CREDIT AND CRISES 689 
country could only be flourishing when her neighbours were A.D. 1776 
sufficiently well off to be good customers for her goods. So 
long as the exhaustion, due to the war, continued on the Fuctua- 
Continent there was little room for fresh activity at home. oA 
Agricultural land will recover from the devastating effects of 
war in a year or two, if seed and stock and labour are avail- 
able’, but trade connections may not be easy to reestablish, 
and purchasing power does not recuperate at short notice. 
257. It would be impossible to follow out the rami- 
fications of the influence of these political changes in detail, 
but an attempt may be made to point out some of their 
effects on the main factors in production. The changing Desig 
conditions of war and peace had grave results upon the industry 
supply of materials for some of the staple trades. Spanish sufere 
wool was used for many fabrics, and certain branches of “tof 
trade relied almost entirely on Saxony wool. The inter- 
ruption of communications—apart from all questions of 
Napoleonic policy—could not but cause distress. The cotton 
trade, which depended exclusively on imported materials, 
was on the whole well supplied by English shippers; but 
the loss of Tobago® was severely felt at the time, and the 
war of 1812, by cutting us off from Carolina, caused a serious 
scarcity. 
The influence of the changing political conditions in from the ey 
opening and closing foreign markets was very noticeable at of sales, 
the time?, though the development of clandestine trade was so 
great, that the actual distress due to this cause was probably 
less than might have been anticipated. There seem to have 
been curiously discriminating changes of foreign demand, for 
1 J. 8. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Bk. 1. v. § 7. 
2 Parl. Hist. xxi1. 778. 
3 The war had something to do with bringing in the low rates of spinning in 
1793. “In several villages where the spinners could get a shilling for jenny- 
spinning before the war they were taken off threepence when the war broke out. 
[n these very villages, one of which I have lately visited, in Huntingdonshire, five- 
pence are now taken off, in some sixpence, and even sevenpence. So that in many 
places the poor, if they can possibly help it, will not spin at all. There is indeed 
no sale for the yarn, and on conversing with a gentleman who has large concerns 
in the wool trade and in whose county I met with many spinners who had seven- 
sence in the shilling taken off, he assured me he should lose in the course of the 
ast six months a thousand pounds by the war.” The Complaints of the Poor 
People of England, 1793. Brit. Mus. C. T. 104. 11. 
~~