THE OLDEST NATION OF EUROPE 



413 



plished much that is wonderful, we ought 

 surely to bear carefully in mind at this 

 time, when so much stress is being laid 

 upon the achievements of German scien- 

 tists, that most of the revolutionary dis- 

 coveries and inventions have been made 

 by men of the British race. The steam- 

 engine and the locomotive are at the bot- 

 tom of everything, and without them the 

 development of the last century is un- 

 thinkable Scarcely less important were 

 ihe smelting of iron with coal, the blast 

 furnace, the steam-hammer, the first Bes- 

 semer converter, without which modern 

 iron and steel and all the complex ma- 

 chinery they made possible could never 

 have been. The numerous machines for 

 spinning and weaving were first com- 

 mercially developed and the first factories 

 were organized in England. The prin- 

 ciple of assembling under one roof all the 

 processes necessary for turning the raw 

 material into the finished product was 

 revolutionary and extremely potent. 



Nor must we forget the great upheaval 

 in agriculture produced by the work of 

 Baker and his contemporaries in the 

 breeding of cattle and the selection of 

 grains, by the introduction of the turnip 

 into the rotation of crops. Oualit}^ be- 

 came possible, and it only remained for 

 American farming machinery to complete 

 the emancipation of the human race from 

 hunger. 



It almost seemed in the eighteenth cen- 

 tury as if the British had added to their 

 control of the Channel and their monop- 

 oly of the carrying trade a monopoly of 

 inventive genius. It may indeed be true, 

 as the Germans claim, that the banner of 

 industrial invention has passed from 

 England's hands ; but the vast capital 

 which this industrial monopoly brought 

 to England is none the less in existence. 

 English wealth is due partly to her peace- 

 ful past, partly to her strategic position, 

 partly to her fleet and its carrying trade, 

 but chiefly to the extraordinary efficiency 

 of British industry which resulted from 

 the development of these inventions. 



the; napole;onic wars gave e;ngi.and a 

 monopoly of manufacture 



Chance threw opportunity in Eng- 

 land's way, as some phrase it ; but a little 



examination will show us that the mo- 

 nopoly of manufacture for the world 

 which the English obtained during the 

 Napoleonic wars was really the result of 

 her isolation, and of the fact that the 

 Channel weather rather than the Brit- 

 ish fleet foiled all of Napoleon's at- 

 tempts to interfere with the domestic 

 peace of the Island Kingdom. For 

 nearly twenty-five years, while European 

 industry was at a standstill and Euro- 

 pean trade nearly annihilated, the Eng- 

 lish factories ran overtime and the Eng- 

 lish merchants sold the goods at war 

 prices to their own enemies. This arti- 

 ficial monopoly, plus the unusual profits 

 due to the factory organization and to 

 the new machinery, made the period as a 

 whole one of astounding prosperity for 

 England. The expenses of the war. 

 which that generation paid, consumed 

 only a fraction of the profits the war 

 fairly thrust into English hands. 



While such extraordinary circum- 

 stances could not continue and while the 

 last century has seen a less spectacular 

 development in England, all careful ob- 

 servers are agreed that modern England 

 is exceptionally alert, capable, industri- 

 ous, and competent. It is still develop- 

 ing at a rapid rate, as the swelling vol- 

 ume of its exports onlv too clearly show. 



From the profits of past generations 

 England has made great investments in 

 other countries from which she draws at 

 present an enormous revenue, visible, of 

 course, in her surplus of imports over 

 exports. This is, naturally, clear gain 

 for the present generation of English- 

 men — a great sum paid them every year 

 because of the genius, thrift, and success 

 of their forebears. Few, if any other, 

 nations in the world are in receipt of so 

 large and tangible an evidence of the eco- 

 nomic success of the nation's past. Some- 

 thing has intervened in other countries 

 to use up the capital, and more often 

 than not this has been war. 



There is also some racial quality in 

 Englishmen, or perhaps we should say 

 some national quality, the result of so 

 many years of association with each 

 other, which appears constantly as what 

 the English like to call their honesty. 



No small part of England's success in 



