EXPANSION OF THE UNITED STATES Period. §13. The story of the settlement of different portions of The North America by colonists from different lands, of the mag- Colonial nificent distances and the differences in institutions and ideas which long held them apart, and of the common interests and the common cause, first against the French and Indians, and then against the English, which at last brought them together and cemented them into a nation under the Constitution of the United States (1789), has been too often told to need repetition. From its very nature, as a new country with unbounded natural resources in virgin land and forests, the United States was predisposed to extractive industries. The earlier settlers established themselves along the coast as farmers and Indian traders. As the Indians were driven back into the wilderness, adventurous whites took up the business of hunting and trapping and acted as pioneers in the westward movement characteristic of the development of the country during the last century. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the American farmer made for himself most of the things that he required. His food was the produce of his farm or game from the neighboring forest. For clothing he used the skins of animals and homespun cloth. His house was made of roughhewn logs. Only his gun and some of his tools and implements were purchased, and these were mostly imported from England. One important branch of manufacturing alone was developed during colonial times, that is, ship-building, which early established itself in New England, and continued to be a leading industry in that section until wooden vessels were superseded by those of iron. The industrial institutions and ideas which were fostered by colonial conditions may be easily surmised. Living in com Liberty, parative isolation and enjoying almost complete industrial independence, the colonists came to regard liberty as one of their dearest possessions. To direct one's life and activities as one pleased came to be thought of as an inherent right with which no such extraneous thing as government should interfere. The abundance of free land and the importance to the first settlers of extending the cultivated area as rapidly as possible so that the menace of Indian massacre might be pressed farther and farther into the interior, made the system of private property in land seem natural, if not inevitable. From an early period settlers were permitted in nearly all of the colonies to acquire on easy terms the absolute ownership of large estates. As long as equally promising land remained open to the border pioneer there seemed nothing inconsistent in this policy with the ideal of equality, which was fostered by the similarity of the conditions under which most families lived and supported themselves. This ideal showed itself in connection not only with social usages, but also with the political organization of the country. Short terms and rotation in office, which are characteristic of American public life, have from the first been defended in the popular consciousness on the ground that any good American citizen is competent to serve his country in any capacity. Experience with the thefts and depredations of the lawless characters that are always found in pioneer communities made the colonists peculiarly alive to the sacredness of property. It was taken for granted that property was justly acquired, and governmental machinery was largely devoted to protecting people in the use and enjoyment of their possessions. Thus, in the bills of rights which were generally appended to the constitutions adopted by the states after independence was achieved, life, liberty and property are characterized as the three fundamental and inalienable rights of American citizens. In exalting the rights of property the colonists were not so much breaking with the institutions which they had brought with them from the Old World as giving greater prominence to familiar ideals. By so doing they paved the way for an industrial civilization which has been marked thus far by intense individualism in thought and practice. THE NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL IDEAL 23 In conflict with the ideals of liberty and equality was the Slave v. demand arising from the abundance of fertile land for a large Free Labor. laboring population. To satisfy this need Negro slavery was early introduced into the southern colonies, where conditions of soil and climate made slave labor profitable. The northern colonies resorted to the system of importing white servants from Europe under contracts (indentures) which required them to work for a certain number of years in return for their passage money. Where slavery flourished manual labor itself soon came to be despised by the free inhabitants, so that slaves, who were at first merely a convenience in such sections, became, with the progress of time, an economic necessity. The system of indentured labor had no such serious consequences. At first, a valuable supplement to the wages system which was carried on side by side with it in the northern colonies, it was given up entirely early in the nineteenth century, when easier ways were found of securing from Europe the much-needed working force. The diverse social, political and economic ideals which North and South owed to their contrasting labor systems were the root cause of the attempt of the Southern States to secede, and of the terrible Civil War through which the Union was saved and through which, incidentally, slavery was abolished. Since the issue of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 the wages system has been introduced in one form or another into all sections, until it has become the characteristic labor system of the whole country. Industrial Ideal. § 14. When the united colonies declared their independence The of Great Britain and formed themselves into the United States, National the industrial ideal of most of the revolutionists was an agricultural community. Appreciating the vast extent of the undeveloped resources of the country and the superior advantages of England for manufacturing, the founders of the Republic counted upon a mutually advantageous trade, consisting of the exportation of raw products and the importation of manufactured goods, as one of the conditions to national prosperity. England's own policy had much influence in giving a different direction to national ambition. Through her restrictive measures she made trade on equal terms between the two countries impossible. The result was that even before the |