England. Switzerland was the first continental country to actively
adopt the new methods. The large supply of water-power stood her in
good stead, and the people took more willingly to the factory system
than in other countries.[87] France was slower in her development, in
spite of the strong protective system by which she strove, though not
very successfully, to exclude English cotton goods. The fall of
English prices and profits in the cotton trade between 1820 and 1830
marks clearly the breakdown of the English monopoly before the cheap
labour of Alsace and the cheap raw material of the United States, now
organised in the factory system with the new machinery.[88] In this,
the most advanced trade, the world-competition which now is operative
in a thousand different industries, measuring and levelling economic
advantages, first clearly shows itself, and in 1836 Ure finds the
continental nations and America competing successfully with England in
markets which had hitherto been entirely her own.

(_c_) ECONOMIC CONDITIONS.--The transformation of English agriculture,
the growth of large farms, drove great numbers of English peasants
into the towns, and furnished a large supply of cheap labour for the
new machinery.

This movement was accelerated by the vices of our land tenure. In
France and Germany, where the agricultural workers had a stronger
interest and property in their land, they were less easily detached
for factory purposes. But in England, where the labourer had no
property in the land, reformed methods of agriculture and the
operation of the Poor Law combined to incite the large proprietors and
farmers to rid themselves of all superfluous population in the rural
parts and accelerated the migration into the towns. Here the
population bred with a rapidity hitherto unknown. The increase of
population in England and Wales during the thirty years from 1770 to
1800 is placed at 1,959,590, or 27-1/10 per cent., while during the
next thirty years, 1800 to 1830, it amounted to 5,024,207, or 56-3/5
per cent.[89] This large supply of cheap labour in the towns enabled
the Lancashire and Yorkshire factories to grow with startling
rapidity. The exhaustion left by the Napoleonic wars, the political
disorder and insecurity which prevailed on the Continent, retarded
until much later the effective competition of other European nations
who were behind England in skill, knowledge, and the possession of
markets. The American ma