NEEDS OF A MANUFACTURING POPULATION 205 



deserved another. In narrow ways the bells on the teams were not 

 merely ornaments ; they were warnings that the passage was barred 

 by the entry of another vehicle. When rural districts were thus 

 cut off from one another, then: isolation was not only a formidable 

 obstacle to agricultural progress, but made a uniform system of 

 growing corn on every kind of land a practical necessity. Yet 

 the days when Gloucester seemed " in the Orcades," and York a 

 " Pindarick flight " from London had their advantages. In 1800 

 it required fifty-four hours, and favourable circumstances, for " a 

 philosopher, six shirts, his genius, and his hat upon it," to reach 

 London from Dublin. 



Shut off from neighbours by impassable roads, impeded in their 

 access to markets, not ambitious of raising from the soil anything 

 beyond their own needs and the satisfaction of the local demand for 

 bread, farmers felt no spur to improvement. Hitherto the slow 

 increase of a rural population was the only effective incentive to 

 increased production. But as the eighteenth century drew to its 

 close, Watt, Hargreaves, Crompton, Arkwright, and other me- 

 chanical geniuses were beginning to change the face of society with 

 the swiftness of a revolution. Population was shifting from the 

 South to the North, and advancing by leaps and bounds in 

 crowded manufacturing towns. Huge markets were springing up 

 for agricultural produce. Hitherto there had been few divisions of 

 employment because only the simplest implements of production 

 were used ; spinners, weavers, and cloth- workers, iron-workers, 

 handicraftsmen, had combined much of their special industries with 

 the tillage of the soil. But the rapid development of manufacture 

 caused its complete separation from agriculture, and the application 

 of machinery to manual industries completed the revolution in social 

 arrangements. A division of labour became an economic necessity. 

 Farmers and manufacturers grew mutually dependent. Self- 

 sufficing farming was thrown out of date. Like manufacture, agri- 

 culture was ceasing to be a domestic industry. Both had to be 

 organised on a commercial footing. The problem was, how could 

 the inevitable changes be met best and most promptly 1 How 

 could a country at war with Europe raise the most home-grown food 

 for a rapidly growing population, concentrated in the coal and 

 iron fields ? How could agriculture supply the demand for artisan 

 labour, and yet increase its own productiveness ? Arthur Young 

 was, at this period of his career, ready with an unhesitating answer 



