The railroads have been only recently built. The first great one was
opened from Liverpool to Manchester in 1830, since which all the great
cities have been connected by rail. London with Southampton, Brighton,
Dover, Colchester, Exeter, and Birmingham; Birmingham with Gloucester,
Liverpool, Lancaster (via Newton and Wigan, and via Manchester and
Bolton); also with Leeds (via Manchester and Halifax, and via Leicester,
Derby, and Sheffield); Leeds with Hull and Newcastle (via York). There
are also many minor lines building or projected, which will soon make it
possible to travel from Edinburgh to London in one day.

As it had transformed the means of communication by land, so did the
introduction of steam revolutionise travel by sea. The first steamboat
was launched in 1807, in the Hudson, in North America; the first in the
British empire, in 1811, on the Clyde. Since then, more than 600 have
been built in England; and in 1836 more than 500 were plying to and from
British ports.

Such, in brief, is the history of English industrial development in the
past sixty years, a history which has no counterpart in the annals of
humanity. Sixty, eighty years ago, England was a country like every
other, with small towns, few and simple industries, and a thin but
_proportionally_ large agricultural population. To-day it is a country
like _no_ other, with a capital of two and a half million inhabitants;
with vast manufacturing cities; with an industry that supplies the world,
and produces almost everything by means of the most complex machinery;
with an industrious, intelligent, dense population, of which two-thirds
are employed in trade and commerce, and composed of classes wholly
different; forming, in fact, with other customs and other needs, a
different nation from the England of those days. The industrial
revolution is of the same importance for England as the political
revolution for France, and the philosophical revolution for Germany; and
the difference between England in 1760 and in 1844 is at least as great
as that between France, under the _ancien regime_ and during the
revolution of July. But the mightiest result of this industrial
transformation is the English proletariat.

We have already seen how the proletariat was called into existence by the
introduction of machinery. The rapid extension of manufacture demanded
hands, wages rose, and troops of workmen migrated from the agricultural
districts to the tow