n, the less can it support the petty devices of
swindling and pilfering which characterise its early stages. The
pettifogging business tricks of the Polish Jew, the representative in
Europe of commerce in its lowest stage, those tricks that serve him so
well in his own country, and are generally practised there, he finds to
be out of date and out of place when he comes to Hamburg or Berlin; and,
again, the commission agent, who hails from Berlin or Hamburg, Jew or
Christian, after frequenting the Manchester Exchange for a few months,
finds out that, in order to buy cotton yarn or cloth cheap, he, too, had
better drop those slightly more refined but still miserable wiles and
subterfuges which are considered the acme of cleverness in his native
country. The fact is, those tricks do not pay any longer in a large
market, where time is money, and where a certain standard of commercial
morality is unavoidably developed, purely as a means of saving time and
trouble. And it is the same with the relation between the manufacturer
and his "hands."

The revival of trade, after the crisis of 1847, was the dawn of a new
industrial epoch. The repeal of the Corn Laws and the financial reforms
subsequent thereon gave to English industry and commerce all the elbow-
room they had asked for. The discovery of the Californian and Australian
gold-fields followed in rapid succession. The Colonial markets developed
at an increasing rate their capacity for absorbing English manufactured
goods. In India millions of hand-weavers were finally crushed out by the
Lancashire power-loom. China was more and more being opened up. Above
all, the United States--then, commercially speaking, a mere colonial
market, but by far the biggest of them all--underwent an economic
development astounding even for that rapidly progressive country. And,
finally, the new means of communication introduced at the close of the
preceding period--railways and ocean steamers--were now worked out on an
international scale; they realised actually, what had hitherto existed
only potentially, a world-market. This world-market, at first, was
composed of a number of chiefly or entirely agricultural countries
grouped around one manufacturing centre--England--which consumed the
greater part of their surplus raw produce, and supplied them in return
with the greater part of their requirements in manufactured articles. No
wonder England's industrial progress was colossal and u