The British business man often has a side job, or hobby. Thus, a banker or a merchant may have a collection of butterflies or roses, and he may know more about these things than anybody else in his town. If they can afford it, British people often have attractive flower gardens. English country districts have many beautiful, green, smooth-clipped lawns, well-trimmed hedges, and stately shade trees. (Fig. 332.) 427. World location.—Look at a globe, or map of the world (Fig. 10), and find the place that is exactly on the other side of the world from London (longitude 180° E., latitude S.). Then look at England. Which location is the better for trading with all the countries of the world? Why? England is close to the mainland of Europe, but her sea boundary has enabled her to keep out of many wars that have injured the countries of the main land.
428. Coasts and harbors.—Like New York and New England the British Isles have many drowned valleys (Sec. 216). These arms of the sea make the best kind of harbor, and because the British Isles have so many of them it has been easy for the people to go to sea in ships and develop sea fisheries and trade.
429. Trade and shipping.—British fac tories produce goods not only for England but for many other countries. Thus Eng land makes much of her living by ocean trade. Steamships from the leading British ports,—London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Hull, and Bristol,—take manufactured goods to every continent, and to almost every country in the world. These ships return with raw materials and food. Indeed, British trade has prospered so much that England has come to live almost as New England lives (Sec. 238). In 1919, England imported from the United States alone three million dol lars' worth of food each day in the year.
430. The coal trade.—Shiploads of grain, meat, butter, cheese, wood, cotton, wool, jute, skins, lumber, rubber, and other goods are paid for with cotton cloth, woolen cloth, knives, machinery, and other valuable manu factures. But these do not fill up one-tenth part of the ships that come in loaded with bulky raw materials. The rest of the space is not used unless it is filled with coal, so the shipowner who receives $20 a ton for bringing wheat from Argentina is glad to accept $4 a ton to carry coal back. For this reason England is the greatest coal exporter in the world, and sends millions of tons of this black necessity from Cardiff and New castle to Argentina, Brazil, France, and to all the countries of the Mediterranean, which unfortunately have very little coal.
431. A British water fronts are busy places. The puffing tug boats labor to pull the big ships up to the solid stone walls of the docks. On the decks of the ships the rattling donkey engines wind and unwind drums, pulling ropes that lift bales and bundles from the hold to the wharf, lighter (Fig. 317), wagon, truck, or car alongside. Wagons, locomotives, and trucks wind in and out. Sailors of every color remind us of the ends of the earth.
432. A world trade can now begin to see how it is that England has built up a kind of trade called entrep6t (ahn-tray po), which means the shipment of goods to one foreign country after importing them from another foreign country.
Thus, if a wool manufac turer in Philadelphia wants some Australian wool, he can find it in the London warehouses. If a rubber manufacturer in Nova Scotia or Ohio wants some Ceylon or African rubber of a particular kind, he can find it in the London ware houses. If a Boston or Philadelphia tanner wishes to examine goatskins from Mongolia, he can find them all sorted out by sizes and kinds in London or Liverpool warehouses. If a Swiss or Norwegian cotton-spinner wants a few bales of Texas or Egyptian cotton, he can find it in the Liverpool cotton ware houses. Thousands of workmen in London or Liverpool are busy loading and unloading, sorting and grading, and storing goods that came from the ends of the earth and will go out again to the manufacturers and users in many countries. England is really a kind of middleman, like a storekeeper who keeps on hand the goods that come from a hun dred different factories in a dozen foreign countries.
433. London, a center of world trade.— London is the greatest entrep6t in the world. In no other city do we see so many evidences of relations with all the world. The signs on the doors, the ships in the harbor, the great warehouses for storage purposes, the bundles on the docks, the people in the streets, and the news in the papers, all show that London is a great center of trade.
434. The carrying trade. — England owns so many steamship lines having agents in foreign countries, that it is easy for her to carry freight for other peoples. For example, an English line from London to Rio de Janeiro has an agent in Brazil. He may load a ship and start it off to New York, where another representative of the same firm may pay off the crew, unload the goods, and send the ship on her next voy age. Thus Britain carries the world's goods.