the new city on our western coast. In the
latter years of this dynasty, the trade
extended greatly. Many extensive tracts of
.land in Lancashire were drained and
rendered available for building and cultivation,
while English manufacturers began to make
considerable progress. From this epoch
may be dated the settlement of certain
manufacturers and handicrafts in particular
localities; which, for the first time, were
perceived to be specially favourable for them
by reason of the supply of coal, or water,
or ores. The cotton trade of Lancashire
became permanently seated there, because
of the contiguity of those localities to Liverpool,
the port of the American cotton ships,
and because of the abundant supply of
fuel.

When Arkwright and Hargreaves brought
science to bear upon the rude cotton apparatus
employed in the middle of the last century,
they could have formed no conception of the
wonderful influence their inventions would
exercise upon the future of the then humble
shipping port on the Mersey, with its four
hundred trading vessels entering it during
the year. At that period, the town stood
upon a third of its present area; the London
post arrived and departed three times a
week, bringing and taking all foreign
correspondence, which was then carried on by way
of London. Not a bale of cotton had reached
this country from North America; supplies
being chiefly drawn from Egypt and the West
Indies.

In the year seventeen hundred and
seventy, there were imported into Liverpool
three bales of cotton wool from New
York, four bales from Virginia and Maryland,
and three barrels from North Carolina.
Thirty years after, the importations into
the same place from those sources amounted
to nearly eighty millions of pounds weight.
Eighty-two years later, the imports of cotton
into Liverpool had reached the astounding
average of a thousand tons daily, throughout
the year.

The first Liverpool dock was opened in
seventeen hundred and nine, the town
owning as many as one hundred and twenty
ships: in thirty years, a second dock
was formed. In seventeen hundred and
fifty-six, the first local newspaper made its
appearance. Canal navigation, which was
commenced in seventeen hundred and twenty-nine
by the opening of the Mersey and Irwell
canal, exercised a great influence upon the
trade of the port, in developing the cotton
industry of Lancashire. More than half a
century later, a Liverpool paper, the Mercury,
startled the British public by announcing
that at Pittsburgh, in the United States, a
vessel, propelled by steam, was expected to
convey goods and passengers at the
extraordinary rate of fifty miles a day. A
marvellous ship actually did appear at Liverpool
in the shape of a Clyde-built steamer after
the twenty-two years' war. The first year
of the peace witnessed the iirst steamboat
on the waters of the Mersey. In the
following summer the first application of
steampower to sea-going vessels took place
between Holyhead and Dublin; and, three years
later, the first steam ship that crossed the
Atlantic, arrived in Liverpool from the
United States. It was a vessel of some three
hundred tons. From that time, a record
of the progress of the shipping business
of Liverpool would be a history of steam
navigation and cotton manufacture. Year
by year it has grown silently but rapidly:
advancing with giant strides, until at length
it treads upon the heels of its elder sister,
London.

There are now more mercantile firms in
Liverpool than there were ships belonging
to the port in the first part of the last
century. And one single railway, the London
and North-Western, conveys more
goods from the town in one day than, a
century and a half ago, were imported into it
in six months. No wonder that the Liverpool
brokers prosper, when we know that the
yearly commissions on the sales and
purchases of but one article—cotton—amount in
round figures to a quarter of a million
sterling. Even a commission upon that
commission would form a very handsome sum.

You never hear of a Liverpool man travelling
to Manchester or London by any but the
express-train, or corresponding on business
without the aid of the electric telegraph.
He will be in the full vigour of commissions
on Change at London, to-day, at ten
minutes past four in the afternoon; to-morrow
morning he will be seen as usual in the
thick of Liverpool life, in the purlieus of the
Exchange or the Docks or hovering about
some of those quiet quaint-fashioned
counting-houses in the old churchyard. He has
no sort of objection to talking: on the contrary,
he is a practised adept in the art, but he
prefers work to words.

It is seldom that there is no business at
Liverpool. If the Lancashire spinners will
not buy, or if the cotton men are obstinate
and there is no such thing as moving a bale,
they knock up a little gentle excitement
among themselves and buy and sell on
speculative account, as it is called, professedly
for dealers, but most frequently for dummies:
that is to say, for themselves, in the hope of
future profit from a rising market. The
speculative account will sometimes embrace as many
as twenty or thirty thousand bales in a single
week. Idleness does not exist at Liverpool.
Frozen-out gardeners perambulating
the snowy streets in doleful guise are familiar
objects; but last winter, the good people
of Liverpool beheld a body of frozen-out
brokers on 'Change: not in lugubrious
vein, ice-bound in spirits as in occupation,
but jovial and active as on a bright summer
day. A heavy fall had occurred during