10 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY,
zas; the England of 1852 was habitually employing them all,
though it had still much to learn in the way of perfecting
their use,
The greatest change of all, the transformation of the United
Kingdom from a state mainly dependent on agriculture to an
essentially manufacturing community, is also the
Growthof work of the first half of the nineteenth century.
A lread ken of the enormous develop-
turing and e have already spoken of the pP
urban popu- ment of trade during the years of the great
lation—Free :
trade. French war, but the prosperity of the landed
interest had also been very great as long as that
struggle lasted, and at its end the number of the inhabitants of
the realm more or less directly interested in agriculture was
still reckoned to exceed that engaged in manufactures. The
great towns contained less than twenty per cent. of the popu-
lation of England, while by 1852 they counted nearly forty per
cent., and at the present day have risen to more than half of
the total“ It was the gradual and silent change in propor-
tion between the tillers of the soil and the townsmen, between
1815 and 1840, that made Free Trade inevitable. When the
producers of food-stuffs had become a clear minority, it was
absurd that the large majority to whom cheap corn was
essential, should be taxed for their benefit. "The landed
aristocracy strove long to retain for agriculture its privileged
position, and tried to cover the material benefits which pro-
tection brought to themselves, by patriotic talk as to the neces-
sity for keeping England self-sufficing in her food-supply.
When it became clear that population was growing too fast for
:he kingdom ever to be able to supply all its own needs, so
‘hat some amount of foreign aid must always be called in, the
* In 1891 the purely rural ““ Sanitary Districts” of England had only
11,076,315 inhabitants out of a total population of 29,000,000. "The total
of the great towns in 1811 had been about 1,850,000 out of a total popu-
lation of 10,c00,009. In 1851 they had risen to be over 6,000,000 out of
a total of 17,000,000,
