1760-1783.] DR. ROEBUCK. 55. active mind of a scholar, who was previously conscious of no aptitude for mechanical pursuits. His parliamentary reward did not repay his expenses in working out his scheme. The history of the cotton-manufacture, as of most other arts, abounds with examples of the struggles of inventors, if not against neglect and fraud, against the almost insuperable difficulties of carrying forward an invention to commercial success. Bentham has expressed a great truth in forcible words: "As the world advances, the snares, the traps, the pitfalls, which inexperience has found in the path of inventive industry, will be filled up by the fortunes and the minds of those who have fallen into them and been ruined. In this, as in every other career, the ages gone by have been the forlorn hope, which has received for those who followed them the blows of fortune." * Dr. John Roebuck, "who may be said to have originated the modern iron manufacture of Britain, though his merits as a great public benefactor have as yet received but slight recognition," † was one of those who encountered the snares and pitfalls in the path of inexperience. We have shown what the iron manufacture was in 1740. In 1774, we find it alleged that "there is no room to doubt, that in every one of the three kingdoms there may be enough iron found to supply all the British dominions, and yet we import very large quantities from the North, from Spain, and from America. The reason of this is, because the inhabitants of these countries can make it cheaper." They had a great command of fuel for charcoal. "It is earnestly to be wished," says the writer, "that, as it hath been often proposed and promised, the use of pit-coal could be generally introduced, so as to answer in all respects as well as charcoal." He adds, "at this time, as I have been wellinformed, iron is wrought with pit-coal at the Carron Works in North Britain." § The founder of these Carron Works, and the inventor of the economical processes which first gave cheap iron to our country, in many forms of utility, was Dr. John Roebuck. The man who succeeded in proving, by the commercial results of his processes, that iron could be smelted by pit-coal, everywhere in abundance, instead of by charcoal from woods that were disappearing through the advance of agriculture, was a physician at Birmingham. He was a scientific chemist, as far as the science of chemistry was understood in the middle of the eighteenth century; and he was connected with a chemical manufactory, to which he devoted himself with the ardour of an experimentalist. By his improvements in the production of sulphuric acid (then called vitriolic acid), the use of which was even then extensive in manufactures, he reduced the price of that article to a fourth of its previous cost. He was one of those who led the way in those great chemical discoveries which have produced as wonderful changes in the productive power of the country as machinery has produced. Sulphuric acid, after Roebuck's time, partially did the work of bleaching that the sun and air were necessary to complete. But his attempts to connect bleaching processes with the vitriol works that he established at Preston Pans were not successful. Having abandoned his practice as a physician, and settled in Scotland, he turned his thoughts to smelting and manufacturing "Manual of Political Economy." "Quarterly Review," vol. civ. p. 78. § Campbell," Political Survey," vol. ii. p. 43. 56 THE CARRON SMELTING WORKS. [1760-1783. At Carron, in the parish of Tarbert, in Stirlingshire, there were the great requisites for this manufacture. There was abundant coal, and ample command of water-power. Some iron-stone and lime were to be found within a mile; some was to be procured from places ten miles distant.* Workmen were brought from Birmingham and Sheffield; and on the banks of a river, renowned in Scottish history, was the famous foundry, established in 1759, which sent cheap grates into the homes of England, and cast the guns for Wellington's battery-train. To Dr. Roebuck has been assigned the honour of inventing the process of converting cast iron into malleable iron. But it is enough to give him an enduring name in the history of manufacturing industry, that he first brought about that marriage between the neighbours coal and iron which time can never dissolve-that union which made iron "the soul of every other manufacture;" which, when the iron railing round St. Paul's was still pointed out as a great feat of charcoalsmelting, enabled a daring engineer, within fifteen years of the time when the first furnace was lighted at Carron, to throw a cast-iron bridge over the Severn of a hundred feet span; and which, during the lapse of a century, has covered our country with works that are amongst the noblest triumphs of a great era of the Sciences and Arts; compared with which structures the once famous Coalbrook Dale bridge appears a toy. Dr. Roebuck called Smeaton to his aid as an engineer, and he invited Watt to experiment upon the employment of his steam-engine in blowing the furnaces. He was at one time associated as a partner in the great career that was opening to Watt. * "New Statistical Account of Scotland, -Stirlingshire," vol. viii. p. 373. 1760-1783.] THE POTTERIES. 57 But he became involved in other undertakings beyond his capital; and had the common fate of those who undertake mighty enterprises without an adequate command of the sinews of all enterprise, whether of war or of peace. The historian who has brought so large a fund of good sense and liberality to his narrative of English affairs from the peace of Utrecht to the close of the American war, says that the year 1763 "was distinguished by an event of more real importance than the rise or the resignation of lord Bute." * That year is considered memorable for the production of a new kind of earthenware, remarkable for fineness and durability. This ware was soon to remove the pewter dishes from their dingy rows in the tradesman's kitchen, and to supersede the wooden platter and the brown dish of the poor man's cottage. The artisan of Burslem, in Staffordshire, who brought about this change, was Josiah Wedgwood. We have already briefly indicated the condition of the Staffordshire Potteries at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Dr. Campbell, in 1774, makes this statement: "In the space of about sixty years, as I have been well informed, the produce of this ware hath risen from 5000l. to 100,000l. per annum. These are entered by the thousand pieces for exportation, which is annually about forty thousand." In 1857 there were a hundred million pieces of British earthenware and porcelain exported to every European country (with the exception of France), and to America, the United States being by far the largest importers. It is to Josiah Wedgwood that the creation of this great manufacture and commerce is to be principally attributed. England had produced its Bow china, its Worcester china, and its Chelsea china, which was held to equal that of Dresden. But these elaborate tea-services and ornaments were for the luxurious. Palissy gave France the lead amongst industrious nations in her manufacture of expensive porcelain. But Wedgwood in his ware combined the imitation of the most beautiful forms of ancient art with unequalled cheapness. In his workshops we may trace the commencement of a system Lord Mahon-"History of England," vol. v. p. 2. + Ante, vol. v. p. 18. 58, COMMERCIAL TREATY OF 1787 WITH FRANCE. [1760-1783. of improved design, which made his ware so superior to any other that had been produced in Europe for common uses. England, by the discovery of a contemporary of Wedgwood, Mr. Cooksworthy, of Plymouth, was found to possess, in the Cornish clay, a material equal to that of the Sèvres and Dresden manufactories. His patent was transferred to the Staffordshire Potteries in 1777, and from that time we went steadily forward to the attainment of our present excellence in the production of porcelain, upon a scale commensurate with the general spread of the comforts and refinements of society. The transference of power to Mr. Pitt, in 1784, and the firmness with which he was enabled to hold its possession, presented opportunities for wise endeavours to place the commerce of the kingdom upon a broader foundation. The first object attained was the removal, in 1785, of an odious system of restrictions and disabilities in the trade between Great Britain and Ireland. In the preliminary inquiries by a committee of the House of Commons, some interesting details of manufactures were elicited. Mr. Wedgwood pointed out how greatly the industry of the Potteries multiplied the industry of others besides that of the twenty thousand persons directly employed; the quantity of inland carriage it created; the labour it called forth in collieries, and in raising the raw material of earthenware; the employment of coasting vessels in the transport of this material from the Land's-End to different parts of the coast; and the re-conveyance of the finished goods to those ports "where they are shipped for every foreign market that is open to the earthenware of England." In 1787 the government carried through a bold measure of commercial freedom in a treaty of commerce and navigation with France, which opened new ports, not only to the earthenware of England, but to her woollens, her cottons, her hardware and cutlery, her manufactures of brass and copper. Previous to this treaty, most of the staple productions of Britain had been prohibited for so long a period in France that the notion of exchange, under a system of moderate duties, had ceased to be contemplated by the merchants of either country. The political arguments by which this great measure was supported, and those by which it was opposed, will be noticed in a subsequent chapter. We introduce the subject here, because the debates in both Houses of Parliament supply some general views of the commercial policy of a period, when, as we have seen, the industry of this country had received an extraordinary impulse from new inventions, and from increased energy in the long-established modes of production. The general argument for the treaty was put with great force by Mr. Pitt: "France was, by the peculiar dispensation of Providence, gifted, perhaps more than any other country, with what made life desirable, in point of soil, climate, and natural productions. It had the most fertile vineyards and the richest harvests; the greatest luxuries of man were produced in it with little cost, and with moderate labour. Britain was not thus blest by nature; but on the contrary, it possessed, through the happy freedom of its constitution, and the equal security of its laws, an energy in its enterprises and a stability in its exertions, which had gradually raised it to a state of commercial grandeur. Not being so bountifully gifted by Heaven, it had recourse to labour and art by which it had acquired the ability of supplying its neighbour with all the necessary embellishments of life in exchange for her natural luxuries. Thus standing with regard to each other, a friendly connection seemed to be pointed 1760-1783.] DREAD OF FOREIGN RIVALRY. 59 out between them, instead of the state of unalterable enmity which was falsely said to be their true political feeling towards each other."* The principle laid down by Pitt has a permanent importance. The national and commercial jealousies by which the principle was assailed are simply curious, as an exhibition of plausible fallacies. Bishop Watson,-one who had rendered good service to the arts of his country, by making chemistry popular in his amusing "Essays,"-maintained that, as in the time of Charles II., the trade with France was held to be detrimental to our interests because it showed a balance against us "by which we lost a million a year," such a trade would not be lucrative and safe in the time of George III.: that is, because the British consumer of the seventeenth century had paid in money to the French producer a million a year above what the British producer received, "we lost a million a year," the satisfaction of the wants of the consumer being nothing in the account. All this dust, which, from time immemorial, had been thrown into the eyes of the nation, is now scattered to the winds. But the anxious prelate thought that if our home market, the richest market in Europe, was opened to France, her own industry and ingenuity would be dangerously stimulated. France, he said, was ambitious to rival us in its rising manufactures of cotton, cutlery, hardware, and pottery. If she were to cultivate manufactures in the same degree as we had done, our ruin would be inevitable. France, Dr. Watson maintained, had abundant pit-coal; was casting pig-iron; was making cutlery at Moulins cheaper and neater than that of Sheffield; and, notwithstanding a recent law of England, prohibiting the exportation of tools and machines, France had got models of them, and would soon copy our tools, and not take our manufactures. The bishop proclaims, in his despair, that "every tool used at Sheffield, Birmingham, and Manchester, might be seen in a public building at Paris, where they were deposited for the inspection of their workmen."+ Great manafactures are not created simply by possessing copies of another country's machinery. The French. government obtained, in 1788, models of the cotton-spinning machines used in England; but whilst a peaceful intercourse enabled us to send France cotton fabrics, she did not attempt to manufacture for herself. Cotton-mills were established in Normandy and at Orleans when the continent was shut out by the war of the Revolution from commercial exchange with England.‡ But there was a power possessed by our country that France and other continental nations did not possess, and had not capital and trained workmen to acquire by imitation; a power, of which it was said in 1819 that it had fought the battles of Europe, and exalted and sustained, through the late, tremendous contest, the political greatness of our land; "-a power which upon the return of peace, "enabled us to pay the interest of our debt, and to maintain the arduous struggle in which we were engaged with the skill and capital of countries less oppressed with taxation."§ That great power was "our improved steam-engine." In the year 1757, over the door of a staircase opening from the quadrangle of the College of Glasgow, was exhibited a board, inscribed "James Watt, Mathematical-Instrument Maker to the University." In a room of * "Parliamentary History," vol. xxvi. col. 395. Ibid., vol. xxvi. col. 523, and col. 543. Say "Cours d'Economie Politique," tome i. chap. xix. § Jeffrey "Character of James Watt," 1819. |