Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/380

360 England and America, yet the growth was inevitably steady and rapid. Englishmen built English ships fitted with the new steam engines, whereby trade was carried on quickly and securely with the far ends of the earth, and the little State of old times, compassed so hopelessly by the inviolate sea, became the world-wide Empire it is to-day.

Perhaps nothing so forcibly illustrates the immense growth of our over-seas commerce as the Great Exhibition of 1851. It is only by comparative statistics that we can obtain the slightest idea of the vast increase of our national wealth. In the year of the Great Exhibition our imports were valued at one hundred millions, our exports at some seventy-five millions. In 1865 our imports had nearly trebled and our exports doubled. Such increase of wealth told substantially on the middle classes of England, and their position rapidly improved. It told more slowly on the working classes, whose condition in the early forties was pitiful indeed. The industrial revolution had followed the introduction of machinery as a natural sequence. Riots and crimes were but the result of discontent and the prospect of starvation. The