The land is too wet for the plow, but good for grass. Here, on the treeless green hills, is the shepherd with his big woolen coat, his staff, his flock of sheep, and his collie dog. Even some dairy farms on the level clay lands near Liverpool are not plowed at all, because one rain follows another before the sticky soil can dry enough for planting. In addi tion to grass, the cows eat hay and grain, which are brought by ship to Liver pool.
419. Irish agriculture.— Clouds, fog, and showers furnish so much moisture that Ireland is rightly called the Emerald Isle, because its fields are so very green. The island is too wet to suit wheat, but grass, pota toes, and oats (Figs. 354, 378) grow well. Most of the Irish people are farmers, busy with herds of sheep, cattle, and swine, and flocks of chickens. From the farms of Ireland, milk, but ter, bacon, and eggs go to the cities of England. The houses in the country are often built of stone, and have roofs of thatch (Fig.
333). The household fires burn dried peat, of which the many bogs of Ireland furnish plenty. (Fig. 336.) 420. When England was an agricultural country.— At the time of Columbus, . the Low Countries, now called Holland and Belgium, were greater manufacturers than was England, and were very famous for their woolen cloth, much of which was made from English wool. At that time England was still an agricultural country, and wool from her flocks was the chief article of export. Then the southeastern plain (Fig. 340) was the richest, most populous, and most important part of England. For centuries southeastern England was the home of the rich gentlemen of England. They owned large estates, and there are still many old mansions (Fig. 332) with beautiful grounds scattered about this farming region. The novels of Sir Walter Scott will show you that in 1750 the western and northern parts of Great Britain were thought.
to be a kind of wild frontier.
421. The age of coal.—In 1740, an Eng lishman succeeded in making a steam engine that would burn coal and pump water out of a coal mine. In the next sixty years other inventions were made, and spin ning and weaving machines could then be driven by a steam engine or water wheel. In a short time these new machines entirely changed the manufacturing industries of the country. Cloth was no longer made by hand
in the roadside cottages of the farming regions, where food was grown close by. It was made instead in big buildings near the coal mines or waterfalls. A few loads of coal could furnish power to run a hundred machines at once. Mines were dug, facto ries were built, and towns grew. To-day the coal fields, not the grain fields, have the denser population, and the wild country of Sir Walter Scott's time is now dotted with 'manufacturing cities.
No other country in the world was so well adapted as England to use coal and to build up factories in the days before the railroad came. In the United States the coal field nearest to the sea is a hundred miles inland. Britain has coal fields beside the sea: at Newcastle on the northeast coast, at Cardiff in south Wales, near Glasgow in west Scotland, and also in northwest England. These coalfields are now busy centers of min ing and manufacturing. Before men had steamships or railroads, England could import cotton and wool in sailing vessels, and land these raw materials close beside her coal mines and her factories, to be made into cloth. Ships could then easily take the cloth to markets over the sea. When the locomotive was invented, British man ufacturers had already made a good start, and for a hundred years England was the greatest manufacturing country in the world.
422. The cotton industry. — The little county of Lancashire, with its capital at Manchester, is no larger than the state of Delaware, but it is the world's greatest cotton-manufacturing center. Its damp climate helped the industry to start, because in damp air fibers may be twisted into thread without being broken. In Manchester and in the many towns near it one can now hear almost all day long the clack, clack, clack of looms, and the whir of spinning machines. The phrase " Manchester goods" means cotton cloth to millions of blackmen inAfrica, brown men in India, yellow men in China, dark-skinned Indians in South America, and negroes in the West Indies. In 1919, the total British export of cotton cloth would have provided thirty yards for every man, woman, and child in the United States.