It is noteworthy that the Industrial Revolution in this, its first phase, brought wealth and contentment to all members of the community. The quantities of thread, varying in fineness, but severally invariable in texture and strength, enabled the hand-loom weavers to push on with their work with none of the interruptions formerly caused by the inability of hard-pressed spinsters to supply the requisite amount of yarn. These last, it is true, lost somewhat in economic independence; for by degrees they sank to the position of wage-earners in mills, but they were on the whole less hard-worked than before, water furnishing the power previously applied by the spinster’s foot; and the family retained its independence because the father and brothers continued to work up cloth on their own hand-looms and to sell the produce at the weekly markets of Manchester or Blackburn, Leeds or Halifax. In the case of the staple industry of Yorkshire, many men reared the sheep, dressed and dyed the fleeces, worked up the thread into cloth, and finally, with their sons, took it on a packhorse to the nearest cloth market. A more complete example of economic independence it would be difficult to find; and the prosperity of this class—at once farmers, and dyers, manufacturers, and cloth merchants—was enhanced by the new spinning machinery which came rapidly into use after the year 1770.
This fact is emphasized in a vivid sketch of life in a Lancashire village drawn by one who saw it at the time of these momentous developments. William Radcliffe describes the prosperity which they brought to the homes of the farmer-artisans who formed the bulk of the population of his native village of Mellor, about fourteen miles north of Manchester. He calls the years 1788 to 1803 the golden age of the cotton industry. Every out-house in the village was fitted as a loom-shop; and the earnings of each family averaged from 80 to 100 or sometimes even 120 shillings a week.[34] This account, written by a man who rose to be a large manufacturer at Stockport is probably overdrawn; but there can be no doubt that the exuberant prosperity of the North of England provided the new vital force which enabled the country speedily to rise with strength renewed at the very time when friends and enemies looked to see her fall for ever. Some idea of the magnitude of this new source of wealth may be gained from the official returns of the value of the cotton goods exported from Great Britain at the following dates:
| 1710 | £5,698 |
| 1751 | 45,986 |
| 1764 | 200,354 |
| 1780 | 355,060 |
| 1785 | 864,710 |
| 1790 | 1,662,369 |
| 1795 | 2,433,331 |
| 1800 | 3,572,217 |
| 1806 | 9,753,824 |
After 1803 Cartwright’s power-loom came more and more into use, and that, too, at the time when Watt’s steam-engine became available for general use. The pace of the Industrial Revolution was thus accelerated; and in this, its third phase, the far-reaching change brought distress to the homes of the weavers, as was to be seen in the Luddite riots of 1810–11. This, however, belongs to a period later than that dealt with in these pages. Very noteworthy is the fact that in the years 1785–1806, which nearly cover the official life of Pitt, the exports of cotton goods increased almost twelvefold in value; and that the changes in the textile industries enhanced not only the wealth of the nation but also the prosperity of the working classes in districts which had been the poorest and most backward.
Limits of space preclude any reference to the revolution wrought in the iron industry when coal and coke began to take the place of wood in the smelting of that metal. It must suffice to say that, whereas the English iron industry had seemed in danger of extinction, it now made giant strides ahead. In 1777 the first iron bridge was erected at Coalbrookdale, over the Severn. Six years later Cort of Gosport obtained a patent for converting pig-iron into malleable-iron by a new and expeditious process;[35] and in 1790 the use of steam-engines at the blast furnaces trebled their efficiency. This and the former reference to the steam-engine will suffice to remind the reader of the enormous developments opened up in all manufactures when the skill and patience of Watt transformed a scientific toy into the most important generator of power hitherto used by man.
Thus, in the closing years of the eighteenth century—that much despised century, which really produced nearly all the great inventions that the over-praised nineteenth century was merely to develop—the Industrial Revolution entered on its second phase. The magnets which thenceforth irresistibly attracted industry, and therefore population, were coal and iron. Accordingly, as Great Britain had abundance of these minerals in close proximity, she was able in a very short space of time to become the workshop of the world. The Eldorado dreamt of by the followers of Columbus was at last found in the Midlands and moorlands of the north of England. For the present, the discovery brought no curse with it. While multiplying man’s powers, it also stimulated his ingenuity in countless ways. Far from diverting his energies from work to what is, after all, only the token of work, it concentrated his thoughts upon productive activity, and thus helped not only to make work but to make man.
While the moors and vales of the North awakened to new and strange activities, the agricultural districts of the Midlands and South also advanced in wealth and population. A scientific rotation of crops, deep ploughing, and thorough manuring of the soil altered the conditions of life. Here again England led the way. Arthur Young, in his “Travels in France” (1787–9) never tires of praising the intelligence and energy of our great landowners, whereas in France his constant desire is to make the seigneurs “skip.” In the main, no doubt, the verdict of Young was just. Landlords in England were the leaders of agricultural reform. In France they were clogs on progress. Yet, the changes here were not all for good. That is impossible. The semi-communal and almost torpid life of the village was unequal to the claims of the new age; and, amidst much of discomfort and injustice to the poor, individual tenures, enclosures, and high-farming became the order of the day.[36] New facilities for travel, especially in the form of mail-coaches, better newspapers (a result of the Wilkes affair)—these and other developments of the years 1770–84 heralded the dawn of an age which was to be more earnest, more enlightened, less restful, and far more complex. The times evidently called for a man who, while holding to all that was best in the old life, fully recognized the claims of the coming era. Such a man was William Pitt.
In many respects he summed up in his person the tendencies of the closing decades of the century, just as the supreme figure of his father reflected all that was most brilliant and chivalrous in the middle of the Georgian era. If the elder Pitt raised England to heights of splendour never reached before, the younger helped to retrieve the disasters brought on by those who blindly disregarded the warnings of his father. In the personality both of father and of son there was a stateliness that overawed ordinary mortals, but the younger man certainly came more closely into touch with the progressive tendencies of the age. A student of Adam Smith, he set himself to foster the industrial energies of the land. In order to further the cause of peace, he sought the friendship of the French nation, of which Chatham was the inveterate enemy; and in the brightest years of his career he seemed about to inaugurate the golden age foretold by the Illuminati. As by contact with Adam Smith he marched at the head of the new and peaceful commercialism, so too through his friendship with Wilberforce he felt the throb of the philanthropic movements of his times.
For the new stirrings of life in the spheres of religion, art, and literature, Pitt felt no deep concern. Like his father, and like that great genius of the South who wrecked his career, he was “a political being.” In truth, the circumstances of the time compelled him to concentrate all his energies on public affairs. It was his lot to steer the ship of state through twenty of the most critical years of its chequered voyage. Taking the tiller at a time of distress, he guided the bark into calmer waters; and if he himself did not live on to weather a storm more prolonged and awful than that from which he at first saved his people, yet even in the vortex of the Napoleonic cyclone he was to show the dauntless bearing, the firm faith in the cause of ordered freedom, the unshaken belief in the destinies of his race, which became the son of Chatham and the typical Englishman of the age.