THE EVOLUTION OF SECURITIES
not as yet highly organized, were neither easily salable nor
readily available to the average Englishman as investments.
Compared with our own times the business world of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was poor, slow-moving,
risky, wasteful, and inefficient. Steam power had not yet been
harnessed to industry and transportation, and large business
organizations as we know them today were, if only for this
reason, still impossible. The manufacturer of 1700 could pro-
duce his wares only by hand and in small quantities—con-
sequently he made little effort to concentrate his manufacturing
under a single factory roof, but let it out piecemeal to his
employees to be performed in their cottages. From this last
fact the term “cottage industry” is used to designate the manu-
facturing enterprises of this period.
Seventeenth Century Transportation.—But even if such
an inefficient system had permitted the manufacturer to produce
large quantities of goods they could not have been distributed
quickly, securely, or in considerable amounts by the clumsy
stage coaches and canals of that period. Macaulay has drawn
a graphic picture of English transportation conditions * in the
latter decades of the seventeenth century:
There were no railways, except a few made of timber from the
mouths of the Northumbrian coal pits to the banks of the Tyne. There
was very little internal communication by water. A few attempts had
been made to deepen and embank the natural streams, but with slender
success. Hardly a single navigable canal had been even projected.
[t was by the highways that both travellers and goods generally
passed from place to place . . . on the best lines of communication
‘he ruts were deep, the descents precipitous, and the way often such as
it was hardly possible to distinguish, in the dusk, from the unenclosed
heath and fen which lay on both sides. . . . It was only in fine
weather that the whole breadth of the road was available for wheeled
vehicles. Often the mud lay deep on the right and the left, and only a
narrow track of firm ground rose above the quagmire. . . . It hap-
pened almost every day, that coaches stuck fast, until a team of cattle
» Macaulay. “History of England,” Ch. III,
