sed fixing arbitrary prices for grain. For a time monopolies
creating artificial prosperity were granted to individuals and to
corporations for the manufacture, sale, or exploitation of certain
articles, such as matches, gunpowder, and playing-cards.

This highly artificial and paternalistic state was not content with
regulating all these internal matters but spread its protection over
foreign commerce. Navigation acts attempted to monopolize the trade
of the colonies and especially the trade in the products needed by
the mother country. England encouraged shipping and during this period
achieved that dominance of the sea which has been the mainstay of her
vast empire. She fostered plantations and colonies not for their own
sake but that they might be tributaries to the wealth of the nation. An
absurd importance was attached to the possession of gold and silver, and
the ingenuity of statesmen was exhausted in designing lures to entice
these metals to London. Banking and insurance began to assume prime
importance. By 1750 England had sent ships into every sea and had
planted colonies around the globe.

But while the mechanism of trade and of government made surprising
progress during the mercantile period, the mechanism of production
remained in the slow handicraft stage. This was now to change. In 1738
Kay invented the flying shuttle, multiplying the capacity of the loom.
In 1767 Hargreaves completed the spinning-jenny, and in 1771 Arkwright
perfected his roller spinning machine. A few years later Crompton
combined the roller and the jenny, and after the application of steam to
spinning in 1785 the power loom replaced the hand loom. The manufacture
of woolen cloth being the principal industry of England, it was natural
that machinery should first be invented for the spinning and weaving
of wool. New processes in the manufacture of iron and steel and the
development of steam transportation soon followed.

Within the course of a few decades the whole economic order was changed.
Whereas many centuries had been required for the slow development of
the medieval system of feudalism, the guild system, and the handicrafts,
now, like a series of earthquake shocks, came changes so sudden and
profound that even today society has not yet learned to adjust itself
to the myriads of needs and possibilities which the union of man's mind
with nature's forces has produced. The industrial revolution took the
workman from the land and cr