Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/636

622 of London by a roystering set of dare-devils, who, elated with drink, wrenched off knockers, gave chase to sober citizens, and came into combat with the city guard. By day they sought immunity from the consequences of their nocturnal orgies by the healthy games of golf, curling, bowling, penny-stane, and the like.

Till after the union with England, which opened up a new and wide field of enterprise, the Scotch gentlemen who were younger brothers, sought employment in the continental armies; and Gustavus Adolphus, in the Thirty Years' War, had no less than four lieutenants-general, twenty colonels, and a vast number of inferior officers, from Scotland. After the union the Scotch aristocracy began to educate their younger sons for commerce and the national service. As Scotland had no poor-law, the number of mendicants during this period was enormous. Fletcher, about the time of the union, calculated the beggars at two hundred thousand, and that at no time had they been less than one hundred thousand. Many of these are said to have been of gipsy blood, and to have threatened and seized by violence whore they could not obtain their wishes otherwise; but the old gaber-lunziemen and the blue-gownsmen—the Edie Ochiltrees of the eighteenth century—were a privileged race, who brought the news of the country, carried letters and messages, and who had always a welcome and a warm place in the ingle. The manners and customs of the Highlanders seem comprised In their chivalrous following of their chiefs in war, their hunting, herding cattle, and their acting as drovers in the low countries.

SHIPS, COMMERCE, COLONIES, AND MANUFACTURES.

Notwithstanding the almost constant wars of this period, our shipping, commerce, colonies, and manufactures made considerable progress. The governments went on fighting and spending; the people, as far as such drains and disturbances would let them, working and accumulating. At the commencement of this period the amount of shipping employed in our commerce was altogether 244,788 tons, being 144,264 tons English, and 100,524 foreign; in 1701 the amount of shipping employed was 337,328 tons, of which alone 293,703 were English. In 1702, the end of William's reign, the number of English mercantile vessels were about 3281, employing 27,196 seamen. The royal navy, at the end of William's reign, amounted to about 159,000 tons, employing about 50,000 sailors, so that the seamen of England must have amounted at that period to nearly 80,000.

At the end of the reign of Anne the shipping employed in commerce amounted to 448,000 tons, of which only 26,573 tons were foreign; so that the English mercantile shipping had increased, in little more than twelve years, 127,800 tons. At the end of the reign of George I. our mercantile shipping was only 456,000 tons, the foreign being 23,651 tons; so that the increase for the time was but slight. The royal navy had also greatly decreased under George I. At the end of the reign of George II., the total amount of our commercial shipping was 573,978 tons, including 112,737 foreign. Thus, whilst the total shipping at the commencement of this period (in 1688) was only 244,788 tons, at the end of it (in 1760) the total was 573,978 tons, or a nett increase, in seventy-two years, of 329,190 tons, the increase being much larger than the total amount of tonnage possessed at the commencement of the period, the amount of foreign shipping remaining very nearly the same—in fact, only 12,000 tons more. The royal navy, which, at the commencement of the period, was reckoned at 101,892 tons, at the end of it was 321,104 tons, showing an increase of 219,212 tons; and, at the rate of men employed at the commencement, the number now employed in both our commercial and national navy could not be fewer than 160,000 men.

The growth of our commerce during this seventy-two years is shown by the amount of our exports. In 1697—that is, nine years after the Revolution—the amount of exports was only £3,525,907; but in the three next years of peace they rose to £6,709,881. War reduced these again to little more than £5,000,000, and at the end of the reign of Anne, during peace, they rose to £8,000,000. At the end of the reign of George I. the war had so much checked our commerce, that the exports scarcely amounted to that sum, the average of the three years—1726, 1727, and 1728— being only £7,891,739. By the end of the reign of George II., however (1760), they had risen to £14,693,270. Haring by this period driven the fleets of France and Spain from the ocean, we rather extended our commerce than injured it. Thus, during this seventy-two years, our annual exports had increased from about three millions and a half annually to more than fourteen millions and a half annually, or a yearly difference of upwards of eleven millions—a substantial growth.

One great cause of this progress was the growth of our colonies. They began now to demand a considerable quantity of our manufactures and other articles of domestic comfort and convenience, and to supply us with a number of items of raw material. Towards the end of the reign of George I. our American colonies, besides the number of convicts that we sent thither, especially to Virginia and Maryland, attracted a considerable emigration of free persons, particularly to Pennsylvania, in consequence of the freedom of its constitution, as founded by Penn, and the freedom for the exercise of religion.

New York, Jersey, and the New England states traded in the same commodities; they also built a considerable number of ships, and manufactured, especially in Massachusetts, coarse linens and woollens, iron, hats, rum, besides drying great quantities of fish for Spain, Portugal, and the Mediterranean markets. They employed 40,000 tons of shipping, and 600,000 seamen. New England furnished the finest masts in the world for the navy; Virginia and Maryland furnished 50,000 hogsheads of tobacco, annually valued at £370,000; employing 24,000 tons of shipping. From these colonies we received also great quantities of skins, wool, furs, flax, &c. Carolina had become a great rice-growing country. By the year 1733 it had nearly superseded the supply of that article from Italy in Spain and Portugal; in 1740 it exported nearly 100,000 barrels of rice; and seven years afterwards, besides its rice, it sent tr England 200,000 pounds of indigo, rendering us independent of France for that article; and at the end of the present period its export of indigo had doubled that quantity, besides a large exportation of pitch, sassafras, Brazil wood, skins, Indian com, and other articles.